[HN Gopher] The History of 'Ampersand' (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ The History of 'Ampersand' (2020) Author : graderjs Score : 286 points Date : 2022-07-27 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.merriam-webster.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.merriam-webster.com) | tommit wrote: | I really like reading about linguistic origins like that one. | Makes me reflect on my irrational hatred towards reading "could | of", "would of" and the likes. I mean, I still get a seizure | reading it, but I can only imagine some old dude yelling at the | youngsters in the late 1800's like "it's called 'and per se, | and'! Not ampersand! Jeez you all are the reason the english | language is degrading!" | jayski wrote: | Yes, language evolves torwars comfortability, written and | spoken. What is incorrect today if used enough will become | official. | | I watched a linguistics course online many years ago and that | was my key take away. | | Water in french was originally something like "aqua", and it | devolved into eau, all along the way people complained they | were saying it wrong. | sandworm101 wrote: | Language also evolves away from easy of use. For instance, | complexity and secrets are created to distinguish one class | of speaker from another. Rules are invented for no higher | reason than distinguishing those educated in them from those | not. English is full of such rules, rules we base in deep | history but on examination were the creation of 18th | schoolmasters or book publishers. | | The King/Queens English? Most English monarchs barely spoke | the language. They were far better with French or German. | gumby wrote: | > Most English monarchs barely spoke the language. | | ^Most^Several | | Famously of course the first two Georges, perhaps William | of Orange, definitely of course William the Conquerer and | his immediate successors, but I think _most_ is a gross | exaggeration. | sandworm101 wrote: | Read through any royal writings. English was almost never | used. French is by far the most commonly used language of | English royals. | gumby wrote: | For certain legal written uses. The claim that the King | was also the monarch of France was only dropped from the | official titles lat in the French revolution. Then again, | the charter of my high school was signed by Charles I and | is written in English, like all the other colonial era | official documents I've seen (a small number!) were. | | But as a spoken language, there is plenty of evidence the | other way. All the Tudors and Stuarts were English | speakers, for example. | | I have heard that French was the vernacular of the late | Romanovs, about which I am...dubious. | oxfeed65261 wrote: | ...or Old Norse (e.g. Cnut), or Dutch (William of Orange), | any others? | sandworm101 wrote: | Spanish, dutch ... they were products of european houses, | few of which spoke any english. | amyjess wrote: | > it's called 'and per se, and' | | It was more that they just called it "and". Rattling off the | last few letters of the alphabet, it would have sounded awkward | if they ended it with "X, Y, Z, and and". So they added the | _per se_ to indicate that _and_ was the letter 's name and not | just stammering on a conjunction without finishing the | sentence. | collinmanderson wrote: | A, B, C, and D, Pray, playmates, agree. E, F, and | G, Well, so it shall be. J, K, and L, In | peace we will dwell. M, N, and O, To play let us | go. P, Q, R, and S, Love may we possess. W, | X, and Y, Will not quarrel or die. Z, and | ampersand, Go to school at command. | | - A Book of Nursery Rhymes (1901) | | https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Nursery_Rhymes/Part. | .. | vincent-manis wrote: | I was once returning to Vancouver. Ahead of me in the | Canada Customs` line was a woman and a boy around 6 years | old. He was singing the Alphabet Song; when he triumphantly | got to `Ecks, Why, and Zee', the woman said `Stop it! | They'll think we're Americans'. | | She had a point, it's `Zed'. | signal11 wrote: | Napron => Apron is another hilarious change, but older. What I | take away from this is that pretty much every major culture | "butchers" (or evolves, if you like) words on an ongoing basic. | nsedlet wrote: | This guy has a great set of examples of rules in English that | started as bastardizations, fabrications, arbitrary preferences | of some particular writer, etc.: | https://youtu.be/JTslqcXsFd4?t=444. | jpmoral wrote: | "And the like" | mywittyname wrote: | I had a writing professor in college whose obsession with | forcing us to write and speak "Queen's English" really soured | me on hearing people correct someone else's grammar. Said | professor went so far as to author his own style guide that we | were forced to use for class because the existing ones were | wrong for this reason or that. | | This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what | matters is if people can understand what you're saying. | Archelaos wrote: | > This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what | matters is if people can understand what you're saying. | | doohureehliebeeleafthatt? | kelseyfrog wrote: | While I'm probably responding to a joke, intelligibility | isn't simply a binary. It's how we're able to have | interesting connections between dialects or Danish, | Swedish, Norwegian for example. | | The first rule of communication is knowing your audience | and if one's language can be adapted in simplicity, | complexity, lexicon, grammar, content, style, voice, medium | &c to be more readily understood, then it's in the | speaker's benefit to do so. If GP's teacher could not | earnestly understand vulgar English then by all means | adapt, but the sense that I'm getting is that they were | being obstinate on purpose and those sort of people should | live in the communicative bubble of isolation they put | themselves in. | Archelaos wrote: | Well, my "joke" was ment as a demonstration, that the | rules have the purpose to make it easy to be understood. | I bent the rules a bit, so that it should still be | possible to decode my message, but not easily. This | should demonstrate that rules are not completely | arbitrary, even if (some) people can understand what I am | saying. | anyfoo wrote: | You're showing a case though where you diverge from _the | current conventions_ so much that it 's incredibly hard to | understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure you're going | against OP's point. | | By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple | European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, | you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too | seriously or else you go insane. | | What