[HN Gopher] Ampersand (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
Ampersand (2015)
Author : alex_young
Score : 166 points
Date : 2023-04-18 03:44 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (haggardhawksblog.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (haggardhawksblog.blogspot.com)
| emersion wrote:
| To anyone trying to figure out what the missing "Eyetests were a
| lot easier in the 1920s" image was referring to, here's a link to
| an archived version:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20191128021121/http://dlewis.net...
| tudorw wrote:
| did they just hold it nearer or further away?
| mgaunard wrote:
| I think the bigger problem is that you can predict what a
| letter is from its position regardless of whether you can
| read it.
| tudorw wrote:
| hmm, that is true, but hey maybe not if you don't know the
| order of the alphabet ;)
| tudorw wrote:
| also I don't think eye tests work if you lie?
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Fascinating!
|
| I can just hear the lettering conversation...
|
| "We need a font with a TON of contrast for this. The thin parts
| should be negligible. Hairline.
|
| People should get to the R, reflect back on what they now
| realize was an H, and then start thinking about a more
| appropriate career"
| kamray23 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didone_(typography)
| hknmtt wrote:
| i'm reading a 70yo book and there is "&c" used instead of "etc".
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well clearly the pointer to c is on address 10111699.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I hope it's " _& c._", not " _& c_".
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| It's particularly common in German blackletter texts though
| they use 7c instead of &c, same origin though.
| 1-more wrote:
| Anyone else wondering what that little guy is it's a
| "Tironian et" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I still write like that!
| wjdp wrote:
| I adopted it as etc or e.t.c. just seemed so clunky
| 1-more wrote:
| Dots are used to denote that the previous character is an
| initial for a longer word. Since "et" is a whole word you
| only put the dot after the "c" that stands for "cetera" so
| "e.t.c" is kind of a hypercorrection like octopi, ignorami,
| or habanero.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
| agalunar wrote:
| Same! nice to meet another "&c" user ^_^
|
| I'm afraid I can't remember _why_ I began writing "&c"
| rather than "etc", although I know I now prefer it (rather
| than it merely being a matter of habit) since it neatly
| separates the "et" and the "cetera" and looks cute to boot.
| Do you remember where you picked up the practice?
| Camillo wrote:
| It wasn't a letter of the alphabet any more than the dollar sign,
| the pound sign, or punctuation were letters of the alphabet. It
| wasn't used in words. All that happened is that someone decided
| to put it at the end of the alphabet song to teach it to
| children, and that's where it got the name.
| martyvis wrote:
| I remember getting a rubber stamp set as a kid here in
| Australia, probably around time I started school in 1968. They
| definitely had an ampersand, dollar and cents stamp and even
| "No." (with the superscript o)
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| The Numero Sign, , despite representing Latin letters,
| apparently arose in Cyrillic usage as an independent symbol.
| Most languages just use No or Nr.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > It wasn't a letter of the alphabet any more than the dollar
| sign, the pound sign, or punctuation were letters of the
| alphabet.
|
| I'm not aware of historic English alphabets that include the
| dollar or pound sign or any sort of punctuation. On the other
| hand there is a lot of evidence of & being part of the
| alphabet. Wikipedia has or links to plenty of cases:
|
| * Old Saxon alphabet:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_Latin_alphabet#/me...
|
| * The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks:
| https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/moore/moore.html#moore5
|
| * Byrhtferd's Old English Alphabet:
| https://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/thorn.html
|
| * My Own Primer, or First Lessons in Spelling and Reading:
| https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%C...
|
| None of these are songs.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Old Saxon alphabet: despite being on an alphabet page, it's
| very clearly separated from the _letters_.
|
| I'm not at all convinced that it was ever what you might call
| a _letter of the alphabet_. Although it seems to not have
| been _rare_ to group it with the letters in some way, I have
| received the impression it wasn't particularly common, and
| that it wasn't how people generally thought of it. _Nowadays_
| we would draw a clear distinction between letters, numbers
| and symbols (maybe we have more symbols? though certainly
| fewer ligatures /abbreviations like W), and call the alphabet
| just the letters, but I get the vibe that maybe "alphabet"
| wasn't so strictly just the letters. But I handwave liberally
| and provide no sources in this mostly-uneducated suspicion of
| mine.
