Did Jews Invent the Question Mark?
Somehow, it’s not surprising that Jews, who are known to answer a question with a question, may have invented the question mark.
Reuters reports that manuscript specialist Chip Coakley of Cambridge University was studying biblical manuscripts at the British Museum in London when he determined that the “zagwa elaya” (two dots resembling a the modern colon punctuation mark), which is found in biblical manuscripts dating to the fifth century B.C.E. written in Syriac, function as a question mark.
He claims that up until now grammarians had been mistaken about the mysterious marking and thought that it denoted sarcasm or reproof. He realized that the zagwa elaya, which appears at the beginning of a declarative sentence, is the first example of a grammatical punctuation mark denoting questioning. Earlier languages, such as Hebrew, used particles instead.
Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic spoken since the first century B.C.E. by Christian communities in the Middle East. Many Christian religious tracts were written in the language, and there are still small pockets of Syriac-speaking peoples. Aramaic, from which Syriac is derived, is the language in which the Gemara was written, and was the Jewish vernacular for many centuries.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO