Definition:
(John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism, Oxford University Press, 2005)
A late-medieval mark of punctuation (؟) used to signal the close of a rhetorical question. See also: What Is a Rhetorical Question?
Observations:
"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. This usage seems to have been invented by the translator Anthonie Gilbie or his printer Henry Denham (a pioneer of the semi-colon): roman examples appear in their psalms of Dauid (1581), black letter ones in Turberville's Tragicall Tales (1587). It didn't catch on in print because, being reversed, expensive new type was needed, but was used by scribes including Crane, who worked on Shakespeare's First Folio: so how did compositors set percontation-marks present in their copy but not type-cases? One possibility is that italic or black letter question-marks amid roman type record otherwise unsettable percontation-marks."(John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism, Oxford University Press, 2005)
Also Known As: punctus percontativus, percontation point
