11 ms·

The History of ‘Ampersand’ (2020)

315 points by graderjs 4y ago

transfire 4y ago
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.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
Neat.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  You can tell it's neat because of the way it is.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    and also because of my helpful comment.
prmoustache 4y ago
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.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  That's interesting that such a similar process happened so far apart. In German it's simply known as "Und-Zeichen" ("and-symbol") or "Kaufmännisches Und" ("mercantile and" or "business and") due to its popularity in company names.
- FabHK 4y ago
  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_französische_Bezeichnung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et-Zeichen#Englische_und_franz...
- Namari 4y ago
  I really doubt Occitan Language has anything to do with that.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Ah sorry I got confused with "Basque" Language.
- pluc 4y ago
  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 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperluette#%C3%89tymologie > « et, per se, et » (« et, en soi, 'et' ») pronounced « ète-per sé-ète », would have transformed into « et, per lui, et »
  - Bayart 4y ago
    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.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    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.
- _puk 4y ago
  Obligatory Mitchell & Webb Ampersand origin theory.. https://youtu.be/XXryAnAD5Jw https://youtu.be/XXryAnAD5Jw
bitcurious 4y ago
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 4y ago
In many typefaces the "et" in "&" is still completely legible. It's common to see "&c." in older texts instead of "etc."
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  > It's common to see "&c." in older texts instead of "etc." Guessing this was to save on ink or something?
  - lucideer 4y ago
    more of an aesthetic choice I'd say, as with a lot of typography (after legibility)
  - vehemenz 4y ago
    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.
- amelius 4y ago
  You can also see it in HN comments. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28194901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28194901
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  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 8½ 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/ 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 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 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, ½ 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.
Dreami 4y ago
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
- ainar-g 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    And French "Et commercial". It's sometimes written as a form closer to "et", corresponding to the ligature outlined in the article
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- kaichanvong 4y ago
  as opposed to the appealing German scharfes (ß)
  - mccorrinall 4y ago
    Don’t believe them! ß is not sharp! Do you see any sharp edges there? Me neither! It’s as blunt it can get!
    - kaichanvong 4y ago
      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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30139925
kaichanvong 4y ago
in HTML, `&`
O__________O 4y ago
Around 300 BC, S and Z were removed — and G added: https://www.dictionary.com/e/z/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/z/
kevin1024 4y ago
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.
vehemenz 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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’
KSPAtlas 4y ago
In polish the name is borrowed straight from Latin, et
tommit 4y ago
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!"
- IggleSniggle 4y ago
  Lawl
- mywittyname 4y ago
  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.
  - rawTruthHurts 4y ago
    > 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.
    - IIsi50MHz 4y ago
      An _un_certain set of rules, you mean. Especially as we're on about language. (-: If the set of rules were certain, we might not be having the these discussions; yea, and proscriptive grammarians and tyrants of spelling would us all be.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    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.
DonHopkins 4y ago
Dutch has a digraph "ij" that's written as one letter like a "y" with an umlaut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) >IJ (lowercase ij; Dutch pronunciation: [ɛi] (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 [ɛi]. In standard Dutch and most Dutch dialects, there are two possible spellings for the diphthong [ɛi]: 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(Amsterdam) >The IJ (Dutch: [ɛi̯] (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/ https://fuckyeahkeming.com/
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Spanish has the digraph CH, depending on region perhaps? I wonder if that was ever a ligature as well?
- DonaldFisk 4y ago
milliams 4y ago
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-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-of-2/ https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-2-o...) - The Ampersand, part 2½ of 2 (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%c2%bd-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.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  I need a spoiler, were there ever common names including it?
  - ampersandy 4y ago
    I would have used it! :)
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      &, the artist formerly known as Ƭ̵̬̊, 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%201993%2C%20in%20rebellion%20against,disks%20with%20a%20custom%20font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)#:~:text=In%2....
- spongeb00b 4y ago
  I second your recommendation for The Book book, it’s a beautifully produced hardback, extremely well written and researched.
phkahler 4y ago
I hate ligatures, but how one earth is & derived from et?
- mellavora 4y ago
  bad cursive?
- albrewer 4y ago
  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/ https://creativepro.com/ampersand-history-usage/
- s1mon 4y ago
  https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/history-of-ampersands-typography/ https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/history-of-ampersands-typo...
ajaimk 4y ago
Also explains how "et al." came about
- graderjs 4y ago
  How so? Where is that?
meta-level 4y ago
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 :)
beardyw 4y ago
Between sea & l& Is rocks & s&
yesbabyyes 4y ago
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.kth.se/~f96-lla/@.html https://web.archive.org/web/19981202002949/www.student.nada....
jdblair 4y ago
that sounds totally made up!
masswerk 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    "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".
mmaunder 4y ago
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.
ampersandy 4y ago
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.
ggm 4y ago
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.
jng 4y ago
It's called "arroba" in Spanish, an old measure of weight.
vaxman 4y ago
Number 2 article on HackerNews. I hate the Future sometimes.
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
deleted 4y ago
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transfire 4y ago
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`?
tabtab 4y ago
I didn't know what it was called when I was a kid, so referred to it as "the baby playing with its feet".
aimor 4y ago
So does the Alphabet song end "X, Y, &, Z"?
- deleted 4y ago
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pjungwir 4y ago
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 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&chapter=89&lid=en&side=r&zoomSlider=0 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 4y ago
  > 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 "jamás", French "déjà" 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".
gramie 4y ago
I'm on about episode 108 of the podcast "The History of English" https://historyofenglishpodcast.com https://historyofenglishpodcast.com, which taught me about ampersand's origins. I highly recommend the podcast!
saurik 4y ago
> 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 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.
- pfedak 4y ago
  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
- Jverse 4y ago
  Thank you, the article left me very confused about the logic behind two 'and'.
citizenkeen 4y ago
Every time I see another person hand write an ampersand, I smile and nod. One of us.
deleted 4y ago
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supernova87a 4y ago
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.
AriedK 4y ago
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 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.
Tagbert 4y ago
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/ 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/ 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 4y ago
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drdec 4y ago
I've seen this several times, but I've never seen anything describing how or why & was included in the alphabet when it is clearly(?) not a letter. And what caused it to be dropped?

