5 ms·

The 27th Letter

41 points by daddy_drank 4y ago

graypegg 4y ago
That was actually really enjoyable to read! A bit of bouncy poetic prose is something I don’t see much of on HN (for good reason) but it’s fun in this context.
avgcorrection 4y ago
ASCII is so bloated that it even has a ligature from a dead language.
- saghm 4y ago
  We can't get rid of it now! How else would we make pointers?
- wanderingstan 4y ago
  Note that there are a lot of ligatures in our symbols: - ! from “Io” - ? From “Quo” - W from UU (or VV, back before U and V diverged) - And German of course has the ß, ligature of soft s with s. There is not really a clear delineation between when a ligature becomes a letter, at least before formal systems like ASCII required them.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    It’s considered a logogram now.
- bradrn 4y ago
  It’s used in English, which as far as I’m aware isn’t dead.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    Is that right.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Opportunistically and not out of necessity, I think. As far as I know all it means is “and.” If any word deserves a character, it’s “the.”
    - ironick09 4y ago
      It’s used as a symbol in programming, I have a hard time imagining a symbol that could replace “the”. That’s not to say there isn’t one that would be suitable, I just lack the creativity or imagination to think of one.
      - Waterluvian 4y ago
        The use in programming is also just a result of it being available. It’s a great fit for binary AND, logical AND, but there’s countless symbols that we just assign to operators because they’re available.
        pacaro 4y ago
        Prolog uses /\ and \/ for bitwise AND and OR respectively, which certainly tips a hat to one system of logic notation—of course for conjunction and disjunction between clauses it uses , (comma) and ; (semi-colon)
      - wolfgang42 4y ago
        Perhaps, taking inspiration from Tironian shorthand, “𝈭” (a backwards version of ⁊ “et”, so to speak) would be suitable?
    - colanderman 4y ago
      I believe "yͤ" is the character you desire. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Ye_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Ye_form
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > ASCII is so bloated that it even has a ligature from a dead language. It was actually an english letter (at least as recently as the late 19th Century), considered part of the alphabet; its current name being a corruption of the end of the alphabet recitation including it, “... and, per se and”.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    It was in fact used in old timey spelling like “Well &ctually” by the more high-brow.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  Ampersand is really not dead - I use it quite regularly. I always sign cards from me and the wife as x & y. It is shift 7 on a en_GB keyboard English also used to have the letter thorne. It looks quite a lot like a Y or y and leads to the notion that "Ye olde shoppe" is NOT pronounced as "the old shop". Here the the would probably have a long e so "thee". Modern thornes look more like a d - see Icelandic for example. See wikipedia for the full run down. I still see r written as a sort of squiggly mess rotated 45 degrees. Mostly by the generation before mine (I'm 53). A lowercase s used to be written looking like f with the crossbar missing. I suspect the kids might have said: "et per se and" or "ut ..." and then that collapsed into "and per se and" -> ampers& (yes I have seen that monstrosity used in anger)!