| mdswanson wrote:
| If you like this, I'd highly recommend the book, "Shady
| Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other
| Typographical Marks": https://a.co/d/iqGNnyi
| newqer wrote:
| I'm getting The Da Vinci Code vibes.
| blowski wrote:
| As in you think it's a load of curious but bullshit stories?
| weinzierl wrote:
| Not on punctuation specifically but otherwise highly
| recommended Robert Bringhurst's _" The Elements of Typographic
| Style"_ discusses the ampersand and its usage in great depth.
| Somehow Bringhurst's obsession with this character is almost
| uncanny.
| AriedK wrote:
| Earlier discussion, different source, roughly the same
| information. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32249465
| kgwgk wrote:
| Wrong title. Ampersand was once "and per se
| and" & was ...
|
| should be Ampersand was once "and per se" and &
| was ...
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| According to the article, the former title is correct. The term
| was in fact "and per se and".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| No, title is correct, the name of the letter was pronounced
| "and per se and", which slurred into the modern "ampersand",
| and since "Ampersand" is the subject of the first clause of the
| sentence and the second clause is a dependent clause connected
| by a conjunction, not an independent clause joined by a comma
| and a conjunction, the subject doesn't need repeated: the "&"
| is just the conjunction "and" not a repetition of the subject
| "ampersand".
| SilasX wrote:
| Yes, they're being overclever "&" earning an eyeroll from me
| (& everyone who expects headlines to be clear and easily
| parseable.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Ok, I stand corrected.
|
| But saying that the name of the character "&" was pronounced
| "and per se and" is like saying that the name of the
| character "Z" is pronounced "and zee" or "and zed".
| gameman144 wrote:
| How is it like saying "and zee"? The article pretty clearly
| outlines the logic here, and this would not be like that.
| If anything, it'd be "zee per se zee".
| [deleted]
| kgwgk wrote:
| Because the alphabet was "a, b, ..., x, y, z and &"
| (pronounced "... why zed and per se and") and now it's
| "a, b, ..., x, y and z" (pronounced "... why and zed").
| boffinism wrote:
| You're missing that "& per se &" would still have been
| called that even if it wasn't the last item in the list.
| If the order was "...y, & and z" you'd pronounce it "why
| and per se and and zed".
| kgwgk wrote:
| Is there any reason to believe so?
|
| Maybe it's you who is missing what's going on.
|
| https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-ampersand
|
| & was named ampersand in the context of rattling off the
| letters of the alphabet in English: "double-you ex wye
| izzard/zed, and".
|
| "... And what?"
|
| "And, on its own, and" (and, per se, and).
|
| With "and" named in English, because this was an English
| rattling off of the alphabet.
| boffinism wrote:
| > Is there any reason to believe so?
|
| Yes, specificially this article: http://haggardhawksblog.
| blogspot.com/2015/03/ampersand.html
| kgwgk wrote:
| I agree with palotasb about that article:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35611618
| [deleted]
| boffinism wrote:
| No it isn't. The first "and" in "and per se and" isn't a
| conjunction. So you could actually say:
|
| I per se I, O per se O, and and per se and.
| kgwgk wrote:
| One could say whatever one wants but I think that in this
| case it's actually a conjunction and I doubt anybody has
| ever said "I per se I" (Edited to add: actually that
| makes sense - for the letter i - but in a different
| context: spelling and not alphabet recitation. "c, a, r :
| car", "i : I". _letter_ (per se) : _word_)
|
| https://www.englishclub.com/efl/podcasts/interesting-
| facts/a...
|
| At the end of the alphabet, students would say "X,Y,Z
| and, per se, & (and)".
| boffinism wrote:
| Re "I doubt anybody has ever said I per se I" (in the
| context of alphabet recitation) may I draw your attention
| to this article[0]:
|
| > Up until as recently as the mid 1900s, it was standard
| practice when reciting the alphabet to use the Latin
| phrase per se (literally "by itself") to differentiate
| between individual letters of the alphabet--like A, I,
| and O--and single-character homographic words--like a, I
| and O.
