Just out of pure curiosity, why does Japanese use the English symbols of ? and ! to mark questions and exclamation? Did the language have a different way to mark this in the past? Excuse my ignorance if ! and ? don’t originate from English which they most likely don’t.
7 comments
Punctuation isn’t native to Japanese writing
Punctuation marks come from latin not english.
Japanese use particles to indicate question, admiration, doubt, etc.
Since latin punctuation marks are more practical to use a lot of languages included them in their writing system and one of them is english
<！> and <？> are actually not used in formal Japanese writing to this day, but are often used informally.
One also sometimes sees <~> in informal English to indicate excitement or elongated speech, borrowed from Japanese <〜>
か? and よ ?
I mean my native language also uses what you call “English ! and ?” I don’t get what you’re asking.
か
You don’t really need it to tell what’s a question and what’s not, especially if you’re writing in a literary register which to my knowledge won’t have intonation only questions that match the form of a non-question statement
Same with exclamations, those will usually be deducible from sentence form and context