The History of ‘Ampersand’ (2020)
merriam-webster.com
merriam-webster.com
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.
---
[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.
What I disagree with sometimes is whether the block needs to start on a new line. For example I would like to do this:
if (foo = bar) { blah(); }
Point 1 is fine by me and the team: We embrace "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment", so that fits into the philosophy.
Point 3, i.e. disallowing inline comments, seems ill-conceived and bad to me.
[1] Actually correctness, which often means security.
[2] Or rather a generalization of what "hygienic macro" means.
I'm happy with that. In fact I usually do that to avoid schoolboy errors when expanding to multiple statements later. It doesn't add much (a few characters, not three lines) and allows for lining up parts (ala my point 1) when there are a couple or more of lines doing very similar (but not so much so they can be usefully reduced to a function/macro).
doohureehliebeeleafþatt?
The first rule of communication is knowing your audience and if one's language can be adapted in simplicity, complexity, lexicon, grammar, content, style, voice, medium &c to be more readily understood, then it's in the speaker's benefit to do so. If GP's teacher could not earnestly understand vulgar English then by all means adapt, but the sense that I'm getting is that they were being obstinate on purpose and those sort of people should live in the communicative bubble of isolation they put themselves in.
By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too seriously or else you go insane.
What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent.
If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so eh, just stupid guesses.)
The French don't seem to agree.
I disagree. Kind of. Like all languages, English is a tool. The more complicated that tool is, the harder it is to learn/use, the less effective it is. YAML and HTML are easy examples of how the complexity of a language can hurt its utility. There's something to be said for maintaining a formal spec that guards against changes that would introduce unnecessary complexity.
However... a spec like that doesn't exist for English - at least not one that most of its users agree upon - and being able to understand what people are trying to communicate is absolutely the most important feature of any language. Therefor, I consider it a faux pas to strictly enforce arbitrary rules like your professor did. Frankly, it sounds like he was just using his position to take out his frustration on others.
One of my favorite word derivations is feamyng which is a collective noun for ferrets. The word itself is like a game of telephone gone wrong. Multiple mistypings in dictionaries, etc. give it quite the interesting word history.
> I do here … complain to your Lordship … that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities … Gentlemen … introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, … as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds … They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid … Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.
— A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue [taken from https://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/proposal.html]
Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels! Not that nasty word ‘dess-turbd’ which is impossible to pronounce! What a horrible degradation of the language!”
(For more of this, Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language contains a highly amusing list of examples dating all the way back to Cicero in 46 BC, who complains that the speech of his day was sadly degraded from the great orators of the past. I’m certain I’ve even seen an Ancient Egyptian complaint along these lines, though sadly I can’t seem to find it now.)
I had a Professor who pronounced the -ed that was at the end of a word as its own syllable. She loved doing that, and it actually wasn't noticable after a short while.
> What a horrible degradation of the language!”
It's not that different from people today saying "wanna" for "want to" or even "me wan go home" for "I want to go home".
Idioms and dialects abound!
Given how prevalent the eyeroll-inducing grammar nazis have been in my lifetime (I am happily recovered from that affliction, myself), I have no trouble believing they existed in the 1700s, too.
You are raising the question, not begging it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-questi...
> Begging the question means "to elicit a specific question as a reaction or response," and can often be replaced with "a question that begs to be answered."
This progression is likely due to the fact that people raise questions much more often than they beg questions. Once the phrase started being used in the former sense, it was bound to overtake the latter.
Languages don't really become systematically simpler over time, or they would've had to start out incredibly complicated. They have some tendency to cycle between lots of grammatical forms (like Latin) and few grammatical forms with lots of helper words (like English).
("Simple" and "complex" is debatable; English's snarl of helper words is infamously hard to learn.)
It's obvious how you go in the "less inflection" direction, but how do you go in the "more inflection" one? The answer is that you start with helper words, which evolve into enclitics (fragments of words attached to other words, like the n't in 'can't' and 'shouldn't'), and eventually those become suffixes and prefixes, and then merge into the words they're attached to, creating grammatical inflections!