English (partly US English, partly "English in | general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also | interesting is that unlike _any_ other language I speak, | reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know | how it 's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example | seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. | German or Italian, but it's still consistent. | | If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part | because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan | words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so | eh, just stupid guesses.) | thaumasiotes wrote: | > What English (partly US English, partly "English in | general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also | interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, | reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know | how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for | example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared | to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. | | The French don't seem to agree. | | https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homographe | dspillett wrote: | A valuable life lesson though. I've followed coding standards | that I don't entirely agree with123, but breaking them would | cause more discomfort for the larger project than the minor | irritation keeping them would cause me. I'm sure the feeling | is common in other career areas too, particularly | professional writing. | | --- | | [1] Not using extra space to line up similar parts of similar | lines when grouped together, for instance, I find it makes | things easier to read and alter afterwards | | [2] Some codebases absolutely hate one-line if statements, it | must be in a block even if only one statement is inside the | conditional and the brackets must each be on their own line. | I get that for more complex code it breaks things up visually | in a way that is helpful, but stretching out 20..30 | characters over four lines, artificially lengthening a | function significantly if it happens multiple times... | | [3] One FOSS project I once submitted a patch for insisted on | absolutely no inline comments - all explanation had to be in | the comment block at the head of the function declaration. It | almost discouraged commenting, and I like to comment | liberally. | irrational wrote: | [2] For me it has to do with scanning code. If if- | statements are always in a block, then I can easily scan to | or past it without having to stop and read what it actually | says. But, if it is in a single line I have to stop and | read it to understand that it is actually an if statement | that was put onto a single line. | downvotetruth wrote: | Username checks out | yissp wrote: | I've made the mistake of trying to add an extra statement | to a one-line if and forgetting to add a block too many | times. Although now GCC has -Wmisleading-indentation | which should catch that. | anyfoo wrote: | Yes, exactly, it's just not worth the risk. It gets worse | with preprocessor macro systems like C has, where | something might look correct until you follow the macro | definition. | anyfoo wrote: | Point 2 is also for security[1], especially in languages | with non-hygienic[2] macro systems such as C. But as | another commenter (yissp) already pointed out, even without | macros it can quickly go bad. I once liked omitting blocks | in if, while, for etc., but stopped doing it altogether and | it now jumps out as a wart to me, too. It's just too risky | for too little benefit. | | What I disagree with sometimes is whether the block needs | to start on a new line. For example I would like to do | this: if (foo = bar) { blah(); } | | But my former team was against it, and my current team uses | a style enforcement tool (which I do agree with in | principle), so I don't. | | Point 1 is fine by me and the team: We embrace "tabs for | indentation, spaces for alignment", so that fits into the | philosophy. | | Point 3, i.e. disallowing inline comments, seems ill- | conceived and bad to me. | | [1] Actually correctness, which often means security. | | [2] Or rather a generalization of what "hygienic macro" | means. | CivBase wrote: | > This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what | matters is if people can understand what you're saying. | | I disagree. Kind of. Like all languages, English is a tool. | The more complicated that tool is, the harder it is to | learn/use, the less effective it is. YAML and HTML are easy | examples of how the complexity of a language can hurt its | utility. There's something to be said for maintaining a | formal spec that guards against changes that would introduce | unnecessary complexity. | | However... a spec like that doesn't exist for English - at | least not one that most of its users agree upon - and being | able to understand what people are trying to communicate is | absolutely the most important feature of any language. | Therefor, I consider it a faux pas to strictly enforce | arbitrary rules like your professor did. Frankly, it sounds | like he was just using his position to take out his | frustration on others. | rawTruthHurts wrote: | > This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what | matters is if people can understand what you're saying. | | Not that you can learn anything unless it sticks to a certain | set of rules. | hiccuphippo wrote: | What ticks me of is when people use then instead of than. | English is not my main language so the first time I read it I | was very confused. | xeromal wrote: | I'm a native english speaker and I can't tell you the | difference between then and than. lol. | dropofwill wrote: | For my dialect at least they sound the same, so in my brain | they are the same. | xeromal wrote: | Maybe that's my problem. I'm from the Southeast US | (rednecks) and we pronounce them both dth-i-n. It's hard | for me to type out but it's a harder I sound as the | vowel. We use the same vowel for PEN (It goes PIN) and | the name Ben goes BIN like BIN laden. | Rychard wrote: | I'm sure there's a better example, but I've always | explained it like so: | | "than" is for comparisons; e.g. smaller _than_, older | _than_ | | "then" is used to indicate timing; chew _then_ swallow, | wash _then_ rinse | | It's certainly an incomplete explanation, but if someone | else can share an explanation that is more succinct and/or | complete than my own, I'd be interested in seeing it. | tharkun__ wrote: | That is exactly how we learned it too and I can't figure | out why people don't use these correctly. | | Another one for "than" is also if you can replace it with | "instead of". "Rather than learning the