315 points by graderjs 4y ago

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.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

Neat.

moffkalast 4y ago
You can tell it's neat because of the way it is.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  and also because of my helpful comment.

prmoustache 4y ago

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.

wongarsu 4y ago
That's interesting that such a similar process happened so far apart. In German it's simply known as "Und-Zeichen" ("and-symbol") or "Kaufmännisches Und" ("mercantile and" or "business and") due to its popularity in company names.
FabHK 4y ago
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_französische_Bezeichnung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et-Zeichen#Englische_und_franz...
Namari 4y ago
I really doubt Occitan Language has anything to do with that.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Ah sorry I got confused with "Basque" Language.
pluc 4y ago
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 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperluette#%C3%89tymologie > « et, per se, et » (« et, en soi, 'et' ») pronounced « ète-per sé-ète », would have transformed into « et, per lui, et »
- Bayart 4y ago
  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.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  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.
_puk 4y ago
Obligatory Mitchell & Webb Ampersand origin theory.. https://youtu.be/XXryAnAD5Jw https://youtu.be/XXryAnAD5Jw

bitcurious 4y ago

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 4y ago

In many typefaces the "et" in "&" is still completely legible. It's common to see "&c." in older texts instead of "etc."

giancarlostoro 4y ago
> It's common to see "&c." in older texts instead of "etc." Guessing this was to save on ink or something?
- lucideer 4y ago
  more of an aesthetic choice I'd say, as with a lot of typography (after legibility)
- vehemenz 4y ago
  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.
amelius 4y ago
You can also see it in HN comments. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28194901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28194901
chrismorgan 4y ago
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 8½ 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/ 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 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 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, ½ 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.

