16 ms·
What character was removed from the alphabet? (2020)
- paulkrush 3y ago"It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” So, the students said, “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” The term per se was used to denote letters that also doubled as words, such as the letter I (for “me”) and A. By saying “per se,” you clarified that you meant the symbol and not the word. Over time, “and per se and” was slurred together into the word we use today: ampersand."
- caturopath 3y agoA and I used to sometimes get 'per se' to clarify that people were referring to the letter, not the one-letter word
- asciimov 3y agoI have seen this explanation printed so many times, and unattributed, that I wonder if students of that era actually said "and per se and".
- tgv 3y agoMe too, but given certain educational methods of the past, I can also imagine it happening. Here's an example of teaching Latin in the 19th century. Read the first 1/3 from the link from today's front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354213. Latin was taught by rote, by repeating without understanding. One of those head masters must once have thought it would be correct to call it "and per se and," and had the power to make generations do it. On the other hand, why it would have become so widespread as to become a word is what makes me doubt the story.
- mbg721 3y agoSome probably did, the same ones that addressed their dad as "pay-ter".
- rossitter 3y agoFrom The Frumentary by William King (1699)[0]: U’s conversation ’s equal to his wine, You sup with W, whene’er you dine: X, Y, and Z, hating to be confin’d, Ramble to the next Eating-house they find;... And Per Se And alone, as Poets use... See also an elaborate classroom game described in the Documents of the Board of Education of the City of New York (1861)[1]: "One [student] represents &—called ‘And per se and’—as being appended to the alphabet, but not belonging to it....The merriment of this pastime turns upon the endeavor of An’ per s’and to take precedence of Z, and so get fairly into the alphabet..." [0] A 1781 printing: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068156031&view=1up&seq=17 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068156031&vi... [1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433075984876&view=1up&seq=485 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433075984876&vi...
- sanderjd 3y agoThese are great. Did you just know about these already or did you research them just now? If the latter, how did you find these in such short order? Always impressed by people who can find primary sources for things quickly!
- behnamoh 3y agoAnd here I thought ampersand had something to do with Ampere, the unit of electric current…
- onionisafruit 3y agoI really like this as an alt etymology. If it got popularized to save characters in telegrams, it could have been the “electric and”. Another way it could be from Ampere is that his son was a philologist and could have conceivably promoted the idea of an ampersand.
- Pigalowda 3y agoCicero’s educated Greek body slave, Tiro, invented it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Tullius_Tiro https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Tullius_Tiro https://creativepro.com/ampersand-history-usage/#:~:text=The%20invention%20of%20the%20ampersand,Notes%2C%20which%20included%20the%20ampersand https://creativepro.com/ampersand-history-usage/#:~:text=The....
- I_complete_me 3y agoI think you might be confusing ampersand with the Tironian et which looks like a 7 - Unicode point U+204A. It is still visible in Ireland on the old Post 7 Telegraph boxes. Tiro invented a shorthhand system and his Tironian et represented the sound "et". I recently dived into this whole subject so it's kinda fresh in my mind.
- Pigalowda 3y agoMaybe the second link i provided has it wrong. You seem to know more so I defer to you.
- I_complete_me 3y agoFrom the book “Shady Characters” by Keith Houston "Among Tiro’s notae was an innocuous character representing the Latin word et, or “and.” Though this was only one symbol among many (in their most elaborate medieval form, a system descended from Tiro’s original cipher comprised some fourteen thousand glyphs), the utility of Tiro’s system ensured that his et sign would considerably outlive both its creator and its sponsor. This was not, however, the storied ampersand: when Tiro created his so-called Tironian et, the ampersand was still more than a century away." The book itself is worth a read for all the other punctuation marks it discusses.
- kokanee 3y agoI’ve heard some people say that as a child they thought the letter before P was “Elemeno.” So it certainly tracks that if you ask kids to recite “and per se and” that they might think the whole phrase is the name of the letter.
