I was wondering. Is there a designated unicode position for exclamation comma and question comma (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Question_comma",_"exclamation_comma") ? If not, what position would you say it's best to place them and how would you imagine them being accessed (e.g. with an open type substitution rule)?
Comments
One way would be to add a substitution for comma+zwj+question.
Well, that's also true. There is no actual need in using them. It's just a playful way to enrich the typographic palette of a typeface I guess.
I think that a substitution of comma followed by the respective exclamation or question mark would be sufficient (I don't think there is any circumstance where one would use an exclamation or a question mark directly after a comma, right?)
Thank you both for your responses
It is surely a richer and interesting system. But a bit distinct than exclamation-comma and question-comma idea: the new marks would indicate the end of exclamative and interrogative tone inside a longer sentence. The idea does not appeal to me. In Portuguese, use of ! or ? in the middle of a sentence is against the grammar rules, but allowed as a stylistic resource. I prefer this usage than the addition of two marks.
In other hand, the idea of a sarcastic mark is quite useful. So much that proposals for it were made since 16th Century (!). None got relevant adoption. The recent idea uses a very bad mark and I doubt it could perform any better than previous proposals.
But ¿who knows? After interrobang was encoded ¡anything is possible!
(Italics, shmitalics.)
This can be used to represent an Oxford comma which stares threateningly at editors who attempt to remove it.