|
| > So the letter A would be read as "A per se A", to
| ensure it was distinguished from the indefinite article
| a. The letter I, similarly, would be "I per se I" to
| differentiate it from the pronoun I. And the letter O
| would be "O per se O" to differentiate it from the
| interjection O!
|
| [0] http://haggardhawksblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/ampersan
| d.html
| kgwgk wrote:
| Thank for the link but that seems misleading or just
| wrong. "A per se A" means "a" (per se =
| by itself = as a letter) [spells the word] "a"
|
| Nobody would recite the alphabet as a
| per se a, bee, ..., aitch, i per se i, jay, ...
|
| and ending with ... zee and per se and
|
| means ... zee and "&"
|
| It was not, at claimed there, Y, Z, and
| & per se &
|
| In that case the modern name would be _andampersand_!
| sebstefan wrote:
| [flagged]
| newqer wrote:
| [flagged]
| silisili wrote:
| That's interesting, I for one had no idea.
|
| Does anyone have an explanation for the e and t, though? I don't
| see any of either of those letters in it. Maybe a tiny bit of e,
| but surely no t....
| kitd wrote:
| My Linux computer has the Caladea typeface installed. '&' in
| that is clearly `e` and `t` elided.
|
| ed: See
| https://d144mzi0q5mijx.cloudfront.net/img/C/A/Caladea0.png
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| You can see more of the shape in some type faces, it's a
| capital E and lowercase t in cursive script. Once you see it,
| it's also hard to unsee.
| jwilk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trebuchet_MS_ampersand.sv.
| .. is a great example.
| alex_young wrote:
| Wikipedia has some interesting discussion on that point:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand
| javier_e06 wrote:
| So is A(merican) T(elephone) and per se T(elegraph Company). eh?
| I've been saying wrong all this time.
| zerocrates wrote:
| The "and per se and" origin sure _feels_ like the kind of folk
| etymology that ultimately doesn 't really have anything backing
| it up.
|
| But as far as I can see there really isn't any controversy over
| it.
| croisillon wrote:
| since the french version esperluette comes from occitan "es per
| lou et", meaning "is for the and", i would say it is plausible
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Is it just me or is Haggard Hawk spouting ideas without
| citations? I don't know if they're right, but it would be cool if
| there were a link or two to an established source like an
| academic journal or even a Wikipedia page.
| ars wrote:
| I'm an advocate of bringing back thorn (Th, th) to replace the
| th, and yogh (Y y) to replace gh in words.
|
| No need for unnecessary digraphs with special pronunciation. I'm
| sure we could find other letters for the rest of them.
| carlmr wrote:
| >I'm sure we could find other letters for the rest of them.
|
| Looking at the number of pronunciations for the same letter
| sequence in English you'd probably need an alphabet with
| hundredsof letters to make this happen.
|
| At this point you can just switch to IPA instead.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I'm going to plug my friends project about this
| https://www.ekalipi.org/
|
| Don't ask me to defend it though. Good friend but not my
| project
|
| He was a software dev for like 45 years if you can tell from
| the site design
| Kiro wrote:
| Bad title change. The last one summarized the whole article
| perfectly and made for interesting discussions.
| cryptoz wrote:
| &
|
| And per se and and per se and;
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| & As It Is Such, So Also As Such Is It Unto You;
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Peace be with you.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| & cum spiritu tuo.
| Timwi wrote:
| In German, the & character is known as "kaufmannisches Und", or
| "tradesman's and". For this reason, I used to believe that
| ampersand was really "amper's and" and amper was somehow an
| obsolete word for tradesman.
|
| Needless to say, that it not the case, but it felt very
| convincing.
| andrepd wrote:
| In Portuguese it's the "commercial and".
| hoosieree wrote:
| Amper (noun): one who amps.
|
| Today we use the term "influencer".
|
| Did you know that the term "computer" used to refer to an
| occupation? The same used to be true for audio amplifiers. It
| was a role traditionally occupied by the loudest shouter in the
| village.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I thought the same way. It's kind of so obvious but also so
| wrong.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| In some latin languages we have a similar modern name ("e
| comercial" in portuguese, "y comercial" in spanish, "E
| commerciale" in italian), literally meaning "commercial 'and'".
