Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What is the origin of the question mark?
In the early 13th century, when the growth of communities of scholars (universities) in Paris and other major cities led to an expansion and streamlining of the book-production trade, punctuation was rationalized by assigning Alcuin's stroke-over-dot specifically to interrogatives; by this time the stroke was more sharply curved and can easily be recognized as the modern question mark.
During the early medieval era, Roman numerals were used in Europe to represent numbers, but the Arabs represented numbers using the Hindu numeral system, a positional notation that used ten symbols. In about 1202, Fibonacci published his book "Liber Abaci" (Book of Calculation) which introduced the concept of positional notation into Europe. These symbols evolved into the numerals "0", "1", "2" etc. At that time there was dispute regarding the difference between rational numbers and irrational numbers and there was no consistency in the way in which decimal fractions were represented.
The word "algorithm" itself derives from the 9th century mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, Latinized "Algoritmi". A partial formalization of what would become the modern concept of algorithm began with attempts to solve the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) posed by David Hilbert in 1928. Later formalizations were framed as attempts to define "effective calculability" or "effective method". Those formalizations included the Gödel–Herbrand–Kleene recursive functions of 1930, 1934 and 1935, Alonzo Church's lambda calculus of 1936, Emil Post's Formulation 1 of 1936, and Alan Turing's Turing machines of 1936–37 and 1939.
In English, "yes", "no", "okay" and "amen" are common pro-sentences. In response to the question "Does Mars have two moons?", the sentence "Yes" can be understood to abbreviate "Mars has two moons."
The numeral system employed, known as algorism, is positional decimal notation. Various symbol sets are used to represent numbers in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, potentially including both symbols that evolved from the Brahmi numerals, and symbols that developed independently. The symbols used to represent the system have split into various typographical variants since the Middle Ages:The evolution of the numerals in early Europe is shown here in a table created by the French scholar Jean-Étienne Montucla in his "Histoire de la Mathematique", which was published in 1757:
The Morse code was developed so that operators could translate the indentations marked on the paper tape into text messages. In his earliest code, Morse had planned to transmit only numerals, and to use a codebook to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. However, the code was soon expanded by Alfred Vail in 1840 to include letters and special characters, so it could be used more generally. Vail estimated the frequency of use of letters in the English language by counting the movable type he found in the type-cases of a local newspaper in Morristown. The shorter marks were called "dots", and the longer ones "dashes", and the letters most commonly used were assigned the shorter sequences of dots and dashes. This code was used since 1844 and became known as "Morse landline code" or "American Morse code".
The etymology of the word "anime" is disputed. The English term "animation" is written in Japanese "katakana" as ("animēshon", ) and is ("anime") in its shortened form. The pronunciation of "anime" in Japanese differs from pronunciations in other languages such as Standard English (pronunciation: ), which has different vowels and stress with regards to Japanese, where each mora carries equal stress. As with a few other Japanese words such as "saké", "Pokémon", and "Kobo Abé," English-language texts sometimes spell "anime" as "animé" (as in French), with an acute accent over the final "e", to cue the reader to pronounce the letter, not to leave it silent as Standard English orthography may suggest.
The decimal Hindu–Arabic numeral system with zero was developed in India by around AD 700. The development was gradual, spanning several centuries, but the decisive step was probably provided by Brahmagupta's formulation of zero as a number in AD 628. The system was revolutionary by including zero in positional notation, thereby limiting the number of individual digits to ten. It is considered an important milestone in the development of mathematics. One may distinguish between this positional "system", which is identical throughout the family, and the precise glyphs used to write the numerals, which varied regionally.
