Information About ®At Sign |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT AT SIGN | |
| punctuation | |
| typography | |
|
A commercial at is the symbol '''@'''; also called an '''at symbol''', an '''at sign''', or just '''at''', and sometimes mistakenly called an ''; ''these''; ''vortex''; ''whirlpool''; ''chisignuh''; ''whishi-whishi''; ''yurming''; or ''whorl''. Some of these are based on specialized usage, others are visual descriptions, and ''atgry'' (plural ''atgrynge'') is a recurring joke proposed on Usenet as the answer to a pair of longstanding linguistic Riddles — the singular ''atgry'' is a fourth word that ends in ''gry'', along with ''angry'', ''hungry'', and ''gry''; and the plural ''atgrynge'' provides a word that rhymes with ''orange''. The alternative FAQ for alt.usage.english HISTORY The @ sign may have evolved from the Norman French " à " @ appears to be the cursive form of ''ā,'' an abbreviation of an unknown word beginning with ''a.'' In medieval European manuscripts, abbreviations were generally indicated by drawing a line over or through the letters, as in the common for ''Jesus Christ'' (see Christogram ), or # from A commonly accepted theory is that the symbol is derived from the Latin Preposition ''ad,'' which means ''about'' with Numeral s. However, no document showing this usage has been presented. A similar idea is that @ is the abbreviation of the Greek preposition ''ana (ανά)'', which means 'at the rate of' when used with numerals, exactly its modern commercial usage. A more recent idea has been proposed by Giorgio Stabile , a professor of History in Rome . He claims to have traced the symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4 , 1536 . The document talks about commerces with Pizarro and in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru , where <@> stood for Amphora ( Italian ''anfora;'' Spanish and Portuguese ''arroba''). The word ''arroba'' still means both the @ symbol and a unit of weight (see below). Under this view, the symbol was used to represent one amphora, which was a unit of weight or volume based upon the capacity of the standard Terracotta jar, and came into use with the modern meaning "at the rate of" in northern Europe. However, @ could be the abbreviation of any word beginning in ''a,'' and more than one such symbol was likely in use, but there is no continuous record between any of the possibilities and the modern symbol. An alternative view is that it derives from Norman French "à" meaning "at" in the sense of "each". "2 widgets à £5.50 = £11.00" is the sort of accountancy shorthand notation you will see on English commercial vouchers and ledgers all the way into the 1990s, where the usage was superseded for accountants with its e-mail usage. It is used in this way in Modern French also. According to this view, the @ symbol is simply a stylish way of writing the à, so as not to remove the hand from the page in making the symbol. You can see hybrids between @ and à in French handwriting in street markets to this day. In the Malagasy Language , @ is an informal abbreviation for ''amin'ny''. MODERN USES The symbol's most familiar modern use is in connection to the box with the Hostname www.example.com using the username jdoe. In the Programming Language Perl , the symbol prefixes Variable s which contain Array s, as opposed to Scalar values (indicated with ' $ ') and Hash Table s / Associative Array s (' % '). If the code were to be treated as a sentence, this prefix would be the equivalent of a Determiner , so "@animals" might be read as "these animals". In the IRC protocol, @ is the symbol for a Channel Operator . IRC also uses the user@host form (often preceded by nick!) for identifying and banning users. In this case the user@ part was originally an Ident response and the host part was a Reverse Dns name from the user's IP. However, most modern IRC networks provide some mechanism for users to hide their real reverse dns hostname and/or for admins/privileged users to pick one arbitrarily. The @ character is also used as an Alternative Political Spelling for typing in some Romance Languages as a Gender-neutral substitute for the masculine "o" in mixed gender groups and in cases where the gender is unknown. For example, the Spanish word "amigos," which could either mean male and female "friends" or all male "friends" would be replaced with "amig@s." The character is intended to resemble a mix of the masculine letter "o" and the feminine "a". The usefulness of this is debated; in Spanish the masculine Grammatical gender may include both males and females, while the feminine gender is exclusive to females, and there is no neutral gender. Some advocates of Gender-neutral Language-modification feel that using the male grammatical gender as a generic gender indicates an implicit linguistic disregard for women. Many Spanish speakers feel that this use of the "@" degrades their language, and some allege that it is an example of Cultural Imperialism . This construction is generally only used in informal writing. There is no established pronunciation of this writing. Alternative forms would be ''amigos/as'' and ''amigⒶs'' using the Circled A of anarchism. In a similar fashion, Pokémon fans often write "Lati@s" to denote Latios and Latias . In most Roguelike games (such as NetHack ), the "@" sign is used to denote the player character (or more generally, any human). The "@" sign is also used sometimes (for example in articles relating to missing persons, obituaries, or brief reports) to denote an alias after a person's proper name, for instance: "John Smith @ Jean Smyth". @ may sometimes be used to represent a Schwa , as the actual schwa character may be difficult to produce in many computers. It is used in this capacity in the ASCII IPA or Kirshenbaum IPA scheme. In online discourse, the "@" sign is used by some Anarchists as a substitute for the traditional Circle-A . "COMMERCIAL AT" IN OTHER LANGUAGES In most languages other than English, the symbol was virtually unknown before e-mail became widespread in the mid-1990s. Consequently, it is often perceived in those languages as denoting "The Internet", computerization, or modernization in general.
REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
> |
|
|