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    Þorn was Þ (lowercase þ), þhough þe usual handwriting style gradually brought þe shape closer to y. When printing presses were imported from continental Europe, þey didn't have þis letter, so þe letter y was used as a substitute. Eð is Ð/ð, which has ðe same sound. Ðorn derives from runes, eð from Roman script. Eð is still used in Icelandic and Faroese. I ðink English would benefit from a few more letters, alðough ðis one isn't ðe most useful. Æ or Ø, or accents on vowels, would be more useful for spelling and pronunciation. "Thomas" is ðe only word I can ðink of with a TH ðat wouldn't be a þorn.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    I wish for once on this website that people would just harangue me for making bad jokes instead of dumping their well-actuallys.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Sniffnoy 4y ago
Tangential, since it's not what this article is about, but it's worth noting that the apostrophe acts as something of a 27th letter in English.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  And when it's combined with an 's', and added to the end of a noun, it denotes that the word is plural, in modern English usage.
- wl 4y ago
  The problem with calling an apostrophe a letter is that in standard usage, it doesn't change how you read (prosody) or pronounce the text. Sometimes it's used in transliterating foreign words to indicate a glottal stop (an actual sound!) or as a syllable divider, but that's not really English at that point.
rexreed 4y ago
So I wanted to call BS on the statement that 19th century elementary school textbooks had the & character as the final letter of the alphabet, but lo and behold: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/photos/4207859/untitled.png?1474732555 https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/pho... Now this was not universally true, but there seems to be at least some anecdotal evidence that in the mid to late 1800s some English language school age textbooks did indeed have this extra character.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
phnofive 4y ago
Do I need a coffee or is this just stilted: > In the alphabet recited by nineteenth-century schoolchildren, it followed Z. 'And per se and', they would say, 'and per se and'. A logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word—like a and I and even o, but no—a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all. A word we could do without, to be honest, if we had to. We don’t have to, and thank the language gods for that. A logogram is only a word or phrase. How could we do without 'and'? How is 'and' the plainest word of all? This is like a bad impression of Douglas Adams or something.
- ampersandwhich 4y ago
  Many languages lack an equivalent of "and". What you do is to just juxtapose the two concepts, or perhaps you have structural redundancies in the grammar. Honestly, we could just use commas: After some discussion back, forth; we decided to get fish, chips. Then we droned on, on about this, that.
  - tdba 4y ago
    Perfect username chef's kiss
- cafard 4y ago
  Odd phrasing indeed. At first, the "word" appears to be "and per se and", as in an intensive of "and" But is and-squared really that plain?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Cpoll 4y ago
  I can't think of a sentence that can't be rephrased to avoid "and" (usually resulting in something that sounds less elegant, admittedly). For lists, it's helpful but optional. Sometimes you can make do with "with" instead. Compound sentences with "and" can be split up.
smitty1e 4y ago
> My father died, & I was still in love Niggling editorial point: if I'm going to blow away "and", then the preceding comma is going down with it. That's just how I roll.