DC gave the Question his own solo series in 1987, written by Dennis O'Neil and primarily drawn by Denys Cowan. The series was published for 36 issues, two annuals, and five "Quarterly" specials. In "The Question" #1, the Question was defeated in personal combat, first by the martial arts mercenary Lady Shiva. He was then beaten nearly to death by the villain's hired thugs, shot in the head with a pellet gun, and thrown into the river to drown. Lady Shiva then rescued him for reasons of her own and gave him directions to meet wheelchair-bound Richard Dragon as soon as he recovered enough to get out of bed. Once there, Sage learned both martial arts and eastern philosophy. When he returned to the city, he resumed his journalist and superhero careers with adventures that tended to illustrate various philosophic points. To further illustrate those ideas, Dennis O'Neil had a reading recommendation in the letters page of each issue.
People learning Morse code using the Farnsworth method are taught to send and receive letters and other symbols at their full target speed, that is with normal relative timing of the dots, dashes, and spaces within each symbol for that speed. The Farnsworth method is named for Donald R. "Russ" Farnsworth, also known by his call sign, W6TTB. However, initially exaggerated spaces between symbols and words are used, to give "thinking time" to make the sound "shape" of the letters and symbols easier to learn. The spacing can then be reduced with practice and familiarity.
The hundredth or was marked with a box or circle. Thus 500 was like a superimposed on a or — that is, like a with a cross bar,— becoming or by the time of Augustus, under the graphic influence of the letter . It was later identified "as" the letter D; an alternative symbol for "thousand" was a bracketed (or ), and half of a thousand or "five hundred" is the right half of the symbol, (or ), and this may have been converted into . This at least was the etymology given to it later on.
The letters "u" and "j", as distinct from "v" and "i", were introduced in the 16th century, and "w" assumed the status of an independent letter. The variant lowercase form long s (ſ) lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position up to the early 19th century. Today, the English alphabet is now considered to consist of the following 26 letters:
The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as roman square capitals. The lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the formerly inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Throughout the ages, many dissimilar stylistic variations of each letter have evolved that are still identified as being the same letter.
After the evolution of the alphabet from the Western Greek Alphabet through Old Italic alphabet, G developed from C, the letter J developed from a flourished I, V and U split and the ligature of VV became W, the letter thorn Þ was introduced from the runic alphabet but was lost in all languages except Icelandic, and the letter s could be written either as a long s (ſ) inside a word or as a terminal s at the end or after a long s (ß) after the 7th century AD, but the long s was generally abandoned in the 19th century.
Initially known as Pho Khun Bang Klang Hao () interpreted as "Lord Who Rules Sky", the controversy surrounding this names illustrates the limitations of epigraphy. This science studies inscriptions or epigraphs as writing, to identify graphemes, clarify their meanings, classify their uses according to dates and cultural contexts. Texts inscribed on steles are often missing the top or bottom portions, just where one would expect dates, complicating the drawing of conclusions about the writing and the writers. Specifically excluded from epigraphy are the historical significance of an epigraph as a document, and the artistic value of a literary composition. These complications led to the ruler in early life being simply Hao (หาว).
The first asteroid to be discovered, Ceres, was originally considered to be a new planet. This was followed by the discovery of other similar bodies, which, with the equipment of the time, appeared to be points of light, like stars, showing little or no planetary disc, though readily distinguishable from stars due to their apparent motions. This prompted the astronomer Sir William Herschel to propose the term "asteroid", coined in Greek as ἀστεροειδής, or "asteroeidēs", meaning 'star-like, star-shaped', and derived from the Ancient Greek "astēr" 'star, planet'. In the early second half of the nineteenth century, the terms "asteroid" and "planet" (not always qualified as "minor") were still used interchangeably.
American Morse Code — also known as Railroad Morse—is the latter-day name for the original version of the Morse Code developed in the mid-1840s, by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail for their electric telegraph. The "American" qualifier was added because, after most of the rest of the world adopted "International Morse Code," the companies that continued to use the original Morse Code were mainly located in the United States. American Morse is now nearly extinct—it is most frequently seen in American railroad museums and American Civil War reenactments—and "Morse Code" today virtually always means the International Morse which supplanted American Morse.