language, he went | to a football game". Not "Rather - then learning the | language later - he went to a football game first". Well | actually there 'then' _is_ correct but I had to make a | broken up sentence that you would never write but you | might say it. If you want to tell someone about this, you | start with 'rather' then think of explaining first that | he did go learn afterwards so you interject your own | sentence and then go on. But when writing you have enough | time to form a proper sentence. | | Of course auto correction can play a role nowadays. I | wrote "of" more often recently and a typoed "ofg" might | be corrected to "of" and not "off". Sure. | | Now what I do understand is that native speakers actually | forget the rules meaning the "why" something is correct. | After a while you can usually just tell what's correct. | It just "sounds right" and you can't explain it to | someone else. | xeromal wrote: | I appreciate this example. I don't know why these two | words always stump me. I feel pretty capable | grammatically, but my brain completely forgets to | remember these examples. | | I'll add these examples to my notes so I can write | correct emails at least. lol | gnicholas wrote: | I remember an SAT question about "taking for granted". One of | the other options was "taking for granite". I had never | wondered about how this mostly-spoken phrase would be written | out, or how the orthography would shed light on its meaning. | | I was surprised to realize that a phrase I knew very well, I | had probably never read (and definitely never written). | prmoustache wrote: | Same here english is not my native language. There are many | other errors that makes me cringe, like people writing "could | of". Most of them are done by people whose english is their | primary language. But on the other hand I also see people | doing similar errors in my mother tongue. | bradrn wrote: | Oh, this sort of thing goes _way_ back... here's Swift from | 1712, for instance: | | > I do here ... complain to your Lordship ... that our Language | is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no | means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the | Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied | Abuses and Absurdities ... Gentlemen ... introduced that | barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, ... as to form such | harsh unharmonious Sounds ... They have joined the most | obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to | shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, | that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, | they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at | length, sounded faint and languid ... Instances of this Abuse | are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, | _Drudg 'd_, _Disturb 'd_, _Rebuk 't_, _Fledg 'd_, and a | thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as | Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we | form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have | often wondred how it could ever obtain. | | -- _A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the | English Tongue_ [taken from | https://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/proposal.html] | | Or in other words: "It's 'dess-turb-uhd', with THREE vowels! | Not that nasty word 'dess-turbd' which is impossible to | pronounce! What a horrible degradation of the language!" | | (For more of this, Deutscher's _The Unfolding of Language_ | contains a highly amusing list of examples dating all the way | back to Cicero in 46 BC, who complains that the speech of his | day was sadly degraded from the great orators of the past. I'm | certain I've even seen an Ancient Egyptian complaint along | these lines, though sadly I can't seem to find it now.) | irrational wrote: | It is interesting how much more complex ancient languages | were. Just look at Greek and Latin. So many tenses, aspects, | time, etc. It doesn't seem odd that things become simpler | over time. People are inherently lazy and if they can get by | with nicknames, abbreviations, fewer syllables, simpler | syntax and grammar, they will. Though this does beg the | question, why in the world were language so much more complex | the farther back you go? You would think languages would have | been simple from the start. | jackbravo wrote: | Probably latin wasn't the start ;-). We are not 2,000 years | old hehe. | codehalo wrote: | > Though this does beg the question.... | | You are raising the question, not begging it. | | https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the- | questi... | gnicholas wrote: | I have all but given up on this one. It's now notable | when I hear someone use the phrase in the "correct" way. | Usually the person ends up being someone who majored in | philosophy. | | This progression is likely due to the fact that people | raise questions much more often than they beg questions. | Once the phrase started being used in the former sense, | it was bound to overtake the latter. | BalinKing wrote: | From the first sentence of that article: | | > Begging the question means "to elicit a specific | question as a reaction or response," and can often be | replaced with "a question that begs to be answered." | snarkconjecture wrote: | Disclaimer: not a linguist. | | Languages don't really become systematically simpler over | time, or they would've had to start out incredibly | complicated. They have some tendency to cycle between lots | of grammatical forms (like Latin) and few grammatical forms | with lots of helper words (like English). | | ("Simple" and "complex" is debatable; English's snarl of | helper words is infamously hard to learn.) | | It's obvious how you go in the "less inflection" direction, | but how do you go in the "more inflection" one? The answer | is that you start with helper words, which evolve into | enclitics (fragments of words attached to other words, like | the n't in 'can't' and 'shouldn't'), and eventually those | become suffixes and prefixes, and then merge into the words | they're attached to, creating grammatical inflections! | | This process is where all(?) of the grammatical forms in | Greek/Latin/etc are thought to have come from, afaik. | Proto-Indo-European, one of the earliest languages we can | reconstruct, seems to have been pretty close to the apex of | this process, having just consolidated a bunch of enclitics | into grammar. | | So the goofy internet 'verbn't' trend is actually a | possible glimpse of how English could acquire a negative | verb form like Japanese has! | FabHK wrote: | From what I gather, languages don't necessarily get | simpler over time, but they do tend to get simpler as the | number of speakers increases, particularly if the | speakers learn it as a second language. | | Russians tend to drop articles in English, Indonesians | don't really distinguish between "he" and "she", many | learners forget the -s in third person singular verbs | ("he make"), irregular forms get regularised ("teacher | teached me"). | | Some of the most complicated languages are spoken by | small groups in Africa or Papua Guinea, with features | such as an evidential aspect (different verb endings | depending on whether you saw something with your own | eyes, heard about it, concluded it, etc.) [1], or Mother- | in-law-speech, where the language you use changes when | you speak to your in-laws [2]. | | Pidgins tend to be very simple and regular, by contrast. