Have you ever wondered why the exclamation mark ! is written like that?

No? … well I’m going to tell you anyway! A couple of days ago, whilst browsing through the Italian magazine ‘Focus’, I came across the following curious piece of information. Sometime during the Fifteenth Century, when manuscripts were copied by hand, the amanuensis (those who did the copying) started to introduce the Latin exclamation “io”, which in Italian means “evviva” (hurrah), where appropriate at the end of sentences.  The word “Io” was used to express exultation, surprise, disbelief or anger. With time, the letter “i” was moved above the “o”, which in turn was reduced to a simple dot, becoming the symbol! which which we know today.

And I bet you’ve always wanted to know where the punto interrogativo ? (question mark?) comes from haven’t you? Well, according to my Vocabolario della lingua italiana Treccani, this symbol evolved from the letter “q”, which is the first letter of the Latin word “quaestio”, meaning “domanda” in Italian, and “question”.in English. Interestingly, the English word has stayed much closer to the original Latin.

Let’s have a look at the names of some other segni di punteggiatura (punctuation marks), starting with those that are most widely used:

la virgola , (the comma), means una piccola verga (a small rod), from the Latin word “virga” (rod).

Il punto or punto fermo . , is the full stop. If we are dictating, we say “punto e a capo” (full stop, new paragraph) to clarify when we are starting a new paragraph, and when we reach the end of a dettato (dictation), we say “punto e basta”. This expression is also used metaphorically to mean “that’s that’s”, “end of the story”, “no more discussion”, e.g. “ti ho detto che non puoi mangiare il gelato adesso, punto e basta” (I told you that you can’t eat ice-cream now, end of the story).

Closely related to the above symbols is il punto e virgola ; (the semicolon), which literally translates as “dot and comma”.

I due punti is the Italian word for colon, : , meaning “the two dots”.

I puntini di sospensione … are suspension dots, more informally known as “puntini”. But because we Italians like musical repetitions we often say “puntini puntini”, which better expresses a sense of suspension.

Le virgolette “ ” (literally ‘small commas’) are the inverted commas. Le virgolette are often used in speech to express an implied irony,. In Italian we use the expression detto fra virgolette (said between inverted commas), to graphically describe this euphemistic meaning of a word, e.g.: direi che è stata un’esperienza molto “interessante”, fra virgolette (I’d say that it was a very “interesting”, in inverted commas, experience).

La parentesi (singular feminine), le parentesi (plural feminine) () are bracket/s. Again, in spoken Italian we use the graphic expression aprire una parentesi (literally “to open a bracket”) when we want to introduce a digression, e.g. e qui permettetemi di aprire una parentesi = and here allow me to make a digression.