Update: U+237C ⍼ &Angzarr; | Hacker News Reader

Update: U+237C ⍼ &Angzarr;

ionathan.ch

398 pointsg0xA52A2A82 comments

In case you didn't already heard from others, there's the http://xml.coverpages.org site hosting lots of pre-2000 material related to ISO 8879 (SGML) and XML. Although I didn't find too much on a quick ad-hoc search for ISO 9573, there's mention of angzarr in a preview version of ISO 9573 at http://xml.coverpages.org/ISO-PDTR-9573-13-2004.pdf by Martin Bryant and David Carlisle.

There's also casual mention of ISO 9573 on historical comp.text.sgml Usenet archives.

David and other people involved with SGML, MathML, and early entity sets for math (and chemical etc.) symbols are hanging around on the xml-dev mailing list (https://www.xml.org/xml-dev) and perhaps can tell more about the origin of that character (which looks more like a symbol for military or electrotechnical use to my totally uneducated eye).

Also, there's a typo in your post: Belisage Conference -> Balisage Conference ;)

Good luck.

Whoops, thanks for catching that typo!

What’s the potential copyright issue with the request to Cambridge?

BTW, terrific detective work. I love mysteries like these.

When I tried to request it via ILL, they told me that the amount of material scanned "exceeds copyright law and scanning limits". I haven't bothered to look up whatever law that is, and I'm not sure if it's a US thing, or if it's on the UK side, and if so, whether students/faculty at Cambridge are under the same restrictions and they'd have to end up paying the same fees as well. I have a friend whose advisor works there, but I'm reluctant to ask them for the favour and potentially drag them into numerous back-and-forth emails with Cambridge Library and copyright issues...

Just on copyright - all you want is to take a peek? It is not that you would have to share the complete scans with the world.

Let's say the character means "X" and you can see it on some obscure page - could sharing that be a copyright issue?

Here's what the Cambridge Library says [1] about scans:

> Scans are provided with certain conditions of supply:

> 1. Not pass on, or upload, the electronic copy or make it available to any other person

> 2. Not make further printed or electronic copies

:shrug:

[1] https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/search-and-find/zero-contact-servi...

> When you request a scan, you will be asked to confirm that you acknowledge a copyright declaration which states that you have not already been supplied with a copy of the same material, that you will use the copy only for non-commercial research or private study, nor supply the copy to another person. Copyright forms will be retained by the University Library in perpetuity. (emphasis added)

Wow! Pretty bold promise from a university that’s already been around for 1000 years or whatever. I feel like they’re really staking their credibility on indefinite document retention here lol.

My brother completed his Master's at Queen's College Cambridge and the porters there offer indefinite storage for all active students and alum. He stored his road bicycle in their storage there for something like 8 years before finally getting back out there and arranging to have it shipped. They're pretty big on retention, is my point.

In a similar vein, there are kanji (Chinese characters) with unknown origins called "ghost kanji". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208#Kanji_from_unknown_...

Since I just returned home to the US from a visit to Japan, I found that fascinating reading.

I like how the kanji in the table are classified into 3 categories: Unknown, Source unclear and Unidentifiable.

and those that belong to the emperor, I presume.

Except those that are drawn with a fine camelhair brush.

There are also character variants. Sometimes between CJK, but also historic. I attended a conference at Academica Sinica in Taipei with knowledgeable academic sorts circa 2001 who had apparently elucidated various issues with Unicode unification coming from the full range of prior encodings, fonts, dictionaries, input systems and mechanical typesetting systems.

> In particular, 妛 was probably created when printers tried to create 𡚴 by cutting and pasting 山 and 女 together.

It's crazy to think that a lot of written Kanji and Hanzi come from print drifting and a small accumulation of errors, similar to how many new words are formed in spoken language.

> “Although the Type Archive, which held the Monotype Collection, is now shutting down…”

Boo. Can’t someone like Adobe fund a historical archive like this. Photographs are not a replacement for the physical history of this vanished trade.

I (through my own ignorance?) haven't had much appreciation for this bit of history, but I recently visited the fascinating Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp.

https://museumplantinmoretus.be/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantin-Moretus_Museum

They were a publisher and printing house in Antwerp, starting in the early waves of printing presses that swept Europe after Gutenberg.