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality | | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech | not2b wrote: | That's because the Russian language doesn't have | articles, but other complexities of the language that | don't exist in English convey the distinction between, | say, "a boy" and "the boy". | hoosieree wrote: | Sadly, the art of Speaking in Capital Letters has been lost | to the Ages. | fknorangesite wrote: | Ah but now we have the informal-internet-speak version of | using capital letters to emphasize things that are Very | Important. | egypturnash wrote: | It still exists, but it is rarely taught. When it is time | for you to learn it, you will learn The Way of the Capital | Letter, and anyone paying even the smallest amount of | Attention to your words will Hear them in your speech. | not2b wrote: | Many 18th century writers of English capitalized nouns the | way it's done in German. For example, the US Constitution | does this. But it was already going away by then. | QuercusMax wrote: | Is this a serious article from Swift? It has "A Proposal" in | the name, and we all know about his more famous "Modest | Proposal". I can't tell if this is a masterful 18th Century | troll job or if he was actually in earnest. | fknorangesite wrote: | Even if it's satire, it's got to be satirizing an attitude | that actually exists - otherwise it's just nonsense. | | Given how prevalent the eyeroll-inducing grammar nazis have | been in my lifetime (I am happily recovered from that | affliction, myself), I have no trouble believing they | existed in the 1700s, too. | tommit wrote: | I love this, thanks! " _Kids these days_ " of language. Oh | well, I'm gonna stop correcting of's used instead of have's - | don't want to end up in _The Unfolding of Language II_. But I | will definitely check out the first one, thanks for the tip! | IncRnd wrote: | > Or in other words: "It's 'dess-turb-uhd', with THREE | vowels! Not that nasty word 'dess-turbd' which is impossible | to pronounce! | | I had a Professor who pronounced the -ed that was at the end | of a word as its own syllable. She loved doing that, and it | actually wasn't noticable after a short while. | | > What a horrible degradation of the language!" | | It's not that different from people today saying "wanna" for | "want to" or even "me wan go home" for "I want to go home". | | Idioms and dialects abound! | gumby wrote: | > Or in other words: "It's 'dess-turb-uhd', with THREE | vowels! | | Some of these pronunciations still survive, such as "I | learned* the words to the song" vs "the learned gentleman". | | * as a kid I was taught to write "learnt" but I never see | that in the US. | layer8 wrote: | "learnt" is mostly British English. | IggleSniggle wrote: | Lawl | combatentropy wrote: | "Ampersand" is like "could of", and yet is not like it. | | Ampersand is a change in sounds, for the sake of easier | pronunciation: and per se and # original | andperseand # remove spaces andpers'and # drop | extra vowel, for slightly faster speech an'pers'and | # drop extra consonant, for same reason anpersand | # drop apostrophes ampersand # transform "n" to | its neighbor, "m", because it's easier to say before "p" | | These are all merely changes in sounds, the consonants and the | vowels, the "phonemes" as linguists call them. The course from | "am not" to "ain't" follows a similar pattern. | | "Could of", on the other hand, is not phonological but | morphological --- a change in meaning, because "of" doesn't | mean "have". Or maybe it is merely typographic, because what | they could have written is "could've", which sounds the same as | "could of" --- and it's probably what they meant but simply | made the same mistake as when you accidentally write "there" | instead of "their". | | And I don't believe your repulsion is "irrational", as you say. | There is value in preserving the current state of language, of | slowing down its changes, simply for the sake of | intelligibility, for now and for posterity. A single instance | of one person correcting someone else's "could of" is a like | throwing an ice cube atop a melting glacier, but like voting in | a general election, but it is no reason to just give up. (Of | course the stakes are low, so we must say it only if it will be | well received.) | | Now there is a class of "corrections" that are misguided, I | think, like the rule that you cannot end a sentence with a | preposition. That arose from lovers of Latin, which doesn't end | sentences in prepositions because it is impossible, and they | were trying to make English more like Latin. | giraffe_lady wrote: | Yes it's very funny how much overlap there is between people | who value scientism and people who enforce static usage rules | as if they are objectively correct. | | Among the people whose area of scientific study is the use of | language and how it conveys meaning, and especially how and why | it changes over time, you will not find very many hard | prescriptivists. It's not _wrong_ per se it 's just not a very | useful model in most contexts. | snarf21 wrote: | I learned about & down a wikipedia rabbit hole and was also so | intrigued. Etymology and lexicology writ large are very | interesting.. For example, look up the history of the classic | "ye olde shoppe". The mix of cultures and the effects of time | are amazing. | | One of my favorite word derivations is _feamyng_ which is a | collective noun for ferrets. The word itself is like a game of | telephone gone wrong. Multiple mistypings in dictionaries, etc. | give it quite the interesting word history. | throwaway894345 wrote: | If you like etymology, I highly recommend The History of | English Podcast. It covers the history of ampersand among | many, many other things. | mmaunder wrote: | My wife says it's the S that went to France and came back fancy. | Pretty much destroyed my attempt to sound authoritative after | reading that article. | phkahler wrote: | I hate ligatures, but how one earth is & derived from et? | albrewer wrote: | In some typefaces it becomes more obvious - see the first | graphic on this page for a few examples that more closely | resemble an 'et' ligature: https://creativepro.com/ampersand- | history-usage/ | s1mon wrote: | https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/history-of-ampersands-typo... | mellavora wrote: | bad cursive? | AriedK wrote: | I recommend listening to the told version by the Milk Carton Kids | (Live From Lincoln Theatre (2014)), and the rest of the album. | https://youtu.be/gL8eBrhVTJ4?t=2517 Interesting this article is | from 2020, whereas the wikipedia article on the ampersand lists | merriam-webster videos from 2014 and 2015 as sources. | ajaimk wrote: | Also explains how "et al." came about | graderjs wrote: | How so? Where is that? | vaxman wrote: | Number 2 article on HackerNews. I hate the Future sometimes. | saurik wrote: | > The letter _I_ , for example, would be referred to with the | phrase _I per se, I_ , which means in Latin " _I_ by itself (is | the word) _I_. " When the 27th quasi-letter _&_ was referred to | it was called _& per se_ , and, meaning " _&_ by itself (is the | word) _and_. " That read as "and per se and." | | This explanation is mixed up and confusing. It isn't "I per se, | I" that is somehow "by itself I", it is merely "per se I". The | reason you get another "and" in front was because it was at the | end of the alphabet song: "[and] [per se &]". | | https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ampersand | | > Thus the end of the recitation would be: "X, Y, Z and per se | and". This last phrase eventually became ampersand, and the term | was in common English usage by around 1837. | Jverse wrote: | Thank you, the article left me very confused about the logic | behind two 'and'. | pfedak wrote: | Indeed, this article is embarrassingly wrong. Not sure how | anyone could write | | > The letter I [...] would be referred to with the phrase I per | se, I, which means in Latin "I by itself (is the word) I." | | It's the letter I, not the word. It's like a half-remembered | explanation | yesbabyyes wrote: | This fascinated me and it takes me back to one of my first | webpages, where I collected tidbits about another ligature, "@" | (which is a ligature of "a" and "d"). The Wayback Machine has a | copy (thank you!): | https://web.archive.org/web/19981202002949/www.student.nada.... | jdblair wrote: | that sounds totally made up! | Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: | Neat. | moffkalast wrote: | You can tell it's neat because of the way it is. | Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: | and also because of my helpful comment. | prmoustache wrote: | In french it is called esperluette. | | There are different theories. The most convincing one is it came | from the occitan language where "es per lo et" would translate | litteraly in english to "it is for the and". Sounds similar to | the origin of ampersand. | _puk wrote: | Obligatory Mitchell & Webb Ampersand origin theory.. | | https://youtu.be/XXryAnAD5Jw | pluc wrote: | I went down that rabbit hole too prior to seeing your comment | and I was pretty surprised that the french meaning seems to | have evolved exactly the same way the english one did | | https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperluette#%C3%89tymologie | | > << et, per se, et >> (<< et, en soi, 'et' >>) pronounced << | ete-per se-ete >>, would have transformed into << et, per lui, | et >> | prmoustache wrote: | Yes this is one of the other theory which can have some | weight. The reality is it could be a combination of the two. | People from northern areas of what is now France would have | initially using et, per se, et then et, per lui, et while the | occitan speaking part would have used et, per lo, et and a | merge would have taken place somewhere more recently. | Bayart wrote: | I find the Occitan etymology more convincing, considering | _esperluette_ still sounds almost like perfect Occitan with a | meaning that makes complete sense, and the phonemic changes | from Gallo-Latin _et, per se, et_ don 't seem regular. | wongarsu wrote: | That's interesting that such a similar process happened so far | apart. In German it's simply known as "Und-Zeichen" ("and- | symbol") or "Kaufmannisches Und" ("mercantile and" or "business | and") due to its popularity in company names. | FabHK wrote: | The German Wikipedia [1] has a slightly different variation | than MW and you which makes a lot of sense to me: | | The letters which were also words were _prefixed_ with "per | se" (it was not bracketed like MW says "I per se I" - why?). | | So, when schoolchildren recited the alphabet, they'd say | | "per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, per se I, ...". | | Now, the "&" was at the time considered the last letter, and it | was introduced by "and", as the last item of a list often is | ("Peter, Paul and Mary"), thus the schoolchildren would end | | "... W, X, Y, Z, and per se &." [1] | | French, similarly, ended in "X, Y, Z, et per lui &." | | That seems to me a very plausible theory for ampersand and | esperluette. | | Note, however, that the English Wikipedia mirrors the "A per se | A" explanation from MW. | | [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et- | Zeichen#Englische_und_franz... | Namari wrote: | I really doubt Occitan Language has anything to do with that. | prmoustache wrote: | This is a very old symbol and occitan was the primary | language used by more than a third of what is known as France | until very recently. | Namari wrote: | Ah sorry I got confused with "Basque" Language. | Linda703 wrote: | supernova87a wrote: | Side amusing note -- the story brought up in my memory my | difficulty in figuring it out in Unix usage years ago. | | Without anyone to show me or really having any useful manual on | what it's purpose was, I kept on trying: | | "man &" | | to find out its purpose, usage -- "man" being the tool that I | turned to for explaining to myself anything. Little did I know | there are commands/characters that operate outside of the manual- | explainable set. | | Funnily, this never got me anywhere. | tabtab wrote: | I didn't know what it was called when I was a kid, so referred to | it as "the baby playing with its feet". | gramie wrote: | I'm on about episode 108 of the podcast "The History of English" | https://historyofenglishpodcast.com, which taught me about | ampersand's origins. I highly recommend the podcast! | bitcurious wrote: | The fact of it being a ligature also explains the other common | drawing of it, with the backwards three with a line through it. | You can see how it loosely has the same characters E and T. | vehemenz wrote: | In many