- Irony mark
:"؟" redirects here. For the Arabic question mark, see
Question mark ."The irony mark or irony point (؟) (French: "point d’ironie"; also called a snark or zing) is a proposedpunctuation mark that was suggested to be used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. It is illustrated by a small, elevated, backward-facingquestion mark . The irony mark has never really been used beyond occasional appearances in obscure artistic or literary publications.History
This mark was proposed by the French poet
Alcanter de Brahm (aliasMarcel Bernhardt ) at the end of the 19th century. It was in turn taken byHervé Bazin in his book "Plumons l’Oiseau" (1966), in which the author proposes several other innovative punctuation marks, such as thedoubt point (). It was also featured in the art periodical "Point d’Ironie" by Agnes b. in 1997.Its form is essentially the same as the late
medieval "' ("punctus percontativus"), which was used to mark rhetorical questions [ [http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3193.pdf n3193-medieval-punct ] ] .Printing
Although this character has never been officially adopted by
typographers , it happens to look the same as the question mark (؟) found in Arabic.Unicode does not include this character, but several others resemble it:
*Arabic Question Mark U+061F (؟) (mentioned above, but may cause problems with writing direction when used in Western script)
*Latin letter pharyngeal voiced fricative U+0295 (ʕ)
*Modifier letter small reversed glottal stop U+02E4 (ˤ)Commissioned by the CPNB (foundation for the Collective Promotion for the Dutch Book) on the occasion of their "Boekenweek", which was about "The Praise of Folly", the foundry Underware created a new irony character, and released it into different forms. [CPNB (foundation for the Collective Promotion for the Dutch Book), [http://www.cpnb.nl/bw/2007/ironie-teken.html Ironieteken] (Dutch)]
See also
*
¿
*Interrobang
*Sarcasm mark References
External links
* [http://www.pointdironie.com/ Site of the publication "Point d'ironie"]
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