A question to our readers
Posted by Charles II on May 4, 2009
Have you ever seen a punctuation mark of this kind– a period with a rising line to its right? Any idea what it means?
10 Responses to “A question to our readers”
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Phoenix Woman said
Glitch?
Mahakal / מהכאל said
It might be an exclamation point which fell over…
Doran said
Where, that is, in what, does this punctuation mark appear?
Charles II said
It’s in a Mexican document that I am translating, Doran. I’ve looked at Spanish-language punctuation lists and can’t find it there either. But I feel sure that I saw it somewhere else, many, many years ago.
perris said
if you can scan the document as text, (some scanners can do this) then copy and paste into google you might find what you’re looking for
Charles II said
Thanks, Perris. That’s a great idea. Unfortunately, my scanner doesn’t have that property (OCR).
Mark Gisleson said
Charles, take look at this page: http://tinyurl.com/aogmfr
Then pause and consider that that page is just one of the many linked pages offered here: http://tinyurl.com/cxasuv
There is a truly amazing number of typographical symbols out there, and given the difficulty of searching for a symbol, you can go nuts trying to identify them. I could replicate that mark with a double keystroke, but I’m sure if you dig long enough you’ll find the exact unicode symbol.
But what it means? No clue.
Charles II said
I did, by the way, figure out how to make this symbol. A period, followed by an accent, set to subscript produces this: .´ Shrink the font, and it looks just like.
Mark Gisleson said
That was my solution, but I was too flu and allergy ridden to write technical instructions.
Please email me if you ever find out what it is. I suspect some sort of traditional “flowery” way of making a list, but I really have no clue as I’ve never seen that character before.
Charles II said
Mark, thanks! Great links!
It looks like it falls in the class of combined diacritics. It’s possible this is from the International Phonetic Alphabet. There’s something in the Americanist version that resembles it. But it’s speculative.