This process is where all(?) of the grammatical forms in Greek/Latin/etc are thought to have come from, afaik. Proto-Indo-European, one of the earliest languages we can reconstruct, seems to have been pretty close to the apex of this process, having just consolidated a bunch of enclitics into grammar.
So the goofy internet 'verbn't' trend is actually a possible glimpse of how English could acquire a negative verb form like Japanese has!
Russians tend to drop articles in English, Indonesians don't really distinguish between "he" and "she", many learners forget the -s in third person singular verbs ("he make"), irregular forms get regularised ("teacher teached me").
Some of the most complicated languages are spoken by small groups in Africa or Papua Guinea, with features such as an evidential aspect (different verb endings depending on whether you saw something with your own eyes, heard about it, concluded it, etc.) [1], or Mother-in-law-speech, where the language you use changes when you speak to your in-laws [2].
Pidgins tend to be very simple and regular, by contrast.
Besides, even when you just look at morphology alone, ancient languages are no more complex on the whole than modern ones. Thus consider Russian, which has more cases than Latin (IIRC). Or Hindustani, which uses an entirely different case system depending on the aspect of the verb. Or Swahili, where the verb inflects for both direct subject and object (but not always!), which have no less than 18 irregular genders, as well as for 28 tense/aspect/mood forms (if Wikipedia is to be trusted) — amongst other categories.
What happens, it turns out, is that languages can grow more complex over time as well as simpler. People do tend naturally to simplify, delete and abbreviate syllables in words — but they also tend to merge words together and elaborate simple constructions to more complex ones, in order to retain the expressive capabilities of their language. I’ve already mentioned Deutscher’s bool The Unfolding of Language; I will recommend it again here, since it has a great summary of exactly how these processes work and interact with each other in order to generate complexity in language.
English went through this when the Norse invaded England and controlled up to 3/4 of it for several hundred years. As they did not have a large social separation from the English, they tended to intermarry with the English, and because their own language was similar but not the same, it was easier to speak a simpler kind of “pidgin” based on Anglo-Saxon but dropping things like gender and declensions that didn’t match the Norse versions.
When the Normans invaded, they stayed socially separated from the English for much longer and didn’t try to learn English, so there was no repeat of the simplification process. In contrast, the Norman French vocabulary migrated into English and seriously complicated the spellings in English.
As a result Language was heavily over-engineered back in the day when it was one of the few ways people could get all that "out".
Some of these pronunciations still survive, such as "I learned* the words to the song" vs "the learned gentleman".
* as a kid I was taught to write "learnt" but I never see that in the US.
I watched a linguistics course online many years ago and that was my key take away.
Water in french was originally something like "aqua", and it devolved into eau, all along the way people complained they were saying it wrong.
The King/Queens English? Most English monarchs barely spoke the language. They were far better with French or German.
^Most^Several
Famously of course the first two Georges, perhaps William of Orange, definitely of course William the Conquerer and his immediate successors, but I think most is a gross exaggeration.
But as a spoken language, there is plenty of evidence the other way. All the Tudors and Stuarts were English speakers, for example.
I have heard that French was the vernacular of the late Romanovs, about which I am…dubious.
Among the people whose area of scientific study is the use of language and how it conveys meaning, and especially how and why it changes over time, you will not find very many hard prescriptivists. It's not wrong per se it's just not a very useful model in most contexts.
Ampersand is a change in sounds, for the sake of easier pronunciation:
and per se and # original
andperseand # remove spaces
andpers'and # drop extra vowel, for slightly faster speech
an'pers'and # drop extra consonant, for same reason
anpersand # drop apostrophes
ampersand # transform "n" to its neighbor, "m", because it's easier to say before "p"
"Could of", on the other hand, is not phonological but morphological --- a change in meaning, because "of" doesn't mean "have". Or maybe it is merely typographic, because what they could have written is "could've", which sounds the same as "could of" --- and it's probably what they meant but simply made the same mistake as when you accidentally write "there" instead of "their".