- koheripbal 3y agoMy kids thought Elmo was part of the alphabet for an embarrassing amount of time.
- doodlebugging 3y agoThis is why I taught my kids to sing the alphabet forwards and backwards. If you sing it forwards it can sound like you are saying "elemental pee" which sounds scientifically interesting but doesn't help anyone learn what that letter is supposed to look like. We used wooden alphabet puzzles as a guide so it could reinforce the idea the you are saying L-M-N-O pretty fast. Since the ABC song is one of three songs that use the same tune it is easy to teach an infant or toddler their alphabet as you sing them to sleep. The ABC song, Baa-Baa Black Sheep, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star all use the same tune. Add in the backwards ABC's and you get four songs sung with the same tune so that the whole thing becomes tonally monotonous and soothing and it will tend to relax your child as you rock and sing. With practice I got pretty good at mixing verses from these four songs on the fly so that the song eventually morphed into a single tune with disconnected lyrics. I used it as a challenge to keep myself awake while I rocked them to sleep. For grins, the Backward ABC lyrics are: Z, y, x, w, v, u, t... S, r, q, p, o, n, m... L, k, j, i, h, g, f... E, d, c, b, and a. Now I've sung them backwards to you, Can you sing them backwards too? Pretty easy to see how each letter breaks free of the original forward limitations.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI like this post, but I cannot get your backwards ABC rhythm to make sense.
- rocketbop 3y ago
- atdrummond 3y agoThe reason I’m inclined to accept this narrative is that not only have I not seen any plausible alternative etymology, there is no alternative etymology available period.
- HWR_14 3y agoI would recommend against that methodology. A lot of etymology is not easy to find, but plausible etymology is easy to make up.
- mauvehaus 3y agoYou must know my wife. She's quite confident that the idiom "balls to the wall" has something to do with a person being put up against a wall to be executed by gunshot.
- throwaway894345 3y agoYep, I learned this from the History of English podcast. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes this sort of trivia about the evolution of English.
- paulkrush 3y agoI think of Hacker News as a source of interesting things that I as a nerd, did not know & this fits.
- jmclnx 3y agoWhen I was very young, I remember AE being used in various printed materials (school books). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86 But by the time I was in High School it seemed to have disappeared.
- kzrdude 3y agoThe british spelling is supposedly encyclopædia and Britannica still seems to use it (with and without ae = æ ligature).
- bombcar 3y agoThe advent of the standard typewriter and computer keyboard killed many a special letter/ligature.
- opello 3y ago"AE" as you have it (with your link presumably you mean Æ) is the letter "ash" from the Old English alphabet. Þ called "thorn" is another, which type setters replaced with a Y so as to not add another letter to their collections. It made the "th" sound and why "Ye Olde ..." is a spelling convention but people of the time would never have said "yee" for it. Other letters were lost too, eth, wynn, and this is all contributes to why Modern English spelling conventions are kind of awful for ESL learners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
- version_five 3y agoWe still see this in French semi-regularly, such as œil and cœur
- re-thc 3y agoGoogle
- kzrdude 3y agoPart of the english alphabet, but in which region, all english speaking places? I'm curious where it comes from.
- Lio 3y agoGiven the dates involved I’d guess maybe England what with English be the language of the English and all. ;)
- School-Cotton 3y agoEnglish was spoken in several places outside of England by the 1800s.
- Lio 3y agoYes that's true but the article specifically refers to ampersand already being part of English alphabet for many years before that.
- weinzierl 3y agoI always thought amper was another word for merchant because in my native German the & symbol is called "Kaufmanns-Und", literally "merchants-and".
