Omission of the opening question mark in business Spanish is always an error. Well, unless you are a modern day Pablo Neruda, you should use both the “¿” and the “?” in all questions in your Spanish documents. Given the impact of social media, what should we do now? Or as we say in Spanish: ¿Qué debemos hacer? The only exceptions occur in social media (informal email, text messages, chat rooms, Twitter, etc.). With the exception of Catalan-which used the opening question mark until 1993-major Romance languages such as French, Portuguese, and Italian, did not follow suit.Īlthough the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda steadfastly refused to use it, all Spanish-speaking countries adhere to standard usage of the opening question mark. Acceptance of the opening question mark began slowly and was not widely used until the Academia gained authority when a strengthened Spanish monarchy emerged in the mid-19th century. In 1754 the Real Academia Española recommended the use of an “inverted” or “opening” question mark to introduce questions. After the dust settled, we did some research on this question mark conundrum. Our client agreed, pulled the brochure from the press, and made the correction. Given her time constraints, our client was hoping that we would grant an exemption to a Spanish punctuation requirement established centuries ago by the Real Academia Española.Īfter all, we reasoned with her, using just the top half or the bottom half of a question mark in English would not be correct, so why would the omission of one of the required question marks in Spanish (the “¿” or the “?”) be OK? (For some unknown reason, the client’s typesetter left out the “¿” in the first sentence of the brochure, which was a question.) The press operator noticed that the initial “¿” in the first sentence of the Spanish InDesign file was missing. She was calling from her printer where the Spanish version of their four-color brochure was about to be printed. “Do we really need that upside down question mark?” asked one of our clients. ARTICLES Do Not Delete the Upside Down Question Mark!
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