Amazingly, it stayed in the family and the family obviously had an incredible devotion to their origins, they have their original presses (thought to be the oldest in the world), their original type (their founder was a big believer in the power of good type and bought up the rights where he could), the original building, their original library. It is quite the adventure (in a totally nerdish but culturally significant way!).

It was eventually sold to the city where it has been a museum ever since.

Back to the topic at hand, I agree with you, can't someone acquire this??! :)

I've often thought that the best Civilization would actively maintain living examples of each historical milieu. A stone age place and a middle ages place, a mid century place, and so on. In this way the methods and knowledge of the past would not be lost, and in the event of a calamity (like a Carrington event, or nuclear war), it would accelerate our recovery. Presumably the highest tech'd civ would impose order on the rest to prevent the stronger civs attacking the weaker ones (only the strongest civ could possibly enforce this).

(The prospect of having to recapitulate the advances of the last 200 years fills me with indescribably weariness. Physical typesetting being a good example. Who is foolish enough to think you can "just read a book about it" and get a working press going?)

That’s a great idea. A lot of things make a lot more sense when you can actually see the context they came from.

Indeed, we don't exactly treat our hunter-gatherers well.

Interesting thought experiment. I'd wager there are equally interesting ethics challenges that would need addressing in order to actually do something like this well.

Isn’t that somewhat satisfied by having groups like the Amish, and Renaissance festivals ?

Yo this sounds like some kind of cheap YA novel.

I think it's something the government should step in, not a private company.

Adobe could easily make a one-time donation of $millions to set up an endowment which would keep them running for the foreseeable future. The government could as well, I just see it as less likely. The government seems much more likely to maintain an active control over something like this, opening up the possibility of political interference in the future.

A private company is more likely to use it for propaganda and marketing purposes. At least here government agencies have competent historians.

After decades of corporate propaganda, the mainstream view is that "goverment can't do anything".

This has led to people expecting the rich to donate for this sort of outcome, instead of demanding better organization from the government that's eating away almost half their income.

Rant asside, you're totally right.

My understanding is that the archive isn't being disposed of, but will be going into the Science Museum long term storage. The photographs are not intended as a replacement for the collections.

Unfortunately, as neither faculty nor a student at the University of Cambridge, according to the quote they’ve given me, requesting a digital copy of this document would cost 174£

Maybe just do a go fund me or something to raise the 174£? That is, if no students or faculty from the university of Cambridge see this and help.

I was going to say the same. HN should make quick work of that, and even if it leads nowhere, the investigation is fascinating!

Just post on r/cambridge and/or r/cambridge_uni reddit & ask if a current or ex-student or faculty member would be willing to request it from the stacks & make a copy.

There’s bound to be someone who’ll drop in a request on their behalf.

reddit is deadit

No, it's not

https://reddit.com/r/cambridge

Yeah. I was being facetious. I just meant that many of us are avoiding it right now.

<https://old.reddit.com/r/Scholar/> is what you want.

Finding a Cambridge student or faculty willing to help doesn't seem like it'd be super hard, the university has 6000 academic staff and 25000 students.

Even more so if alumni still have those accesses.

Alumni do have access, so yeas lots more!

Cambridge alum here (for my BA in 2009) but I'm in CA now. Would be willing to try putting in the request. Not sure how to contact Jonathan Chan... I'm not on any of the social media he lists in his site footer... Anyone see an email for him? Edit: nevermind, found it. Emailing him

> Cambridge alum here (for my BA in 2009) but I'm in CA now. Would be willing to try putting in the request. Not sure how to contact Jonathan Chan...

Look at https://ionathan.ch/cv.html

Heard back. Turns out it has to be a current student, unfortunately. I'm sure he'll find somebody.

> That is, if no students or faculty from the university of Cambridge see this and help.

The author has said on Twitter that he already knows someone at Cambridge he could ask: https://twitter.com/ionathanch/status/1663423421831602178

Also on the edge of my seat here, wondering what field it could be from. My ChatGPT-esque BS story is that this symbol was misplaced alongside more abstract math-y symbols and was actually briefly used in schematics to identify "lightning conductor" components shown here https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/wp-content/uploads... ... plausible, yes?

Best theory yet.

It’s a good theory, but shouldn’t it show up regularly in electrical schematics then? It doesn’t sound like anyone in any particular fields (other than possibly German mathematics or Dutch economics) has been able to point to historical common usage.

