Old Nubian Direct Question Mark

Use a Unicode character picker for this punctuation.

The SIL Nubian Keyman 1.2.2 chart lists letters and diacritics but no keystroke for ⳺. Sawarda Nubian's 2021 project note says common Nubian keyboard layouts did not make Old Nubian punctuation readily accessible. Use your system's Unicode character picker or another Unicode input method. For display, Sawarda Nubian is manuscript-inspired; some Nubian fonts use Coptic-based forms, though the mark's question-punctuation role stays the same.

What does ⳺ mark in Old Nubian?

It marks the end of a direct question.

The companion ⳻ ends an indirect question, one reported inside a statement. The pair marks sentence grammar.

Old Nubian was written with a Coptic-based alphabet plus signs from Meroitic, an earlier script used in Nubia. It served multilingual Christian Nubia in church writing, official and commercial records, and literature. Those Meroitic signs suggest that the alphabet's roots predate Christianization, around the fall of the Kingdom of Kush in the third or fourth century CE. The earliest datable Old Nubian text is a graffito (a short inscription) from Es-Sebûa, dated 795 CE; that dates the text, not the first use of ⳺.