Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 February 19

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February 19

Re: Avestan

Earlier this month I brought up a problem I was having with getting Avestan script to render. The problem was not just with my Firefox browser, as I tried Chrome and Edge and those browsers had the same problem. However, the latest update to Firefox resolved the issue.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 17:13, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

You might get more help at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing. Alansplodge (talk) 02:54, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Yet, I strongly suppose that Firefox has nothing to do with the problem, but it was Windows 10 which caused it. First, my Firefox on an earlier version of Windows works well with Avestan, while you and another user reported the problems on Windows 10. Second, release notes of the latest versions of Firefox do not mention problems with Avestan or any other script at all. If the Firefox developers fixed something since version 44.0, then it must have been something else. But the latest update of Windows 10 most probably fixed it. I do not know whether somebody (it might be you) reported the issue to Microsoft.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 08:20, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

The Windows 10 issue sounds like the most likely culprit.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 19:34, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Inverted question and exclamation marks

In "the article" we read: "the inverted question mark was adopted long after the Real Academia Real Academia [Española]'s decision, ... (The Orthography of the Royal Academy) in 1754 recommending it as the symbol indicating the beginning of a question in written Spanish—e.g. ¿Cuántos años tienes? ("How old are you?")." There are some other languages, like Catalan, Waray-Waray, and Galician, etc., in which their speakers write these forms of punctuation marks because of some cultural ties both in the past/present time. But, as a fact, I don't know the main linguistic reason. Could you please help me to understand the reason linguistically? Does is depend on the sentences' intonation or some? Hamid Hassani (talk) 23:33, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

It's been a long time since I studied Spanish in school, but we were told that it was invented as a visual cue that a question was about to begin. Likewise with the inverted exclamation point, that an interjection was about to begin. If the sentence is part statement and part question (or exclamation) the inverted punctuation mark may appear in the middle of the sentence. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:24, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Benjamin Franklin explained it quite vividly. When you read aloud a long sentence with the neutral falling intonation and all of sudden you find out a question mark at the end, then you realize that you have had to read it with the rising interrogative intonation, and thus you have to reread it again. With a question mark at the beginning you already know how to read the sentence aloud properly.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 08:40, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your expository answers! Hamid Hassani (talk) 11:14, 20 February 2016 (UTC)