1993, Malcolm Beckwith Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (University of California Press, →ISBN, “Select Glossary of Technical Terms and Punctuation Symbols”, pages 306–307
punctus percontativus A reversed, but not inverted punctus interrogativus (cf. plates 34 and 35), used in the 16th and 17th centuries to indicate the end of a percontatio (q.v.).
1995, Julia Briggs, “‘The Lady Vanishes’: Problems of Authorship and Editing in the Middleton Canon” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, volume 2: 1992–1996 (1998; Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies; →ISBN, 9780866982306), ed. William Speed Hill, page 115
These include Middleton’s notorious use of oaths — “life,” “heart,” “cuds me,” “push” (the first two extensively deleted by Buc), his frequent use of elisions of various kinds, a number of eccentric spellings (notably a “-est” suffix — “forest” (1.2.91; 3.1.97; “placst,” “gracst” 4.4.14, 16), and the idiosyncratic placing of apostrophes and deployment of punctuation marks — exclamation marks, question marks and a form of reversed question mark which Malcolm Parkes classifies as “punctus percontativus,” associated (though not always consistently in the manuscript) with rhetorical questions.
Exclamation and question marks occasionally seem oddly used (i 183). Sometimes this is due to error, or shortage of type; sometimes we may be encountering the punctus percontativus, used to indicate a rhetorical question; see Parkes (1992) 218f, 306f.
2002, Torbjörn Lundmark, Quirky QWERTY: the story of the keyboard @ your fingertips (UNSW Press), “! to € — Punctuation marks and symbols on the keyboard and beyond”, ‘Special Uses for ?’, page 147
The medieval question mark had an additional function that has since been lost: a mirror-reversed question mark (called punctus percontativus) signified a rhetorical question that did not expect a direct answer. Am I my brother’s keeper ⸮
2005, John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism (2nd ed.; Oxford University Press; →ISBN, 9780199265381), chapter 4: “Punctuation”, page 121
The percontation-mark (or punctus percontativus), the standard Arabic question-mark, indicated ‘percontations’, questions open to any answer or (more loosely) ‘rhetorical questions’, in various books of c.1575–c.1625. This usage seems to have been invented by the translator Anthonie Gilbie or his printer Henry Denham (a pioneer of the semi-colon): roman examples appear in their psalms of Dauid (1581), black letter ones in Turbervile’s Tragicall Tales (1587).²⁶
²⁶ See Parkes, Pause and Effect, plates 34–5.
2007, Julia Briggs, « The Lady’s Tragedy — Autumn 1611 » in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to The Collected Works (Oxford University Press, →ISBN, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, part II, “The Author”, ‘Works Included in this Edition: Canon and Chronology’, page 372
Middleton made regular use not only of exclamation and question marks, but also of the punctus percontativus, a reversed question-mark used to indicate a rhetorical, as opposed to an actual question (described and illustrated by Parkes).
question mark in Arabic (؟) — Unicode U+061F: A similar mark has been proposed for Unicode that would be identical to the punctus percontativus found in some medieval Western manuscripts whose purpose was to indicate a merely rhetorical question rather than one requiring or at least expecting an answer: “What was the use of sending you to school⸮” (Michael Everson et al., “Proposal to add Medievalist and Iranianist punctuation characters to the UCS” (p. 2).
On the other hand, it’s amazing what you can do without. The punctus percontativus, a reversed but not inverted question mark employed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to indicate rhetorical questions, is now long gone.13 How hard is it today to recognize a question not requiring any answer?
