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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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”)
>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
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.
I would have gone with 0
Question marks and exclamation marks, for starters.
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.
Little mouse. How cute. I can’t unsee it now.