- rovr138 3y agoch, ll
- Mordisquitos 3y agoGood old 'che' and 'elle', that used to confusd so many non-Spanish speakers when they looked up words in Spanish dictionaries before these letters were disolved into their constituent parts 'c', 'h' and 'l'. Of course, that was possible because they are not technically characters, but letters that were removed from the alphabet. Fun fact though, there is one character that was removed from the Spanish alphabet and the whole of Spanish orthography but remains in use in many others. Even better, this character actually originated in mediæval Spanish, so it could be argued that it wasn't removed: it was let loose! That character is the 'ç', which is now so closely associated to French, but remains in use in other close neighbours of Spanish such as Catalan and Portuguese and has been adapted for use in many other languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ç https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ç
- hirundo 3y agoThis was good planning, if it was still part of the alphabet we couldn't use it for an URL query parameter delimiter.
- version_five 3y agoI think it's too bad that we didn't choose delimters that had no chance of appearing in actual text. Commas are a big one, when parsing csv there's always the problem of having commas in the text of a field. One hack I have used if I don't want to delete them is to swap them for a character I imagine will never be in the text, such as | (pipe). It all could have been avoided if we had some standard delimiters that were not part of common text.
- meep0l 3y agoThe tab character (U+0009) is a good candidate for this. Many CSV parsers already support it.
- mtizim 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Field_separators https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Fiel... The problem is that any delimiter that has no chance of appearing in actual text will be hard to discover, and cannot appear on a standard keyboard (so it is not easily human-writable). So we are kind of stuck with the comma for human readable formats.
- Symbiote 3y agoThe standard characters are ASCII/Unicode field separator, group separator, record separator and unit separator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Field_separators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Field_...
- jeroenhd 3y agoI have actually used two of these in some kind of hell SQL query that needed to concatenate strings for the fastest path between database and frontend as possible. I was surprised to see how well it actually worked, I assumed surely some kind of step in the middle of the chain would break non-printable characters. Not using these is wasting so many bits of one-byte character encodings, I don't understand why we even need to bother escaping CSV files if we could just use the appropriate control characters instead.
- arek_nawo 3y agoNever would I have thought that "&" was ever part of an alphabet. It's more of a symbol, like "." or ";". HN is sometimes a source of curious things.
- dunham 3y agoI always thought of it as a ligature for "et" (like ffi is a ligature for ffi) rather than a letter. But I suppose the sz ligature (ß) eventually became a letter, so there is precedent.
- dragonwriter 3y agoæ (æsc/ash) was a letter in English, too, but, like &, stopped being one even though it continued to be used (as a ligature).
- mbg721 3y agoSpanish also treats multiple-letters as letters in their own right, doesn't it? And Dutch with ij.
- thenewwazoo 3y agoNot really, depending on who you ask. In the 90s, the RAE declared that ‘ll’ and ‘ch’ were no longer letters, but they’re still taught as letters in many places. ‘rr’ was never a letter in its own right, but many people consider it to be, as a kind of parallel to ‘ll’ and ‘ch’.
- mbg721 3y agoThat's good info to learn beyond the strips of letters at the tops of classrooms, thanks!
- tmtvl 3y agoTreating ij as a single letter in Dutch makes no sense, unless one also treats au, ei*, eu, ou, and ui as single letters. And possibly sch as well. * especially ei as it's the same sound: eis (demand) and ijs (ice) are homonyms.
- Symbiote 3y agoI thought this would be about Old→Middle→Modern English, in which case the lost letters are Ƿ, ð, þ and æ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Alphabet
- dagmx 3y agoThey mention those with links at the bottom of this article as well
- EA-3167 3y agoI think it's interesting that despite our access to this sort of information, a huge number of people still don't understand that "Ye Olde" was not pronounced "Yee" and rather "The".
- rocketbop 3y agoI only learned that in university. I did a joint major in English and history, but it actually came up in a history module in an offhand comment by the lecturer. I’m not surprised it’s little known.
- km3r 3y agoI know it's pronounced 'the', but 'yee' is more fun
- hinkley 3y ago“Yee oldy hat shoppy” is the most fun.
