Armenian Question Mark

It marks the word whose information is being asked for. In Armenian punctuation, ՞ sits over the last vowel of the stressed word, often a verb; that is why the Armenian question mark appears above a word, not at the sentence end.

Shift the mark and you shift the answer target: one placement can ask whether it was the person, the place, or the action that needs confirming.

Where did the Armenian question mark come from?

It developed within a wider Armenian system for marking speech.

Armenian prosody—the written marking of speech pitch and phrasing—took shape in the eighth and ninth centuries to guide reading and recitation. One grammar history describes manuscripts using only a comma-like mark before the tenth century; grammar commentaries and neume notation, signs that guide chant, helped make punctuation conventional in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

A study of an Armenian translation of Greek grammar uses paroyk for the Greek circumflex, a mark over a vowel; Armenian grammar also records paroyk as a name for ՞. The mark belongs to the same tonal punctuation family as ՛ and ՜. Manuscript research argues that Armenian prosody was not simply copied from Greek, but adapted over time.

Read the marked word as the answer target

Standard Eastern and Western Armenian mark the stressed word, but colloquial Eastern Armenian may put the rising question intonation on an auxiliary instead of the main verb. Latin transliteration conventionally uses a final ?, so it does not preserve the Armenian focus position.

When someone sends an Armenian question, treat the word bearing ՞ as the part they want checked. The surrounding sentence tells you whether that is the person, place, or action.