Dreami 4y ago

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

ainar-g 4y ago
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 4y ago
  And French "Et commercial". It's sometimes written as a form closer to "et", corresponding to the ligature outlined in the article
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
kaichanvong 4y ago
as opposed to the appealing German scharfes (ß)
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  Don’t believe them! ß is not sharp! Do you see any sharp edges there? Me neither! It’s as blunt it can get!
  - kaichanvong 4y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30139925

kaichanvong 4y ago

in HTML, `&`

O__________O 4y ago

Around 300 BC, S and Z were removed — and G added: https://www.dictionary.com/e/z/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/z/

kevin1024 4y ago

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.

vehemenz 4y ago

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 4y ago
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’

KSPAtlas 4y ago

In polish the name is borrowed straight from Latin, et

tommit 4y ago

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!"

IggleSniggle 4y ago
Lawl
mywittyname 4y ago
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.
- rawTruthHurts 4y ago
  > 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.
  - IIsi50MHz 4y ago
    An _un_certain set of rules, you mean. Especially as we're on about language. (-: If the set of rules were certain, we might not be having the these discussions; yea, and proscriptive grammarians and tyrants of spelling would us all be.
- dspillett 4y ago
  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.

DonHopkins 4y ago

Dutch has a digraph "ij" that's written as one letter like a "y" with an umlaut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) >IJ (lowercase ij; Dutch pronunciation: [ɛi] (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 [ɛi]. In standard Dutch and most Dutch dialects, there are two possible spellings for the diphthong [ɛi]: 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(Amsterdam) >The IJ (Dutch: [ɛi̯] (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/ https://fuckyeahkeming.com/

galangalalgol 4y ago
Spanish has the digraph CH, depending on region perhaps? I wonder if that was ever a ligature as well?
DonaldFisk 4y ago

milliams 4y ago

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-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-of-2/ https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-2-o...) - The Ampersand, part 2½ of 2 (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%c2%bd-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.

galangalalgol 4y ago
I need a spoiler, were there ever common names including it?
- ampersandy 4y ago
  I would have used it! :)
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    &, the artist formerly known as Ƭ̵̬̊, 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%201993%2C%20in%20rebellion%20against,disks%20with%20a%20custom%20font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)#:~:text=In%2....
spongeb00b 4y ago
I second your recommendation for The Book book, it’s a beautifully produced hardback, extremely well written and researched.

phkahler 4y ago

I hate ligatures, but how one earth is & derived from et?

mellavora 4y ago
bad cursive?
albrewer 4y ago
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/ https://creativepro.com/ampersand-history-usage/
s1mon 4y ago
https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/history-of-ampersands-typography/ https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/history-of-ampersands-typo...

ajaimk 4y ago

Also explains how "et al." came about

graderjs 4y ago
How so? Where is that?

meta-level 4y ago

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 :)

beardyw 4y ago

Between sea & l& Is rocks & s&

yesbabyyes 4y ago

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.kth.se/~f96-lla/@.html https://web.archive.org/web/19981202002949/www.student.nada....

jdblair 4y ago

that sounds totally made up!

masswerk 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  "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".

mmaunder 4y ago

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.

ampersandy 4y ago

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.

ggm 4y ago

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.

jng 4y ago

It's called "arroba" in Spanish, an old measure of weight.

vaxman 4y ago

Number 2 article on HackerNews. I hate the Future sometimes.

Linda703 4y ago

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transfire 4y ago

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`?

tabtab 4y ago

I didn't know what it was called when I was a kid, so referred to it as "the baby playing with its feet".

aimor 4y ago

So does the Alphabet song end "X, Y, &, Z"?

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pjungwir 4y ago

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 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&chapter=89&lid=en&side=r&zoomSlider=0 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 4y ago
> 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 "jamás", French "déjà" 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".

gramie 4y ago

I'm on about episode 108 of the podcast "The History of English" https://historyofenglishpodcast.com https://historyofenglishpodcast.com, which taught me about ampersand's origins. I highly recommend the podcast!

saurik 4y ago

> 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 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.

pfedak 4y ago
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
Jverse 4y ago
Thank you, the article left me very confused about the logic behind two 'and'.

citizenkeen 4y ago

Every time I see another person hand write an ampersand, I smile and nod. One of us.

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supernova87a 4y ago

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.

AriedK 4y ago

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 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.

Tagbert 4y ago

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/ 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/ 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.

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drdec 4y ago

I've seen this several times, but I've never seen anything describing how or why & was included in the alphabet when it is clearly(?) not a letter. And what caused it to be dropped?