Alloglyphs appear to be variations of glyphs. For example a question mark glyph, but deviation from a canonical “normal” glyph i.e. ”?”
I first encountered this with Linear B A readings.
There looks to be more documentation on allographs, which might be the origin of the word, which relates to linguistics and phonetics and is more general usage.
Allographs being defined as
- each of two or more alternative forms of a letter of an alphabet or other grapheme. The capital, lowercase, italic and various handwritten forms of the letter A are allographs.
- in phonetics, each of two or more letter combinations representing a single phoneme in different words.
It’s fascinating to think of the question mark itself as something that required iteration and adoption, because it is such an entrenched piece of punctuation.
Most question marks are distinctive and unambiguous. We have met some, however, that are not. Some resemble the ‘punctus elevatus’ (&punctel;) character (though such question marks do not seem to appear in the same books that use a true punctus elevatus). And some resemble the ‘left punctus elevatus’ character, though again these do not seem to appear in the same books that use the &lpunctel;. Also, the &lpunctel; is an ‘opening’ punctuation mark—it appears at the beginning of a span of text, like opening quotation marks, but the question mark is definitely a piece of ‘closing’ punctuation. For the time being, we will treat these variant forms of question mark as ‘alloglyphs’ of ”?” and capture them as ”?“.