The city was named from the Greek word "eureka", meaning "I have found it!" The city and its history was explored on the show "Ghost Adventures" in 2018.
Musical notation was developed before parchment or paper were used for writing. The earliest form of musical notation can be found in a cuneiform tablet that was created at Nippur, in Sumer (today's Iraq) in about 2,000 BC. The tablet represents fragmentary instructions for performing music, that the music was composed in harmonies of thirds, and that it was written using a diatonic scale.
The quattrino is an ancient Italian currency denomination largely used in Central Italy, especially in Tuscany and Rome. Its name derives from the Latin "quater denari", because its value was equal to four "denari". Consequently, its value was one third of a soldo. It disappeared after the unification of Italy in 1861, when the Italian lira was introduced as an equivalent of the french franc.
In 1908, Wilsdorf registered the trademark "Rolex" and opened an office in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. The book "The Best of Time: Rolex Wristwatches: An Unauthorized History" by Jeffrey P. Hess and James Dowling says that the name was just made up. One story, never confirmed by Wilsdorf, recounts that the name came from the French phrase "horlogerie exquise", meaning "exquisite clockwork" or as a contraction of "horological excellence". Wilsdorf was said to want his watch brand's name to be easily pronounceable in any language. He also thought that the name "Rolex" was onomatopoeic, sounding like a watch being wound. It is easily pronounceable in many languages and, as all its upper-case letters have the same size, can be written symmetrically. It was also short enough to fit on the face of a watch.
Many numbers include hundreds, units and tens. The Roman numeral system being basically decimal, each power of ten is added in descending sequence from left to right, as with Arabic numerals. For example:As each power of ten (or "place") has its own notation there is no need for place keeping zeros, so "missing places" are ignored, as in Latin (and English) speech, thus:Roman numerals for large numbers are nowadays seen mainly in the form of year numbers (other uses are detailed later in this article), as in these examples:The "standard" forms described above reflect typical modern usage rather than an unchanging and universally accepted convention. Usage in ancient Rome varied greatly and remained inconsistent in medieval times. There is still no official "binding" standard, which makes the elaborate "rules" used in some sources to distinguish between "correct" and "incorrect" forms highly problematic.Although Roman numerals came to be written with letters of the Roman alphabet, they were originally independent symbols. The Etruscans, for example, used , , , , , and for , , , , , and , of which only and happened to be letters in their alphabet.
Lynne Truss attributes an early form of the modern question mark in western language to Alcuin of
Non-manual marks vary quite significantly and can only be placed at the beginning or end of words or phrases. Eyebrow marks are denoted before and after the word(s) in question thus bounding the words that are modified by eyebrow marks. They are called: Raised (), Knit, Wan, Slanted and Squint. Questioning marks exist in ASL as logographs that denote ASL's wh-questions such as WHO or FOR-FOR. They are placed after a closed word's or phrase's second eyebrow mark and can exist as an entire sentence alone. Mouth marks are characters that relay what action the mouth is doing. It is placed inside the first eyebrow mark.
In 2000, Question Mark began a collaboration with New York guitarist and rock promoter Gary Fury. This collaboration led to a series of live concerts featuring Question Mark with a backing band led by Fury, featuring musicians from other garage bands in the New York area. The first backing band lineup included Jim "Royale" Baglino of The Casino Royales and later Monster Magnet on bass, Sam Steinig of the Philadelphia band Mondo Topless on keyboards and original Mysterians drummer Robert Martinez. The new group billed itself as "Question Mark and the Mysterymen" and played the Limelight in New York and the Black Cat in Washington, D.C.
The Greek question mark () looks like ";". It appeared around the same time as the Latin one, in the 8th century. It was adopted by Church Slavonic and eventually settled on a form essentially similar to the Latin semicolon. In Unicode, it is separately encoded as , but the similarity is so great that the code point canonically decomposes as equivalent to , making the marks identical in practice.