Re: String name and Character Name

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Apr 29 2005 - 15:06:59 CST

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    From: "Andrew C. West" <andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu>
    > On Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:40:35 +0200 (CEST), Jörg Knappen wrote:
    >>
    >> Yes, there is. ''Klammeraffe'' is a well established traditional name for
    >> the @ thing predating its use in email addresses. The younger ones know
    >> it
    >> as At-Zeichen, but the older ones still use ''Klammeraffe''.
    >>
    >> P.S. IMO, the annotation ''Klammeraffe'' should be kept. We have some
    >> german annotations to other characters, too.
    >>

    Don't forget the well-known traditional name for "@" in French: "une
    arrobace" (normally feminine in typographic language like for the term "une
    espace", but many French users think these terms are masculine, so their
    genre is now ambiguous... unless one makes the distinction between the
    typographic usage that designates the glyph or an implementation of this
    glyph in a page layout, and the other usages where it just designates the
    abstract character in some text).

    It was also commonly named "a commercial" in the past, but the expression is
    now deprecated. Those French users that use "@" in email addresses now
    pronounce it "at" like in English, some are resisting and use the french
    usual preposition "à" when spelling these addresses orally...).

    Despite this, for now, I have not heard or read any expression like "le
    signe at" in French text or speech. So "un (une) arrobace" is still used
    everywhere when not spelling an email addresses or related technical
    syntaxes (but many don't know how to write "arrobace" correctly -- some even
    write "arobasse" -- and this orthographic difficulty may be one reason why
    the old oral expression "a commercial" still persists in French on the
    written form).



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