Yes/No Questions & the Greek Question Mark

Modern Greek turns a statement into a yes/no question by intonation alone. There is no word-order inversion and no auxiliary “do”: Γράφεις. (“You write.”) becomes Γράφεις; purely by lifting the voice at the end, and nothing about the verb changes. In writing the only signal is the Greek question mark, and it is written with the glyph ; - the same shape as a semicolon (Unicode U+003B), never the visually identical legacy character U+037E. So typing an ordinary semicolon types a correct Greek question mark. The answers are ναι (“yes”) and όχι (“no”), and ναι catches people out precisely because it sounds like the English “nay”.