I would like to know why written Spanish uses inverted question and exclamation points at the beginning of a sentence. Where did this rule originate and does any other written language do likewise?
>> I would like to know why written Spanish uses inverted question and exclamation points at the beginning of a sentence
¿So that you know it is a question when you start to read it and not when you get to the end?
>> Where did this rule originate?
Hmmm… WAG… ¿Spain?
>> and does any other written language do likewise?
Good question ¿why do you want to know?
Ok, so the truth is I haven’t a clue and I just wanted to show I know how to do the ¿ and the ¡ and the ñ and the Ñ and the ü and the á etc.
When I took Spanish in school, the teacher explained it like this: Voice inflections are different for a questions, exclamations, and declaratives. But often (especially for very long sentences) it’s not clear which one it will be until you get to the end. Therefore, you have the symbol at the beginning to clue you in on how to read it. Made a lot of sense to me.
Also, some languages (I don’t remember if Spanish is one of them) where the order of the words is the same for questions and declaratives, so the marks help. This happens in English, but only for rhetorical purposes. (Examples: That is George Bush. or: That is George Bush?)
Maybe a better question is why don’t more languages do it? Or perhaps, when did the practice originate and by whom? Probably not some damn engineer like me who on a whim decided that it made good sense.
I read once that the sentence-opening inverted marks were invented in modern times by the Spanish Academy, which sets standards for Spanish language usage.
Can’t provide a good cite, though this mentions it in the third-to-last paragraph (says it was in the 18th century).
Oh, and you can insert inverted ?s in the middle of a sentence.
Ex: “Tu coche es rojo, ¿verdad?”
“Your car is red, right?”
I noted that this phrase appears in a Spanish-language translation of the Bible, at Mark 15:34 (or, if you prefer, Marcos, capítulo quince, versículo treinta y cuatro):
"En la hora noveno Jesús gritó, “Eli, eli, ¿lama sabakhthani?”
To be honest, I don’t remember the exact phrasing offhand, but I do know that the foreign phrase–in the Galilean Aramaic dialect Jesus spoke–used in this Spanish translation did contain the inverted question mark, so Spanish apparently uses the inverted marks in all questions, even in foreign languages quoted in texts in Spanish. 
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean “What do they use it for,” but “How come they use it?”.
dougie, that’s very interesting. I am not sure that says anything about Aramaic, however (I’d be surprised to learn they used question marks at all, let alone inverted ones!)
If I quote a German sentence in English, I use English punctuation. (Goethe’s last words were, “Mehr Licht!”) I don’t use the German convention (,Mehr Licht!"). So I imagine that they put in the inverted question mark to conform to Spanish usage, not Aramaic.
Of course, this isn’t definitive - hell, we often leave in the inverted marks in quotations from the Spanish, right? Maybe we could get an Aramaic expert in to help.
Or for that matter why Spanish uses << and >> in place of " and "
I clap for the Spanish… at least that give you hint…
unlike German that shoves all the relevant stuff at the end of the sentence.
For example:
English:
Aunt Hilde placed a newly peeled peach slice delicately on the lips of her new born niece.
German: (translated to English)
Delicately on the lips of the babe was a peach peeled newly sliced situated by her Aunt Hilde who is the aunt of the newly born.
[some poetic license was used in the composition of this point, but for a point it was used]
On preview I see Matt has made reference to German,
but
ganz egal
Actually, we DO use superscript quote marks all over the place. And the Academy says we can use both types indistinctly. If you see <<this>> you are dealing with an editor that prefers the conservative style manual; but anyway, “this” is just another way to type [sup]<<[/sup]this[sup]>>[/sup]
Actually the superscripted << >> are (were, anyway) used frequently in German in lieu of , `` in a lot of printed materials I’d seen there.
Of course, the great equalizer – the internet – kind of makes everybody use regular quotes these days.
As long as we’re talking about << and >>, I’ve noticed that Russian speakers will put company and organization names into quotes, even if they’re using English – for instance, using a “Dell” computer, or the spam from the “Svetlana” Marriage Agency. Some examples I’ve hunted down …
http://www.gaspadar.com/english/aindex.htm
http://www.rostov.net/prospekt/
Whoops, not only poetic license, but some grammatical license, too…
If you translate the German into English, and confuse active and passive, of course you get messed up sentences. But if you do it normally (retaining active as active, and passive as passive) you’d get something like this:
“Tante Hilde legte den geschälten, zerteilten Pfirsich zärtlich auf die Lippen des Neugeborenen.”
translates to:
“Aunt Hilde tenderly laid the peeled, sliced peach on the lips of the newly born”
or else you write
“Der geschälte, zerteilte Pfirsich wurde von Tante Hilde zärtlich auf die Lippen des Neugeborenen gelegt.”
which comes out as:
“The peeled, sliced peach as tenderly placed on the lips of the newly born by Aunt Hilde.”
Which is different, of course; but at least we don’t go about inverting our punctuation!
Or to clarify myself: that the single ["] key in typewriters and typesetting machines makes a reasonable and keystroke-economical facsimile of a superscripted << or >> . In handwriting the quote marks already tended to be curved, not angled, written smaller than the letters in the words (so as to not confuse with parentheses), and up off the lower writing line. So it wasn’t much of a reach. (And could this mean that indeed the English " is nothing but a vestigial [sup]<<[/sup] anyway?)
Oh, yes: the Spanish term for “quote marks” is “comillas”, i.e. “little commas”
And yes, we’re failing spectacularly at finding ANYTHING that tells us when and how the opening exclamation and question signs were introduced.