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The question mark ( ? ), also known as the interrogation point, query, and eroteme,〔In journalism. See Truss, Lynne. ''Eats, Shoots & Leaves'', 2003. p. 139. ISBN 1-59240-087-6.〕 is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause, or phrase in many languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions. The question mark glyph is also often used in place of missing or unknown data. In Unicode, it is encoded at . ==History== Lynne Truss attributes an early form of the modern question mark in western language to Alcuin of York.〔Lynne Truss. ''Eats, Shoots & Leaves'', 2003. p. 76. ISBN 1-59240-087-6.〕 Truss describes the ''punctus interrogativus'' of the late 8th century as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left".〔(Typografie.info )〕 (The punctuation system of Aelius Donatus, current through the Early Middle Ages, used only simple dots at various heights.) This earliest question mark was a decoration of one of these dots, with the "lightning flash" perhaps meant to denote intonation (or a tilde or titlo, named after the Latin word ''titulus'', as in " ·~ ", such as many wavy or more or less slanted marks used in many medieval texts for denoting various things such as abbreviations, which would later become various diacritics or ligatures or modified letters used in the Latin script), and perhaps associated with early musical notation like neumes.〔M. B. Parkes, ''Pause and effect: punctuation in the west'', ISBN 0-520-07941-8.〕〔(The Straight Dope on the question mark ) (link down)〕 Over the next three centuries this pitch-defining element (if it ever existed) seems to have been forgotten, so that the Alcuinesque stroke-over-dot sign (with the stroke sometimes slightly curved) is often seen indifferently at the end of clauses, whether they embody a question or not. In the early 13th century, when the growth of communities of scholars (universities) in Paris and other major cities led to an expansion and streamlining of the book-production trade,〔De Hamel, Christopher ''History of Illuminated Manuscripts'', 1997〕 punctuation was rationalized by assigning Alcuin's stroke-over-dot specifically to interrogatives; by this time the stroke was more sharply curved and can easily be recognized as the modern question mark. It has also been suggested that the glyph derives from the Latin ''quaestiō'' (that is, qvaestio), meaning "question", which was abbreviated during the Middle Ages to ''qo''.〔Brewer, E. C. ''Dictionary of Phrase and Fable'', 1870 (rev. 1894), s.v. 'Punctuation'.〕 The lowercase ''q'' was written above the lowercase ''o'', and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. However, evidence of the actual use of the Q-over-o notation in medieval manuscripts is lacking; if anything, medieval forms of the upper component seem to be evolving towards the q-shape rather than away from it. According to a 2011 discovery by a Cambridge manuscript expert, Syriac was the first language to use a punctuation mark to indicate an interrogative sentence. The Syriac question mark has the form of a vertical double dot. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「question mark」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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