| I'm not sure about the history about it though
| tptacek wrote:
| My understanding was that it's a ligature of the letters 'et',
| Latin for "and" (you can see it pretty clearly in some scripts,
| but it's not at all obvious in the typeface we're using here).
| But then, there used to be a letter for 'th', too.
| eCa wrote:
| > But then, there used to be a letter for 'th', too.
|
| Which, with time, turned into the "Ye" of "Ye olde <thing>" [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Ye_form
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Nearly. There was an abbreviation for "th" that latter looked
| like "y" (not "ye") and with the invention of the pressing
| press, the letter "y" was often used as a substitute for the
| "throne" character (the character that represented "th"). So
| "ye" means "the".
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| It wasn't an abbreviation for th; it was a separate letter
| in its own right with its own etymology.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But then, there used to be a letter for 'th', too.
|
| _Actually_ , there used to be _two separate letters_ for 'th',
| D /d ("eth") and Th/th ("thorn"). Th hung around longer than D,
| though.
| mathieuh wrote:
| Thorn and eth of course still exist in Icelandic, and eth
| still exists in Faroese.
|
| Interestingly, the IPA symbol for the "th" in "the" is eth,
| but the symbol for the "th" in "think" is th (Greek theta)
|
| "The" = /d@/ "Think" = /thINGk/
|
| Not sure why that is, I'm only an amateur linguist
| adrian_b wrote:
| I do not know if this is the reason, but when reading
| quickly thorn is very easy to confuse with p or b.
| frogulis wrote:
| Just had a browse of Wikipedia and am now more confused.
|
| It states that the consonants of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romic_alphabet are the same
| as were adopted by IPA, except "<n r l > were eventually
| replaced with <n g ? y L> in the IPA". No mention of <th>
| in that sentence.
|
| However, looking at the table on that page, the "th" in
| "think" is represented by <th> !
|
| Going back to the first version of IPA on https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/History_of_the_International_P... the "th" in
| "think" is represented by <th> .
|
| Looking at the other two major early influences mentioned
| in that article,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Phonotypic_Alphabet
| and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeotype_alphabet
| neither uses <th> for that sound either. By the looks of
| it, English Phonotypic Alphabet uses a capital theta to
| represent a vowel sound!
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| And D/d also exists in Croatian, but for a completely
| different sound (something like the "j" in "juice").
| srcreigh wrote:
| The word "ye" as in "ye olde inn" used to be written "The
| olde inn". Aka "the olde inn".
|
| When thorn fell out of use we replace it with y for these
| archaic spellings. But it was always "the".
| joosters wrote:
| I was visiting the V&A museum the other day and came across some
| stone typography carvings by Eric Gill - they include A-Z, 0-9
| and also just &. I wonder if this is why? (However, the ampersand
| is still very much separate from the alphabet on the stone)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gill#/media/File:Eric_Gil...
| iainmerrick wrote:
| What a beautiful carving! I love the Q's and R's.
| nailer wrote:
| > So the letter A would be read as "A per se A", to ensure it was
| distinguished from the indefinite article a. The letter I,
| similarly, would be "I per se I" to differentiate it from the
| pronoun I. And the letter O would be "O per se O" to
| differentiate it from the interjection O!
|
| But we don't want et the letter et here, we want the word et.
| RichieAHB wrote:
| The way I read the article is that the ampersand became a de
| facto 27th letter, so "and per se and" meant "the letter &",
| wheres "and" meant "the word and".
| nailer wrote:
| Yes re 27th letter, hence me writing that we want the word et
| (also known as 'and') not the letter. The author says the
| opposite in the part I quoted:
|
| > The letter I, similarly, would be "I per se I" to
| differentiate it from the pronoun I
|
| We want the word and/et in this case - we are saying 'John
| and Jane' not 'John (letter et) Jane'. So the author's logic
| is not consistent.
|
| Or I'm missing something.
