International punctuation

I remember asking Alberto (my Colombian team-mate in Estonia) why they use a "¿" at the start of a question in Spanish. He answered "so you know right from the beginning that it's a question".

OK, so why don't other languages need it? In English and Estonian, there are words that help identify a question (what, when, why, where, how, are/is) so perhaps an additional punctuation is not needed. On the other hand, in Sinhalese, you don't know that it's a question until you come to the letter "ද" just before the "?".

Perhaps the answer lies with the origin (and evolution) of punctuation marks - as an aid to pronunciation as spoken languages evolved written forms. So, a sign to indicate the start of a question would be needed only if the spoken language had some kind of emphasis at the start of a question: to test this I need to check if this is the case in Spanish...

Anyway, the reason this long-lost point resurfaced was because I noticed Jaq (my colleague from Hungary) using (in my opinion) rather too many exclamation marks. In English, we use this after an interjection ("Hello!"); to express surprise or incredulity ("It was so big!"); or to indicate forceful utterance or strong feeling ("Shut up!"). In Hungarian, it is used after any request (e.g. "Please, close the door!") - as a result, his English writing looks quite aggressive!

So, there appears to be more to diversity in punctuation than the anomaly of the Spanish question mark - I wonder what other examples abound?