Is the article cut short?

I thought there should be some content under heading "What now?".

Very fascinating by the way, I remembered the original post.

OP, if you are reading this, please contact me (email on website in bio). I would like to find a way to help fund the digital request to continue this research.

An email address is here: https://ionathan.ch/cv.html

I remember the previous post and find it weirdly compelling - the cruft and leftovers as technology evolves is interesting - it's like the appendix of monotype. I'm looking forward to the movie adaptation where he drives himself completely crazy trying to find out what the symbol means. I appreciate and can relate to this need to dig into minutiae.

In order to make a Hollywood film it would need to turn out this was a message from The Creator.

Pi 2: Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

I've added a clarification to the end of the post on whether angzarr might be found in the Cambridge Library document, which I mentioned in my twitter thread but not in the post:

> Furthermore, the Rare Books department tells me that “unfortunately none of [the materials] seem to mention S16137 through S16237”. It’s possible the glyph is listed without its serial number, but it’s equally possible that this document skips that range altogether, just as 4-Line Mathematics had.

I'd also like to point out that Cambridge alumni are unlikely going to be able to request scans for free; I think you need to be a current faculty or student.

The previous post discussed on HN in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 (295 comments)

Sort of related, could anyone please explain why there is a , named character reference in the HTML standard?

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/named-characters.html...

Why not? There's lots of named characters in the range of 0x20-0x2F, and symbols in general.

Those symbols (including comma) were added in later editions of the standard, and I'm sure there's a reason, but it seems to me if your keyboard has the characters & and ; it will also have , no? I mean, why not add &a; for a then?

There's also "&semi;" standing for ";", which makes even less sense to me.

To escape both special characters if you wanted to display "&semi;" to the user?

In order to encode the ; as a character, when ; is being used as a separator.

Perhaps for usage as an escaped form of `,` in comma separated value tables? Although good question why it's in the HTML spec, pasting raw csv inside of an element and then needing to read it back seems like a rare use case.

The now deprecated FONT FACE attribute was defined as a comma-separated list of names. The entity was needed if you had a font name with a comma in it.

Another comma-separated list is in the TH|TD AXIS attribute which is considered obsolete now. I found two other CSL attributes in APPLET ARCHIVE (depr.) and AREA COORDS but neither of them need a comma entity.

So the comma entity exists only as a historical artifact.

Couldn't you use , instead?

Can we get the Guided By Voices logo added to unicode? http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7087/1132/1600/rune.1.jpg

I wonder if this is some sort of “signature character”, that the designer would use to discover if their work had been lifted, possibly dating back centuries.

Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street?

I’m sure somebody on here can help have a look. If you put in a scan and deliver request then apparently you aren’t meant to share it with anybody else due to copyright, but I know somebody who could request it and I’m sure could find the symbol in there.

I've asked a friend who is sort of kind of a faculty member; they may or may not be able to get access (they have a rather bespoke institutional status), so please other people keep trying!

The "timeline" link in the article is broken (links to localhost:4000), correct link should be

https://ionathan.ch/2022/04/09/angzarr.html#summary-timeline

lmao silly mistake. I'll get that fixed, thanks

OK. I'll bite. So what did the Cambridge rowing club need specific fonts for?

Possibly typesetting "bumps charts" http://www.cucbc.org/charts?year=2010&event=L&day=Fi&sex=M

Good call.

I’m hoping that when we finally get to the bottom of this mystery, we’ll find out that Aleister Crowley had it slipped into Monotype for magickal reasons.

From the previous post a year or so back I thought the mystery was discovered that it was a new age druidic symbol someone had stuck in

this looks like a variant of thunder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Weather_symbolsNEW2.png?u...

The Story of Ampersand.

https://sharegpt.com/c/J1U3T7m

> They conspired with a rogue hashtag

ChatGPT thinks # is called "hashtag"? :(

I don't like it either but its not a bad name. Octothorpe is dumb because there is nothing on it that ocures 8 times. We could call it 'pound', making it like the 8th common thing we call pound, or we can say "the number symbol" which is also dumb. Language filled a gap, hopefully it evolves into something more generic like 'hash sign' or 'hash mark'

To the emoji t-shirt mobile!!!

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