41 points by daddy_drank 4y ago

That was actually really enjoyable to read! A bit of bouncy poetic prose is something I don’t see much of on HN (for good reason) but it’s fun in this context.

avgcorrection 4y ago

ASCII is so bloated that it even has a ligature from a dead language.

saghm 4y ago
We can't get rid of it now! How else would we make pointers?
wanderingstan 4y ago
Note that there are a lot of ligatures in our symbols: - ! from “Io” - ? From “Quo” - W from UU (or VV, back before U and V diverged) - And German of course has the ß, ligature of soft s with s. There is not really a clear delineation between when a ligature becomes a letter, at least before formal systems like ASCII required them.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  It’s considered a logogram now.
bradrn 4y ago
It’s used in English, which as far as I’m aware isn’t dead.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Is that right.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Opportunistically and not out of necessity, I think. As far as I know all it means is “and.” If any word deserves a character, it’s “the.”
  - ironick09 4y ago
    It’s used as a symbol in programming, I have a hard time imagining a symbol that could replace “the”. That’s not to say there isn’t one that would be suitable, I just lack the creativity or imagination to think of one.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      The use in programming is also just a result of it being available. It’s a great fit for binary AND, logical AND, but there’s countless symbols that we just assign to operators because they’re available.
      - pacaro 4y ago
        Prolog uses /\ and \/ for bitwise AND and OR respectively, which certainly tips a hat to one system of logic notation—of course for conjunction and disjunction between clauses it uses , (comma) and ; (semi-colon)
    - wolfgang42 4y ago
      Perhaps, taking inspiration from Tironian shorthand, “𝈭” (a backwards version of ⁊ “et”, so to speak) would be suitable?
  - colanderman 4y ago
    I believe "yͤ" is the character you desire. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Ye_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Ye_form
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
dragonwriter 4y ago
> ASCII is so bloated that it even has a ligature from a dead language. It was actually an english letter (at least as recently as the late 19th Century), considered part of the alphabet; its current name being a corruption of the end of the alphabet recitation including it, “... and, per se and”.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  It was in fact used in old timey spelling like “Well &ctually” by the more high-brow.
gerdesj 4y ago
Ampersand is really not dead - I use it quite regularly. I always sign cards from me and the wife as x & y. It is shift 7 on a en_GB keyboard English also used to have the letter thorne. It looks quite a lot like a Y or y and leads to the notion that "Ye olde shoppe" is NOT pronounced as "the old shop". Here the the would probably have a long e so "thee". Modern thornes look more like a d - see Icelandic for example. See wikipedia for the full run down. I still see r written as a sort of squiggly mess rotated 45 degrees. Mostly by the generation before mine (I'm 53). A lowercase s used to be written looking like f with the crossbar missing. I suspect the kids might have said: "et per se and" or "ut ..." and then that collapsed into "and per se and" -> ampers& (yes I have seen that monstrosity used in anger)!
- Symbiote 4y ago
  Þorn was Þ (lowercase þ), þhough þe usual handwriting style gradually brought þe shape closer to y. When printing presses were imported from continental Europe, þey didn't have þis letter, so þe letter y was used as a substitute. Eð is Ð/ð, which has ðe same sound. Ðorn derives from runes, eð from Roman script. Eð is still used in Icelandic and Faroese. I ðink English would benefit from a few more letters, alðough ðis one isn't ðe most useful. Æ or Ø, or accents on vowels, would be more useful for spelling and pronunciation. "Thomas" is ðe only word I can ðink of with a TH ðat wouldn't be a þorn.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  I wish for once on this website that people would just harangue me for making bad jokes instead of dumping their well-actuallys.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Sniffnoy 4y ago

Tangential, since it's not what this article is about, but it's worth noting that the apostrophe acts as something of a 27th letter in English.

midoridensha 4y ago
And when it's combined with an 's', and added to the end of a noun, it denotes that the word is plural, in modern English usage.
wl 4y ago
The problem with calling an apostrophe a letter is that in standard usage, it doesn't change how you read (prosody) or pronounce the text. Sometimes it's used in transliterating foreign words to indicate a glottal stop (an actual sound!) or as a syllable divider, but that's not really English at that point.

rexreed 4y ago

So I wanted to call BS on the statement that 19th century elementary school textbooks had the & character as the final letter of the alphabet, but lo and behold: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/photos/4207859/untitled.png?1474732555 https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/pho... Now this was not universally true, but there seems to be at least some anecdotal evidence that in the mid to late 1800s some English language school age textbooks did indeed have this extra character.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

phnofive 4y ago

Do I need a coffee or is this just stilted: > In the alphabet recited by nineteenth-century schoolchildren, it followed Z. 'And per se and', they would say, 'and per se and'. A logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word—like a and I and even o, but no—a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all. A word we could do without, to be honest, if we had to. We don’t have to, and thank the language gods for that. A logogram is only a word or phrase. How could we do without 'and'? How is 'and' the plainest word of all? This is like a bad impression of Douglas Adams or something.

ampersandwhich 4y ago
Many languages lack an equivalent of "and". What you do is to just juxtapose the two concepts, or perhaps you have structural redundancies in the grammar. Honestly, we could just use commas: After some discussion back, forth; we decided to get fish, chips. Then we droned on, on about this, that.
- tdba 4y ago
  Perfect username chef's kiss
cafard 4y ago
Odd phrasing indeed. At first, the "word" appears to be "and per se and", as in an intensive of "and" But is and-squared really that plain?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Cpoll 4y ago
I can't think of a sentence that can't be rephrased to avoid "and" (usually resulting in something that sounds less elegant, admittedly). For lists, it's helpful but optional. Sometimes you can make do with "with" instead. Compound sentences with "and" can be split up.

smitty1e 4y ago

> My father died, & I was still in love Niggling editorial point: if I'm going to blow away "and", then the preceding comma is going down with it. That's just how I roll.