typefaces the "et" in "&" is still completely legible. | | It's common to see "&c." in older texts instead of "etc." | divbzero wrote: | Some of those typefaces can be seen in the images here: | | https://creativepro.com/ampersand-history-usage/ | amelius wrote: | You can also see it in HN comments. For example: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28194901 | giancarlostoro wrote: | > It's common to see "&c." in older texts instead of "etc." | | Guessing this was to save on ink or something? | lucideer wrote: | more of an aesthetic choice I'd say, as with a lot of | typography (after legibility) | vehemenz wrote: | Manuscripts were very large and time-consuming to create. | Ligatures save time, space, and materials (paper and ink). | | Most of these conventions carried over into the printing age | and were slowly phased out. | chrismorgan wrote: | I've consistently used _& c._ (almost always in italics, too, | as was the custom due to the convention of italics for foreign | language words, but especially also because it yields even | prettier results in many fonts--the "et" is more likely to come | through in italics1) for 81/2 years now.2 I've only been | _asked_ about it twice (once "what is that?" and once "I think | you made a typo"), though I've probably confused or surprised | more people than that, and there have been a few occasions over | the years when I've deliberately used "et cetera" instead. | | I also type typographic punctuation (curly quotes, em dashes in | sentences, en dashes in ranges and such, narrow no-break | spaces, true hyphens and minus signs in some contexts, _& c._) | completely naturally with my Compose key. If you get ' from me, | I _meant_ ' rather than ' or '. Or I was using my phone. I | should see about adding some of this stuff to wvkbd. | | It's all good fun. :-) (And that emoticon would have been | U+1F642 SLIGHTLY SMILING FACE, entered with `Compose : )`, but | I went ASCII since HN strips emoji.) | | I also deliberately adopted an idiosyncratic written form for | my ampersands maybe five years ago, based on the 8-with-legs | shape, where I omit the bottom right leg, starting halfway | between the ending line and the 8 intersection. I decided this | was prettier and slightly more legible. | | I... I suspect I might have become a typography snob somewhere | along the way. I'm just going to disguise it with the excuse | that I like to be _correct_. | | --***--3 | | 1 For example, find the _& c._ in | https://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-fizzbuzz/, and compare its | beautiful curly etty ampersand with the boring non-italic | ampersand in the same font in "What's the deal with this &str". | (I'm assuming the use of the serif Equity font that I load on | the page.) | | 2 Judging by my HN comments, I switched some time between | January 29, 2014 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141477 | is my last comment where I wrote "etc.") and February 12, 2014 | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7223153 is my first | comment where I wrote "&c."). | | 3 `Compose h r`, horizontal rule like the HTML tag. For other | characters, 1/2 was `Compose 1 2` (possibly the only stock | mapping used in this comment), and the superscript numbers for | footnotes are `Compose ^ 1` and so forth. | [deleted] | meta-level wrote: | Where I'm coming from Amper is a river and Sand has the same | meaning as in English. So without the context, Ampersand is the | sand you find at Ampers river bank... When I first read this name | I took it for some mystic code name :) | Dreami wrote: | In German it's called the Kaufmanns-Und (roughly | merchant's/salesman's And). I think it may be related to | advertising, if you advertise a product name (or a producer name) | with an "and" in it, the ampersand is much shorter and more | visually appealing | bla3 wrote: | I always thought it's "amper's and" for that reason, and | "amper" must mean "Kaufmann". | ainar-g wrote: | Which is consistent with many Romance languages, where it's | called a variation of "commercial and". Including the Italian | "e commerciale", Portuguese "e comercial", and Spanish "y | comercial". | charles_f wrote: | And French "Et commercial". It's sometimes written as a form | closer to "et", corresponding to the ligature outlined in the | article | [deleted] | kaichanvong wrote: | as opposed to the appealing German scharfes (ss) | mccorrinall wrote: | Don't believe them! ss is not sharp! Do you see any sharp | edges there? Me neither! It's as blunt it can get! | qbrass wrote: | The curve is a convex edge. The shape provides lower | surface area at the point of impact, increasing the surface | pressure with the same impact force compared to a straight | edge. | kaichanvong wrote: | the baseline looks close to being a "sharp edge"... | | really though, with the "New Book called "What if? 2" by | the XKCD creator, can I get him to sign it? given the | previous books suggestion: a cure for the common cold, "If | everyone on the planet stayed away from each other for a | couple of weeks, wouldn't the common cold be wiped out?"? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30139925 | pndy wrote: | German class teacher told us once that this particular letter | can be called _scharfes S_ and _eszett_ | | Was kinda amusing when the "less involved" classmates were | trying to read it as B | kaichanvong wrote: | it's from (serif-like) handwriting really... it's easy to | see that given people "describe" the as being _scharfes_ of | the entity ` ß` | bitwize wrote: | That's like how the symbol @ used to be called "commercial at" | (this is its Unicode name). This is because of how sales were | listed on receipts and such, think "4 apples @ 50C/ each". | hiccuphippo wrote: | In Spanish the @ is used, mainly in text chat, as both an "a" | and an "o" at the same time. Saves time when you want to | address both males and females: "amig@s" instead of "amigos y | amigas" | mixmastamyk wrote: | Smart, maybe can displace the harder to read latinx term. | jameshart wrote: | Very briefly worked in a metal fabrication shop in the last | gasp of pre-CAD and electronic records. Writing out the bill | of materials (by hand, to be typed up) involved a lot of | numbers - measurements, quantities, and prices. | | Using symbols like # before a quantity, @ before a unit | price, or [?] before a diameter was considered critical for | minimizing confusion. I think it was meant to work like a | sort of Hungarian notation for numbers, so if someone's | transcribing them into an order form or something, and they | find themselves copying a diameter into a price column, they | catch themselves on the type mismatch. | | It never seemed like there was