- ashton314 3y agoYou forgot to throw “timey” in there too ;)
- contingencies 3y agoMilliner doesn't have the same ring.
- narcraft 3y agoTom Bombadil
- justin_oaks 3y agoI was hoping this article would be about the letter C and be from the future. The letter C is useless. It either makes the sound that S does or the sound K does. Instead of C we should just use an S or a K for every place a C is. Some may argue that without C we wouldn't have CH. And then I say, "Why do we need two characters to represent a single sound? It should have it's own letter." Alas, English spelling is all kinds of messed up. And I'll have to resign myself to that fact.
- xattt 3y agoC is also used for sounds that sound like “ts”; you can’t make that sound with an s or k alone. Sidenote: I see that some transliteration systems make Q represent “ch”.
- mcv 3y agoIn Slavic languages and in German, the 'c' is (almost?) always the 'ts' sound. That makes it as useful as the 'x', although that's also one we could do without. The 'c' could also be considered useful exactly because it has the unique property of changing its sound depending on the surroundings. In Dutch, for example, the word for politician is "politicus" where the 'c' had a k sound, but the plural is "politici", where the 'c' has an 's' sound. It would be a lot less clean if we had to swap 'k' and 's'. Maybe we should only use the 'c' for words where that property matters. I hope you all remember the various "language reform" essays that get progressively less readable as various redundant letters are dropped or replaced. Although you could also argue we should add some. The 'e' can be pronounced in several different ways, and not being able to tell the difference can occasionally lead to confusion. In Dutch, for example, the words for "a" and "one" are the same: "een", but pronounced differently.
- saalweachter 3y ago> That makes it as useful as the 'x', although that's also one we could do without. I would like to further improve the 'x' by making its pronunciation 'sk' at the beginning of a phoneme, rather than 'z', 'ex', or maybe 'k'. It sounds fine in words like 'xylophone' or 'xray', and there are plenty of words like 'xy', 'xate', 'xunk', or 'xeleton' so we could re-balance our alphabet.
- franciscop 3y agoI keep saying that, by chance, it's a pity that the English alphabet has exactly 23 letters and doesn't have a single one more. Had it one more letter, say "ñ" or "ç" or some other, that'd make it perfect for base64: 24*2 + 10 = 64. Instead now we have 62 "base" alphanumeric alphabet, and two symbols that are disagreed upon since they have to be chosen depending on the context.
- smeej 3y agoWait, here I've been thinking the alphabet has 26 letters all this time? (double checks keyboard)
- etrevino 3y agoYou're right
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoI used to see typos like that and double check that I didn't shift universes. I eventually figured out the the shifts aren't that obvious.
- quesera 3y ago> 26 letters J, U, and W are sometimes considered pretenders. Late additions, at least. J is just a stylized I. U is a variation of V. W is of course just a double U. G is also a relatively recent entry, if you go back to the Romans from which the Latin/English alphabet is derived.
- gsich 3y agoQ also. K can be used instead.
- pimlottc 3y agoNope, it's 23, the same as the number of fingers and toes you have.
- anotherhue 3y agoEver wondered about those old 'U's that look like V? Now you know why 'W' is so named.
- mcdonje 3y ago"&" wasn't ever in the alphabet in the same capacity as the letters that represent sounds. It was there as a keyword signifying the end of the list. Then its name was expanded to clarify that it was not a normal letter but a keyword. Then that expanded name was misinterpreted by people who never needed the list termination signifier to begin with. Lesson? KISS. They should've implemented it with brackets.