|
| Alternative, more logical explanation (which may be garbage
| as it is unreferenced from wikipedia):
|
| > It was also common practice to add the & sign at the end of
| the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced as the
| Latin et or later in English as and. As a result, the
| recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z, and per se
| and".
| call_me_g0d wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this interesting history of the ampersand!
| It's always fascinating to learn about the origins of common
| symbols and phrases. I had heard that the ampersand was derived
| from the Latin word for "and", but I didn't know about its former
| status as a letter of the alphabet or the story behind its name.
| palotasb wrote:
| > [...] A would be read as _"A per se A",_ [...] I, similarly,
| would be _"I per se I"_ [...] O would be _"O per se O"_
|
| That's incorrect, these would have been respectively _" per se
| A"_, _" per se I"_, and _" per se O."_ The confusion is coming
| from how the ampersand was listed out in the alphabet:
|
| > _The alphabet is A, ..., X, Y, Z, and per se and._
|
| That doesn't mean "&" was spelled out as "and per se and"
| separately. The first _and_ is because it 's the last item in a
| list in a sentence. Only the second _and_ is part of the full
| phrase of _per se and._ If you use it as a single item in a
| sentence, it works like this:
|
| > _The last letter of the alphabet is per se and._
|
| The last sentence of the article:
|
| > the alphabet once ended with a final "X, Y, Z, and & per se &".
|
| Should be:
|
| > the alphabet once ended with a final "X, Y, Z, and per se &".
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Thank you. I was really confused by the article. This makes a
| lot more sense.
| makach wrote:
| Nothing quite like going down the rabbit hole on a Tuesday.
| iddan wrote:
| Interestingly enough, modern Hebrew adopted the sign. Even though
| it is not Latin-based / using the Latin alphabet. Probably as
| speakers knew it from other languages and the British mandate
| period
| smcin wrote:
| Well, by the 19th-century mainly in (British?) English, according
| to those sources. By then had been abandoned in other European
| languages.
|
| Britannica [0] says:
|
| - invented by Romans c. 1st century BCE as a shorthand for 'et',
| can be seen from Pompeii
|
| - was [also] prevalent in German manuscripts throughout the 19th
| century.
|
| - gradually abandoned by most [non-English] languages by the end
| of the 19th century, with the notable exception of Gaelic, where
| it's also still used [as an evolution of the rival Tironian
| symbol].
|
| and [1] has a really interesting illustration by Houston (1957)
| citing Tschichold (1953), showing the evolution of the ampersand
| over 2000 years, from Pompeii through 8th-C Merovingian Latin to
| modern-day.
|
| Latterly got pressganged by our C/C++ brethren.
|
| [0]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ampersand
|
| [1]: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2020/12/ampersand-2.html
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| The Tironian et is still preferred in Irish and Scottish
| Gaelic.
|
| Here's an example from Ireland:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pay_and_Display_sign...
|
| (I don't know about the other Gaelic language, Manx, but I
| suspect that they prefer the ampersand. Their orthography is
| more English-like generally.)
| smcin wrote:
| Yes, hadn't known where it came from until this discussion.
|
| Another prominent use in Irish was the old pre-1984 P&T / P7
| (Posts and Telegraphs) logo:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_for_Posts_and_Telegra.
| ..
|
| Image of sign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Irish_Post_
| %26_Telegraphs...
|
| Another old P7T anti-vandalism sign:
| https://www.pinterest.ie/pin/506162445597268179/
| [deleted]
| carlmr wrote:
| > - was [also] prevalent in German manuscripts throughout the
| 19th century.
|
| It's still common enough in Germany, but mostly used for
| company names if you combine two names. E.g. Muller & Schmidt.
| Which is why it's also called the "Kaufmanns Und", the
| "merchants' and".
| azepoi wrote:
| also sometimes called "Et commercial" in french, so
| "commercial and". The official name is esperluette which has
| a nice and probably similar history as ampersand.
| croisillon wrote:
| though german companies love to write themselves Muller +
| Schmidt
| [deleted]
| NathanielBaking wrote:
| The Milk Carton Kids do a funny bit about this.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idpZRb8VP50 If you haven't heard
| of them and like singer-song writer with harmonies check em out.
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