much room for ambiguity in any | of the lists I wrote up, but I guess when you screw up an | order to a steel supplier and get the quantity mixed up with | the length, that can be a pretty expensive mistake. | [deleted] | yesbabyyes wrote: | Its html code is "@". | sfjailbird wrote: | In the subcontinent, almost everybody pronounces this "at- | the-rate-of". I guess they learn this in school or something. | Makes you do a double take the first couple of times someone | reads you an email adress :) | blowski wrote: | "@" has a lot of interesting names - monkey, herring, pig's | tail, strudel, mouse, elephant's trunk, and "arroba" (a unit | of weight, like a bushel). | flawi wrote: | In the 90s/00s it was often referred to as 'miukumauku' in | Finnish, roughly translates as 'meowmeow', as in the sound | a cat makes, since it somewhat looks like a sleeping cat. | joosters wrote: | I forget the exact details, but I've seen it called a snail | in some programming language or other - I remember getting | an error message along the lines of 'unexpected snail at | line x'! I wish I could recall what language it was - | perhaps something verilog related? | gpas wrote: | In italian we call it "chiocciola", which translates to | snail. | tabtab wrote: | @ "Princess Leia hair" | kotborealis wrote: | In Russian, it's usually called `dog`. No idea why. | abudabi123 wrote: | A dog will always perform a certain spiral inwards walk | pattern before it comes to rest on bedding. | IggleSniggle wrote: | My favorite name for "@" is "rogue" | eurasiantiger wrote: | I prefer "tourist" | xpe wrote: | What languages or cultures or regions use this form? | HillRat wrote: | It's particularly popular in Yendor, I believe. | [deleted] | anyfoo wrote: | Spread from there to Ancardia and Moria as well, though. | gvx wrote: | Yeah, in Dutch it's "apenstaartje" (little monkey's tail), | although the last decades, it's becoming far more common to | use the English "at". | froh wrote: | it's "Klammeraffe" in German, spider monkey, and | figuratively a small monkey clinging to / clasping | someone or something. | yesbabyyes wrote: | I kept a collection of names for @ on my first website: h | ttps://web.archive.org/web/19981202002949/www.student.nad | a.... | david927 wrote: | It's "zavinac" in Czech -- pickled herring. If you buy | them in a jar, they're rolled up, looking a lot like that | symbol. | dwringer wrote: | The @ is sometimes used like "apples, 50C/ @" in which it is | read as "each" rather than "at". This may have faded out once | email addresses popularized it as "at", but it always made | more sense to me since @ looks like an "ea" ligature. | formerly_proven wrote: | German uses a for this purpose, there is probably a shared | history behind that. | IggleSniggle wrote: | Ah, I wasn't aware of this, but it makes a lot of sense! It | even looks like it could be a ligature of "eac", and it's | very natural to imagine a cursive each being abbreviated | first to @h and eventually to just @ by a busy clerk. | 2Gkashmiri wrote: | as an accountant, i feel that cringe feeling whenever someone | says their email john at the rate of gmail.com lol..... | kaichanvong wrote: | in HTML, `&` | Tagbert wrote: | If you find the history of Ampersand interesting, you may be a | word nerd and may qualify for listening to some podcasts on the | etymology like these two that are personal favorites. | | https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ A fascinating exploration of | the origin and evolution of English. It includes a lot of | episodes that cover topics like the Ampersand. | | http://www.lexitecture.com/ The premise is simple: in each | episode, two friends (Ryan, a Canadian, and Amy, a Scot) get | together armed with a new chosen word, and then they regale each | other (and you!) with whatever bits of fascinating trivia they've | been able to uncover about the origins and histories of those | words, tracing through the ages to decipher just how each word | got from its beginnings to its current use. | [deleted] | beardyw wrote: | Between sea & l& | | Is rocks & s& | transfire wrote: | The article seems confused on the meaning of "per se". It | specifically says the phrase is used to refer to the symbol as a | letter and not the word, but then goes on to describe it as if | they are talking about the word. Someone should rewrite the | article to make it clearer. | O__________O wrote: | Around 300 BC, S and Z were removed -- and G added: | | https://www.dictionary.com/e/z/ | masswerk wrote: | This is great: there is actually a way to refer to "@" - _at per | se!_ | | (In German, it is often referred to as "Klammeraffe". My attempts | at conversely referring to the ampersand as "Brezelzeichen" | didn't show wide success. The at-ligature is also sometimes | referred to as "Internet a" or "email a" - as in "em@il", i.e., | "ematil" :-) ) | dcminter wrote: | I've definitely heard it referred to as "ampersat" though from | OP sounds like it ought to be "atpersat." | | The other name I'm familiar with is "Commercial At." | masswerk wrote: | "Commercial At" is a thing in German, too (translating the | "at", _Kaufmannsund_.) | | However, it refers to only one of the common uses. The most | prominent use has been in lists, like, "3 socks @ 2 denarii" | (meaning, three socks at 2 denarii each), &c... | | BTW, speaking of lists, there's another, now lost ligature | for "i"+"t", often used as an abbreviation for "item", which | works just the same, an open circle denoting the "t". | [deleted] | DonHopkins wrote: | Dutch has a digraph "ij" that's written as one letter like a "y" | with an umlaut. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) | | >IJ (lowercase ij; Dutch pronunciation: [ei] (listen)) is a | digraph of the letters i and j. Occurring in the Dutch language, | it is sometimes considered a ligature, or a letter in itself. In | most fonts that have a separate character for ij, the two | composing parts are not connected but are separate glyphs, which | are sometimes slightly kerned. | | >An ij in written Dutch usually represents the diphthong [ei]. In | standard Dutch and most Dutch dialects, there are two possible | spellings for the diphthong [ei]: ij and ei. That causes | confusion for school children, who need to learn which words to | write with ei and which with ij. To distinguish between the two, | the ij is referred to as the lange ij ("long ij"), the ei as | korte ei ("short ei") or simply E - I. In certain Dutch dialects | (notably West Flemish and Zeelandic) and the Dutch Low Saxon | dialects of Low German, a difference in the pronunciation of ei | and ij is maintained. Whether it is pronounced identically to ei | or not, the pronunciation of ij is often perceived as being | difficult by people who do not have either sound in their native | language. | | The body of water "IJ" by Amsterdam is spelled with that single | letter, so when written as a digraph, both the I and the J are | capitalized. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(Amsterdam) | | >The IJ (Dutch: [ei] (listen); sometimes shown on old maps as Y | or Ye) is a body of water, formerly a bay, in the Dutch province | of North Holland. It is known for being Amsterdam's waterfront. | | >Etymology | | >The name IJ is derived from the West Frisian word ie, | alternatively spelled ije, meaning water and cognate with the | English word ea.[1] The name consists of the digraph ij which is | capitalized as IJ. | | I recently saw a commercial van drive by with the name of the | company spelled out in widely spaced upper case letters, but the | IJ in the name were kerned closely together because they were | considered one letter. | | It was kerned that way on purpose, so it didn't qualify for | submission to the wonderful web site "Fuck Yeah Keming": | | https://fuckyeahkeming.com/ | galangalalgol wrote: | Spanish has the digraph CH, depending on region perhaps? I | wonder if that was ever a ligature as well? | DonaldFisk wrote: | In Afrikaans, the Dutch ij was replaced by y. | kevin1024 wrote: | Fond memories of trying to draw an ampersand back in college when | my exams required me to write c code with a pencil on paper. I | think I ended up making them backwards. | transfire wrote: | I imagine it fell out of use as a letter because it's a vowel- | consonant ligature. Those seem weird, e.g. `S&` instead of `SET`? | aimor wrote: | So does the Alphabet song end "X, Y, &, Z"? | [deleted] | ampersandy wrote: | I love learning more about the ampersand, for obvious reasons. | | I've used this unixname for a long time and it's always immensely | satisfying when people realize it's just my real name. | pjungwir wrote: | One summer I had a job in the Penn library improving the catalog | data for their medieval Latin manuscripts. The abbreviations were | wild. Here is a handbook of them (which includes & = et and &-bar | = etiam): https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/213385262.pdf (pdf). I | can see how being "literate" was tougher then than now. | | There were different handwriting styles, depending on the writing | speed (inversely proportional to the quality and thus expense). | For example the Codex Sinaiticus is gorgeous: | https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=26&c... | (That's a Greek example, not Latin---sorry, I'm not much of a | Latinist anymore.) I guess if you don't have mechanical type, you | are very motivated to speed up writing. The books I looked at | were pretty hasty. | | Almost everything I saw was a treatise on medicine and biology. | They were all "commentaries on Aristotle". I guess that's what | you had to do to publish in those days. | | Besides the paleography, I had to trace the origin & date of the | paper used, which was possible from watermarks. We had two huge | reference volumes giving known watermarks so you could narrow | things down a lot---but often you didn't get an exact match. | There was a whole symbology there too. | asveikau wrote: | > etiam | | This reminds me of some of the words and phrases in Latin that | can be somewhat intuitive for someone with familiarity with | modern romance ... "iam" meaning "now", having descendants in | Spanish "ya" or "jamas", French "deja" or "jamais". You can | look at "etiam" and read it as "y ya". Yet when I studied Latin | in an English speaking place I imagine that some took it as a | separate word to memorize, not a conjunction of two others. | | This also makes me think of the other way to say "and", other | than "et": by saying the words together and adding -que to the | second one. Eg. "senatus populusque" = "senate and people". | KSPAtlas wrote: | In polish the name is borrowed straight from Latin, et | jng wrote: | It's called "arroba" in Spanish, an old measure of weight. | vehemenz wrote: | Interestingly, the OED's etymology suggests that "ampersand" is a | corruption of "a per se and" instead of "and per se and." | | 1777 H. L. Thrale _Diary_ Aug.-Sept. in _Thraliana_ (1942) I. 145 | The Letter commonly called _Ipse and_ and _ampuse and_ viz &. is | a corruption of _a per se and_ [sic]: spoken very quick. | yawboakye wrote: | given the eventual enunciation of the word it's more likely | that the first word was 'and' or at least contained the n/m | consonant. during a contraction between 'a' and 'p' an | extra/intermediate consonant is barely needed. that is to say | that 'amp' is more likely to come out of 'and p' than 'a p' | ggm wrote: | I think a point missing in this is that written latin had | contractions. In carved form, word.spacing.was.optional.as.well | with dot as a separator, and so the use of the contractions | w.mk.for.some.odd.interp.o.meaning ( _would make for some odd | interpretations of meaning_ ) | | So I per se and A per se typographically would have been | important because I might be standing for I. for Imperator or | some other contextual meaning. Because they hadn't invented | double space after dot == next sentence and barely invented | sentence punctuation, you needed _per se_ to distinguish single | letters as contractions from their use as words. | | _I think_ -I stress this is only my opinion. | citizenkeen wrote: | Every time I see another person hand write an ampersand, I smile | and nod. One of us. | milliams wrote: | This article takes its content from the book "Shady Characters: | The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical | Marks" by Keith Houston. The book originated on his website as a | series of articles, the "&" ones are: | | - The Ampersand, part 1 of 2 | (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-o...) | | - The Ampersand, part 2 of 2 | (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-2-o...) | | - The Ampersand, part 21/2 of 2 | (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%c...) | | I'd highly recommend the website and the book, and also his new | book "The Book" about the origin of the book. | spongeb00b wrote: | I second your recommendation for The Book book, it's a | beautifully produced hardback, extremely well written and | researched. | galangalalgol wrote: | I need a spoiler, were there ever common names including it? | ampersandy wrote: | I would have used it! :) | IncRnd wrote: | &, the artist formerly known as T, who was once known as | Prince and had been born as Prince Rogers Nelson. [1] | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)#:~:text | =In%2.... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-27 23:00 UTC)