Worth 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.
Most 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
It 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.
Around 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.
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.
The 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.
I 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.
> 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)
I 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.
Klammeraffe 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.
People 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.
Worth 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.
The DECNET one is pretty.
Agreed.
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`
C++ also uses (::), by the way. R probably borrowed it from C++.
Most 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
Oh I think you're right and both took it from Common Lisp, which largely predates namespaces in C++ and R.
It 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.
Around 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.
So 3000 years is a guess at the age of the word "amphora", but @ is from the year 1536.
Yes, the headline is a little dishonest. It's a 486 year-old story not 3,000 years.
Welcome to the Internet.
Context is important when telling a story. I say the title is fair.
3000 years ago is about when the first recognizable letter A was drawn.
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.
But what if we add the role that harnessing fire had on the development of pottery and the amphora? That easily adds another 770000 years
>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.
The 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
# is up there. It's a huge part of several systems, channels in discord and IRC, hashtags for content tagging, referenced in songs etc
what?, you must be kidding! :)
I 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.
& is older than @, and is likewise a symbolic contraction of a word.
' (apostrophe) is very old as well.
The 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.
Question marks and exclamation marks, for starters.
I would have gone with 0
> 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)
In French it's "arobas" (Canada) or "arrobe"/"arobase" (France). When it started, we'd sometimes call it "a commercial" too.
I 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.
Arroba is commonly used in Guatemala and signifies 25lbs (roughly 11.3kg)
Rx is possibly the last Egyptian hieroglyph in use.
https://www.history.com/articles/where-did-the-rx-symbol-com...
Eh, a lot of of the Latin alphabet ends up coming from Hieroglyphs->Demotic->Proto-sinatic->Phonecian->Greek->Latin.
In 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
Also “apenstaartje” in Dutch (monkey’s tail)
In Romanian we used to call it literally "monkey's tail", but most people now just use "at" instead.
Zavináč in Slovak (like the fish, sprat, curled into small ball)
German: “Klammeraffe” (literally: “bracket monkey”)
Klammeraffe 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
Heh, 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.
I 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.
People 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.
Great article. I had long thought that the official name for the symbol was "asperand", but it seems like this is a recent invention!
Etymologically, I'd expect "atpersat" ("at per se at"), by analogy to "ampersand" ("and per se and").
Or, as some redditor added, "appersat."
Little mouse. How cute. I can’t unsee it now.