And I don't believe your repulsion is "irrational", as you say. There is value in preserving the current state of language, of slowing down its changes, simply for the sake of intelligibility, for now and for posterity. A single instance of one person correcting someone else's "could of" is a like throwing an ice cube atop a melting glacier, but like voting in a general election, but it is no reason to just give up. (Of course the stakes are low, so we must say it only if it will be well received.)
Now there is a class of "corrections" that are misguided, I think, like the rule that you cannot end a sentence with a preposition. That arose from lovers of Latin, which doesn't end sentences in prepositions because it is impossible, and they were trying to make English more like Latin.
It was more that they just called it "and". Rattling off the last few letters of the alphabet, it would have sounded awkward if they ended it with "X, Y, Z, and and". So they added the per se to indicate that and was the letter's name and not just stammering on a conjunction without finishing the sentence.
A, B, C, and D,
Pray, playmates, agree.
E, F, and G,
Well, so it shall be.
J, K, and L,
In peace we will dwell.
M, N, and O,
To play let us go.
P, Q, R, and S,
Love may we possess.
W, X, and Y,
Will not quarrel or die.
Z, and ampersand,
Go to school at command.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Nursery_Rhymes/Part...
She had a point, it’s `Zed’.
"than" is for comparisons; e.g. smaller _than_, older _than_
"then" is used to indicate timing; chew _then_ swallow, wash _then_ rinse
It's certainly an incomplete explanation, but if someone else can share an explanation that is more succinct and/or complete than my own, I'd be interested in seeing it.
I'll add these examples to my notes so I can write correct emails at least. lol
Another one for "than" is also if you can replace it with "instead of". "Rather than learning the language, he went to a football game". Not "Rather - then learning the language later - he went to a football game first". Well actually there 'then' is correct but I had to make a broken up sentence that you would never write but you might say it. If you want to tell someone about this, you start with 'rather' then think of explaining first that he did go learn afterwards so you interject your own sentence and then go on. But when writing you have enough time to form a proper sentence.
Of course auto correction can play a role nowadays. I wrote "of" more often recently and a typoed "ofg" might be corrected to "of" and not "off". Sure.
Now what I do understand is that native speakers actually forget the rules meaning the "why" something is correct. After a while you can usually just tell what's correct. It just "sounds right" and you can't explain it to someone else.
I finished the job THEN my boss paid me. I finished the job AFTER WHICH my boss paid me.
I'd much prefer him paying me THAN not paying me. I'd much prefer if he paid me AS OPPOSED TO not paying me.
I was surprised to realize that a phrase I knew very well, I had probably never read (and definitely never written).
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
> 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.
> 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
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&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.
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".
- 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-o...)
- The Ampersand, part 2½ 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)#:~:text=In%2....
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
Was kinda amusing when the "less involved" classmates were trying to read it as B
Using symbols like # before a quantity, @ before a unit price, or ⌀ before a diameter was considered critical for minimizing confusion. I think it was meant to work like a sort of Hungarian notation for numbers, so if someone’s transcribing them into an order form or something, and they find themselves copying a diameter into a price column, they catch themselves on the type mismatch.
It never seemed like there was much room for ambiguity in any of the lists I wrote up, but I guess when you screw up an order to a steel supplier and get the quantity mixed up with the length, that can be a pretty expensive mistake.
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.
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_franz...
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 »
It's common to see "&c." in older texts instead of "etc."
Guessing this was to save on ink or something?
Most of these conventions carried over into the printing age and were slowly phased out.
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/, 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 is my last comment where I wrote “etc.”) and February 12, 2014 (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.
(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" :-) )
The other name I'm familiar with is "Commercial At."
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".
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/ 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.
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.
I've used this unixname for a long time and it's always immensely satisfying when people realize it's just my real name.
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)
>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":
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.
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.
Is rocks & s&