¿What ees this?

[jack]

I propose that english should use ¿ and ?. They will bracket the part of the sentence that is a question, and a question mark on the last word displaces the full stop as we do now.

For instance:

* ¿Where are going?
* ¿Where? are you going.
* ¿Where are you going?, we need to talk before you leave.
* I really have to wonder ¿Where are you going?

This is barely more typing, and will often remove some ambiguity, and allow more structure to be put in sentences. OK, I'm mainly joking -- you can always restructure the sentence to not need to emphasise the questioning part, or to put it at the end. But isn't it interesting?

You could do the same thing with ¡ and ! to emphasise a single word like ¡this!, but in fact we already do that with *these*. The only benefit of ¡!ing is that ¡they could be ¡nested!!, but in fact that probably only appeals to mathematicians, and definitely would make them unnecessarily complicated :)

ETA: This is similar but not the same as the spanish use of ¿ and ? iirc.

Comments

[tig-b.livejournal.com]

I use two in my notes from meetings, i.e. ?check this?, and would love to have an ¿ on my keyboard.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Can you not remap a key or key combination to point to that?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

It could confuse people using your keyboard, but then that's wlays amusing :)

[(Anonymous)]

I appear to use all the keys already, but possibly a combo is a good idea - apart from driving everyone else mad?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I don't think you should, but if we truly wanted to we could:

* Map a useless key like `¬¦ to it
* Map a combination ctrl-something, or if you must ctrl-something-selse. Some keyboards have clunky "EMAIL" buttons which could perhaps be reused as a private modifier for *your* combinations
* Have a wordprocessor autocorrect " ?word" to " ¿word"

I often note an extra question when there's doubt that should be expressed before the end of the sentence.