[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....
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