7.1177, Sum: The @ sign: addendum

Tue Aug 20 18:20:23 UTC 1996

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-7-1177. Tue Aug 20 1996. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  176

Subject: 7.1177, Sum: The @ sign: addendum

Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. <aristar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at emunix.emich.edu> (On Leave)
            T. Daniel Seely: Eastern Michigan U. <dseely at emunix.emich.edu>

Associate Editor:  Ljuba Veselinova <lveselin at emunix.emich.edu>
Assistant Editors: Ron Reck <rreck at emunix.emich.edu>
                   Ann Dizdar <dizdar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
                   Annemarie Valdez <avaldez at emunix.emich.edu>

Software development: John H. Remmers <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>

Editor for this issue: lveselin at emunix.emich.edu (Ljuba Veselinova)

---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------------
1)
Date:  Tue, 20 Aug 1996 08:58:58 +0800
From:  karchung at ccms.ntu.edu.tw ("Karen S. Chung")
Subject:  The @ sign: addendum

---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Tue, 20 Aug 1996 08:58:58 +0800
From:  karchung at ccms.ntu.edu.tw ("Karen S. Chung")
Subject:  The @ sign: addendum

	Below follows a brief (whew!) addendum to the lengthy @ summary,
with some interesting data from new languages, and corrections,
clarifications or additions to data on languages originally covered.
Anybody have anything else to contribute? (Still nothing on Hindi,
Tagalog, Vietnamese...!)

					Karen Steffen Chung
					National Taiwan University
					karchung at ccms.ntu.edu.tw

	Heartiest thanks to:

Charles Bigelow 			<bandh at maui.net>
Eul`alia de Bobes i Soler 		<lali2 at oasis.uab.es>
Christopher Brewster 			<brewster at upatras.gr>
Michael I. Bushnell			<mib at gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Ivan A Derzhanski  	   <iad at banmatpc.math.acad.bg, iad at cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Edmund Grimley-Evans 			<Edmund.Grimley-Evans at cl.cam.ac.uk>
Koh 					<kohh at pc.jaring.my>
(Mr.) Pentti Nikula 			<Pentti.Nikula at vtt.fi>
Gavin O Shea 				<goshea at acadamh.ucd.ie>
Geir Skogseth			Courtesy of: Jan-Sverre Syvertsen <pjp at sn.no>

BULGARIAN

*** I noticed that Bulgarian wasn't on your list of languages, so here goes:
The most common name of `@' is _majmunsko "a"_ `monkey "a"';  the second
choice is simply _majmunka_ `little monkey'.

Ivan A Derzhanski  <iad at banmatpc.math.acad.bg, iad at cogsci.ed.ac.uk>

CATALAN

*** It seems I missed your question-post about the @ sign. I'll add some
data about Catalan: in this language the @ sign is also called
"ensaimada". This is the name of a kind of pastry which here is as popular
as croissants, and which has the same spiral form than the @ sign.

Laia
Eul`alia de Bobes i Soler 		<lali2 at oasis.uab.es>

ENGLISH

*** Everyone knows `@' is pronounced `whirlpool'. Geez, haven't these guys
ever used INTERCAL?

Michael I. Bushnell			<mib at gnu.ai.mit.edu>

*** From a handout distributed at a lecture given by Prof. Biq Yung-O at
the Academia Sinica, Taipei, 8/16/96: @ in some systems of discourse
analysis notation symbolizes 'laughter'.

Karen Steffen Chung			<karchung at ccms.ntu.edu.tw>

*** Before I got into computer thingies, I used the <@> much as the use
you quoted for Chicago, as 'about', but also _around_ as in 'a round <a>'.
my sister who had studied bookkeeping pulled me up on it one day, but I
continue to use it as such for my own private uses (that sounds dubious!).

Gavin O Se
Gavin O Shea 				<goshea at acadamh.ucd.ie>

ESPERANTO

*** Unfortunately I missed the question, otherwise I would have told you:

	I have observed a number of terms in use: "atelo" (spider monkey,
genus Ateles), "heliko" (snail), "po-signo" (at-the-rate-of-sign),
"volvita A"  (wrapped up A).  I'm recommending "volvita A" for the new
edition of Plena Ilustrita Vortaro.

Edmund Grimley-Evans 			<Edmund.Grimley-Evans at cl.cam.ac.uk>

FINNISH

*** Those people from Finland forgot a minor thing: The '@' symbol has an
official/standardized name in Finland. It is officially called the 'taksa'
- sign which is an old Finnish word for something like 'a price'. In
practice however hardly anybody knows this because the name was invented
long before computers evolved.

(Mr.) Pentti Nikula 			<Pentti.Nikula at vtt.fi>

GREEK

*** In 8 years of using email in Greece I have always heard the @ sign
referred to as 'to pap'aki' the+NEUT+SING duck+DIMIN - I would be
surprised if this were only a regional use.

Christopher Brewster 			<brewster at upatras.gr>

LATIN + NOTES ON THE ORIGIN OF @

*** I was delighted by your compilation of @s on the Linguist list, and
would like to add the following note about the origin and original Latin
name for the sign.
	Palaeographically, the @ sign is a medieval or renaissance
ligature-contraction of the Latin word "ad", meaning 'to, toward, at' and
so on. The ascending stroke of the 'd', which in some cursive scripts is
curved to the left, has been extended and curled anti-clockwise around the
'a', while the bowl of the 'd' has been assimilated to the bowl of the 'a'
(cf. Berthold Louis Ullman, *Ancient Writing and its Influence*). Though
its original Latin sense had perhaps been forgotten, the "@" sign survived
as a logograph meaning "at" in the commercial cursive handwriting of the
19th century, and thence to the typewriter keyboard invented toward the
end of that century, and thence to the ASCII character set (ASCII =
American Standard Code for Information Interchange), whence it has been
propagated throughout the network world. The phonetic similarity between
Latin "ad"  and English "at"  is not accidental; they are reflexes of
Proto-Indo-European *ad (cf.  Calvert Watkins, *American Heritage
Dictionary of Indo-European Roots*).

Charles Bigelow 			<bandh at maui.net>

NORWEGIAN

	Someone might already have told you, but as I just came across
your piece in the "Linguist" on @ in different languages I thought I'd
mail you. My native language is Norwegian, and according to a friend (an
editor of an interactive web publication) there are two Norwegian terms
currently in use.
	The first is "snabel-a" (pronounced like in German you should get
close, our phonology is not very different as the languages are closely
related) which means "trunk (of an elephant)-a".
	The second, but most widely used, term is "alfa-kro/ll" (o/ being
the Norwegian variety of o"- if it comes out like garble at your end:
it's an o with a slash through it, pronounced like German o" in o"l/oel
(oil) or French oe in soeur (sister)) - the term means "alfa-curl".

Geir Skogseth			Courtesy of: Jan-Sverre Syvertsen <pjp at sn.no>
(I haven't got an e-mail address of my own, so I'm sending this from a
friend of mine's computer)

TAMIL

	We, some of the members who took part in Tamilnet discussion [re a
Tamil term for @] , have agreed to adopt the word "Inaichuzhi(li) for
@.

Koh 						<kohh at pc.jaring.my>

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