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The 3,000-year-old story hidden in the @ sign
- charcircuit 1y ago>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_ 1y agoQuestion marks and exclamation marks, for starters.
- bruce511 1y agoI 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.
- IAmBroom 1y ago& is older than @, and is likewise a symbolic contraction of a word. ' (apostrophe) is very old as well.
- whyenot 1y agoI would have gone with 0
- adzm 1y ago# 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 1y agowhat?, you must be kidding! :)
- astrobe_ 1y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe period is a relatively new invention. A mid-height stop (like a period, but halfway up the height of the characters) is much older, but different.
- card_zero 1y agoSo 3000 years is a guess at the age of the word "amphora", but @ is from the year 1536.
- whyenot 1y agoYes, the headline is a little dishonest. It's a 486 year-old story not 3,000 years.
- xandrius 1y agoWelcome to the Internet.
- pockybum522 1y agoContext is important when telling a story. I say the title is fair.
- card_zero 1y ago3000 years ago is about when the first recognizable letter A was drawn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Canaanite_alphabet 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 1y agoBut 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 1y agoWorth 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 1y agoThe DECNET one is pretty.
- j_bum 1y agoAgreed. 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`
- a57721 1y agoC++ also uses (::), by the way. R probably borrowed it from C++.
- p_l 1y agoMost likely from Common Lisp due to links between R and Lisp. In CL double colon lets you access unexported symbols from a package, while single colon accesses only the exported ones
- a57721 1y agoOh I think you're right and both took it from Common Lisp, which largely predates namespaces in C++ and R.
- penchant 1y agoIn Polish it's called małpa (monkey). I always thought of this as weird — turns out the Poles were not alone in noticing the resemblance :D
- leobg 1y agoGerman: “Klammeraffe” (literally: “bracket monkey”)
- layer8 1y agoKlammeraffe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_monkey
- Nux 1y agoIn Romanian we used to call it literally "monkey's tail", but most people now just use "at" instead.
- dvh 1y agoZavináč in Slovak (like the fish, sprat, curled into small ball)
- misterdata 1y agoAlso “apenstaartje” in Dutch (monkey’s tail)
- smitty1e 1y agoRx is possibly the last Egyptian hieroglyph in use. https://www.history.com/articles/where-did-the-rx-symbol-come-from https://www.history.com/articles/where-did-the-rx-symbol-com...
- monocasa 1y agoEh, a lot of of the Latin alphabet ends up coming from Hieroglyphs->Demotic->Proto-sinatic->Phonecian->Greek->Latin.
- aiisthefiture 1y agoLittle mouse. How cute. I can’t unsee it now.
- zkmon 1y agoIt 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 1y agoAround 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.
- manbitesdog 1y ago> 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 1y agoIn French it's "arobas" (Canada) or "arrobe"/"arobase" (France). When it started, we'd sometimes call it "a commercial" too.
- tirant 1y agoI 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 1y agoArroba is commonly used in Guatemala and signifies 25lbs (roughly 11.3kg)
- r24y 1y agoGreat article. I had long thought that the official name for the symbol was "asperand", but it seems like this is a recent invention!
- quuxplusone 1y agoEtymologically, I'd expect "atpersat" ("at per se at"), by analogy to "ampersand" ("and per se and"). Or, as some redditor added, "appersat."
- paulmooreparks 1y agoI 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 1y agoPeople 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 1y agoHeh, 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.