From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Wed Apr 27 2005 - 23:33:40 CST
On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Timothy Partridge wrote:
> Asterisk comes from Latin asteriscus (little star) from Latin aster (star).
Actually, from Greek asteriskos. I wouldn't mention this if it were not so
that etymologies of character names and histories of characters are so
often wrong or incorrect. Moreover, they are often uncertain. There are so
many stories on the origin of commercial at "@" that people get confused
and would not benefit much from the correct one, if there is one
(and they could know it is provably the correct one).
This is one of the reasons why character _standards_ should refrain from
giving trivia information to entertain readers. I'm especially thinking
about the note on the origin of the letter "G" in the Unicode code chart:
"invented circa 300 BCE by Spurius Carvilius Ruga, who added a stroke to
the letter C".
It's completely irrelevant for the purposes of the Unicode standard, and
not even certain (the invention has also been attributed to Appius
Claudius in the 4th century).
There has been some discussion about displaying the annotations in
user interfaces for selecting characters. I don't think annotations
like the one on "G" would be useful there.
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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