[HN Gopher] The 3,000-year-old story hidden in the @ sign
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The 3,000-year-old story hidden in the @ sign
Author : andsoitis
Score : 76 points
Date : 2025-09-24 15:16 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| charcircuit wrote:
| >there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight
| than @
|
| This is a wild claim. Even excluding the 52 Latin alphabet
| symbols, period has such more cultural weight than the at sign.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Question marks and exclamation marks, for starters.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I guess it kinda depends on what you mean by "cultural weight".
| Alphabet characters just make words, periods et al are just
| punctuation.
|
| @ is somewhat different. It's not punctuation. It's not a
| letter. It's a symbol, used primarily as an abbreviation, like
| %. But while % is universal, @ is more regional.
|
| Sure, these days it's part of email addresses. But it has a
| long history of meaning others things. And it's been used in
| different ways in different places and times. Growing up in the
| 80s, it was on my keyboard, but I had no idea what it was for.
|
| If one takes "culture" here to span time, rather than location,
| then perhaps the argument makes more sense.
| whyenot wrote:
| I would have gone with 0
| adzm wrote:
| # is up there. It's a huge part of several systems, channels in
| discord and IRC, hashtags for content tagging, referenced in
| songs etc
| metalman wrote:
| what?, you must be kidding! :)
| astrobe_ wrote:
| The claim is just inept. There's no particular symbol that
| holds more anything than others. The Greek alphabet [1] as a
| whole is a cultural cornerstone of the "western" culture.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
| card_zero wrote:
| So 3000 years is a guess at the age of the word "amphora", but @
| is from the year 1536.
| whyenot wrote:
| Yes, the headline is a little dishonest. It's a 486 year-old
| story not 3,000 years.
| xandrius wrote:
| Welcome to the Internet.
| pockybum522 wrote:
| Context is important when telling a story. I say the title is
| fair.
| card_zero wrote:
| 3000 years ago is about when the first recognizable letter
| A was drawn.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Canaanite_alphabet
|
| The amphora vessel design is neolithic, so you could add on
| another 10,000 years if you want to trace the roots of the
| @ symbol tenuously into pottery. There's such a thing as
| too much context.
| wongarsu wrote:
| But what if we add the role that harnessing fire had on
| the development of pottery and the amphora? That easily
| adds another 770000 years
| dhosek wrote:
| Worth noting is that @ was not the universal separator for host
| and username. BITNET (and its sister networks) based on IBM's
| networking protocols used with word "AT" (separated by spaces)
| so, back in the olden days I was U12921 AT UICVM. UUCP placed the
| host name first and used ! to separate the hostname from the user
| with explicit routing occasionally given by multiple !s to
| separate a list of machines, e.g., foo!bar!jarthur!dhosek And the
| DECNET protocol used :: with the host name first (e.g.,
| YMIR::DHOSEK) It wasn't until the grand unification of all the
| various academic and commercial networks in the late 80s with the
| "net of nets" which became the Internet that @ became more
| universal, although IBM systems retained their "AT" and VMS
| systems had the awkward IN%"dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu" syntax to
| allow emailing outside the local DECnet.
| ycombinete wrote:
| The DECNET one is pretty.
| j_bum wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| This is how the R language allows you to explicitly scope
| functions from packages. I honestly love that syntax.
|
| E.g., `dplyr::filter`, `limma::voom`
| penchant wrote:
| In Polish it's called malpa (monkey). I always thought of this as
| weird -- turns out the Poles were not alone in noticing the
| resemblance :D
| leobg wrote:
| German: "Klammeraffe" (literally: "bracket monkey")
| layer8 wrote:
| Klammeraffe is a genus of monkey, called spider monkeys [0]
| in English. "Klammer" here means "clinging", because these
| monkeys use their long tail similar to their arms to hold on
| to branches. "Klammeraffe" has no relation to brackets.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_monkey
| Nux wrote:
| In Romanian we used to call it literally "monkey's tail", but
| most people now just use "at" instead.
| dvh wrote:
| Zavinac in Slovak (like the fish, sprat, curled into small
| ball)
| misterdata wrote:
| Also "apenstaartje" in Dutch (monkey's tail)
| smitty1e wrote:
| Rx is possibly the last Egyptian hieroglyph in use.
|
| https://www.history.com/articles/where-did-the-rx-symbol-com...
| monocasa wrote:
| Eh, a lot of of the Latin alphabet ends up coming from
| Hieroglyphs->Demotic->Proto-sinatic->Phonecian->Greek->Latin.
| aiisthefiture wrote:
| Little mouse. How cute. I can't unsee it now.
| zkmon wrote:
| It is a common practice in South Indian languages, to wrap
| letters with a tail or spiral, to mean something more than letter
| itself. In Telugu, people used to start all of their writing with
| a "Sri" as a single letter, with a tail wrapped around it. This
| is mostly seen on post cards, or anything written on paper.
|
| Wrapped letters have special meaning, like goods with a special
| package.
| moreati wrote:
| Around 1999 I interned at Philips Semiconductor. I worked with
| one of the first or early engineers of Teletext (aka BBC Ceefax)
| - a system designed in the 1970s that encoded text pages within
| an analog TV signal.
|
| The World Wide Web was just getting popular and he was happy to
| point out he managed to get @ into the limited character set
| (maybe called a codepage?) all the way back in the 1970s. However
| many (all?) international variants used different character sets
| that replaced @ and other uncommon characters with accented
| characters for their alphabets/languages.
|
| As a result Teletext in the UK (using the english character set)
| could show email addresses, but not in most (all?) other
| countries.
| juancroldan wrote:
| > In Spain and Portugal, the word for @ is "arroba", a term
| related to amphora that is also a standard unit of weight and
| measure.
|
| It is in fact still used in certain contexts. For deciding when
| to slaughter the Iberian pig after feeding it exclusively with
| acorns in the open, it must weight 9 to 10 @s (an @ is 11.5kg, so
| 103.5 to 115kg)
| pluc wrote:
| In French it's "arobas" (Canada) or "arrobe"/"arobase"
| (France). When it started, we'd sometimes call it "a
| commercial" too.
| tirant wrote:
| I was coming to just also explain that. In my family it was
| exclusively used for the arroba unit of weight, used to measure
| the weight of animals, specially pigs and cows.
|
| In itself the word arroba comes from Arab, meaning a quarter of
| something, which in Spain refers to a quarter of a quintal,
| that is 11.5kg.
| nchmy wrote:
| Arroba is commonly used in Guatemala and signifies 25lbs
| (roughly 11.3kg)
| r24y wrote:
| Great article. I had long thought that the official name for the
| symbol was "asperand", but it seems like this is a recent
| invention!
| quuxplusone wrote:
| Etymologically, I'd expect "atpersat" ("at per se at"), by
| analogy to "ampersand" ("and per se and").
|
| Or, as some redditor added, "appersat."
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| I seem to have missed the part of the article that explains how
| this symbol goes back 3000 years. The earliest date mentioned is
| in the 1300's.
| gompertz wrote:
| People can say what they want about AI, but I find an LLM is
| far better at summarizing information. It was obvious a human
| wrote this article and it was way too verbose.
| scoopr wrote:
| Heh, in Finnish it is often called "miuku mauku", almost like
| "meow meow", or perhaps "meowdy meowdi". Didn't see any other
| cat-themed nick names.
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