"punctus percontativus" meaning in English

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  "etymology_text": "Latin: punctus (“point”) + percontativus (“percontative”) = “percontative point”",
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        {
          "ref": "1993, Malcolm Beckwith Parkes, Pause and Effect, glossary, pages 306-307",
          "text": "punctus percontativus A reversed, but not inverted punctus interrogativus […] used in the 16th and 17th centuries to indicate the end of a percontatio.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "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 II: 1992–1996 (1998), ed. William Speed Hill, page 115",
          "text": "These include Middleton’s […] 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 […] with rhetorical questions."
        },
        {
          "ref": "1998, Alastair Fowler, Paradise Lost, 2nd edition, page 9, note 4",
          "text": "Sometimes we may be encountering the punctus percontativus, used to indicate a rhetorical question.",
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        {
          "ref": "2002, Torbjörn Lundmark, Quirky QWERTY, page 147",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2005, John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook, 2nd edition, page 121",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
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          "ref": "2008, Alexander Humez, Nicholas D. Humez, On the Dot, page 207",
          "text": "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).",
          "type": "quotation"
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        "A reversed question mark (⸮), visually almost identical to the Arabic question mark (؟ (?)), used to mark the end of a percontative statement."
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      "related": [
        {
          "word": "percontation"
        },
        {
          "word": "percontative"
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        {
          "word": "percontatorial"
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  "word": "punctus percontativus"
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  "etymology_text": "Latin: punctus (“point”) + percontativus (“percontative”) = “percontative point”",
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      "word": "percontation"
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      "word": "percontative"
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          "text": "punctus percontativus A reversed, but not inverted punctus interrogativus […] used in the 16th and 17th centuries to indicate the end of a percontatio.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "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 II: 1992–1996 (1998), ed. William Speed Hill, page 115",
          "text": "These include Middleton’s […] 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 […] with rhetorical questions."
        },
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          "type": "quotation"
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          "ref": "2005, John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook, 2nd edition, page 121",
          "text": "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.",
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          "ref": "2008, Alexander Humez, Nicholas D. Humez, On the Dot, page 207",
          "text": "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).",
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