- dagmx 3y agoReally they should have had a null. Create extra havoc with C strings if null had the need to be a common char
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- jwilk 3y agoRelated from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32249465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32249465 ("The History of ‘Ampersand’ (2020)", 178 comments)
- beardyw 3y agoAh, mondegreen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen I remember the Maxell tape ads (ibid) "Me ears are alight". https://youtu.be/XEe0qqPAC6E https://youtu.be/XEe0qqPAC6E
- UncleSlacky 3y ago"Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard"
- sjcsjc 3y agoThe girl with colitis goes by
- NelsonMinar 3y agoThe alternate question is "why are these 26 characters the American English alphabet?" It's fairly arbitrary, a collection of historical accidents and changes in orthography. And it's incomplete. You can't really write American English with just the usual 26 letters. Ñ and the ʻokina are proper letters and necessary for writing a bunch of American words correctly. The various kahakō are helpful too but they are treated as diacritics and not full fledged separate letters.
- mcv 3y agoNot just American English; lots of countries use the same alphabet. Even countries that have more characters than these 26, still often consider these 26 to be their alphabet. Weirder still: we often call it the Latin alphabet, but Latin never had some of these characters. No 'j', 'u' or 'w' in Latin, for example.
- School-Cotton 3y ago> Ñ and the ʻokina are proper letters and necessary for writing a bunch of American words correctly Depends what you mean by “correctly”, but in practice they’re not necessary to write American English, and most people don’t use them (except in very high-production-value writing, like professionally edited books and magazines).
- NelsonMinar 3y agoTell that to the people who live in Española, NM; the official name of the city includes the ñ. Or Hawaiʻi, although for the latter "Hawaii" is at least correct from an official government placename perspective.
- permo-w 3y agoat a push, you can transliterate ñ as ny or ni, or even use the Portuguese nh if you really want to push the boat out, but when an ñ isn't available, most people seem to just drop it entirely and let you figure it out from context
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoIn the early 1970's, I saw the & appear in some of our older alphabet books. The absolutist child in me tried to work out if that bit of archaic data was authoritative or not. Those books were likely printed in the 1950s.
- GloomyBoots 3y agoA few years ago I was idly thumbing through old books at a used store. Looking over a remedial arithmetic book, I was surprised to find that they referred to zero as “the cipher”. Exponentiation and the process of finding a square root were “involution” and “evolution”, respectively. My math education was pretty ad-hoc (complicated story), so maybe these are better known than I realize, but I’ve never heard them. I ended up grabbing the book just for the vocabulary. These examples are just the ones that jumped out most in the first couple of pages.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago&totse
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chrischen 3y agoIn the classic alphabet song & comes between Y and Z. It’s been hiding there all this time.
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoI naively thought to be "part of the alphabet" our ancestors would have needed to, you know, use "&" in words - the article weakly hints at this for "&c" as being equivalent to "etc" (saving keystrokes even before they had keyboards, I guess). But given that they didn't, say, write "sand" as "s&" I will politely refuse to accept it as a letter.
- no_identd 3y ago[Laughs in Laughing in b& & v&]
- rvba 3y agoWhy is M before N in the alphabet. It should be N first, then M!
- contingencies 3y agoImagine a roguelike using all of these obscure characters where key plot elements are the elucidation of their true histories.
- kazinator 3y agoQ: What character was removed from the alphabet? A: 1> (diff (range #\a #\z) "the alphabet") (#\c #\d #\f #\g #\i #\j #\k #\m #\n #\o #\q #\r #\s #\u #\v #\w #\x #\y #\z) Plus all all non-alphabetic characters other than space.
- DonHopkins 3y agoThe Story of Ampersand, in The Phantom Tollbooth universe. https://sharegpt.com/c/J1U3T7m https://sharegpt.com/c/J1U3T7m
- markwalllberg 3y agoIn the early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the &. It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” So, the students said, “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” So it was just some shorthand tossed in there
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoOP says 'per se' means 'by itself'. But in this case (the alphabet song) it makes more sense for 'per se' to have it's other meaning: 'as such'. That is, the letter means the same as 'and'.
- 4cao 3y agoI was expecting this would be about the letter Ⱶ or one of the other Claudian letters of the Latin alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudian_letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudian_letters