Why the question and exclamation marks in Spanish are upside down?
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Best answer
Hello, great question! The Exclamation and Question marks in Spanish are used at the beginning and end of sentences because they let the readers know beforehand whether the sentence is actually a question or being told as a statement. This then allows the reader to annunciate certain words so they sound like a more like a question rather than a statement while speaking. I hope this helps!
It is the rule to have ¡! and ¿?
Hi! In spanish, you have the opening question and exclamation marks and the closing ones. If you are writing something formal, you need to use both. If not, you can just use the closing one!
This is a unique feature of the language and is known as "puntos de interrogación" (question marks) and "signos de exclamación" (exclamation marks) and has historical and typographical reasons. The tradition of using inverted punctuation can be traced back to the 18th century. At that time, Spanish printers and publishers started to use a mirrored or upside-down question mark (¿) and an upside-down exclamation mark (¡) at the beginning of an exclamation. These unique symbols were created to distinguish between interrogative or exclamatory sentences and declarative ones. From a typographical standpoint, the use of inverted punctuation marks is also practical. It is easier and faster to draw an inverted mark at the beginning of a sentence rather than to wait until the end to add the regular punctuation mark. Also, when using a typewriter or keyboard, it was more convenient to have the punctuation marks as distinct characters, allowing for quicker and clearer sentence construction.
- Consuelo ChaparroEnglish teacher, Spanish tutor
Because in Spanish we have two question-exclamation marks. Our punctuation rules considers the full question as a clause that has to be distinguished. I believe is because sometimes in our writing the word order for questions are not explicit (in English there is an inversion of verb-subject), and the intonation at the begining of the sentence is quite important when you read a question in Spanish.
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