See Ampersand C

See Ampersand C

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Recently, I was reading a short story for a class I'm enrolled in. The story began as a layout of letters sent between some of the characters. Toward the end of the first letters, they would be marked with "&c". At first I disregarded the mark as something obscure that I neglected in a high school English class I must have missed. However, the mark appeared more often in the story and not where I expected. That's when I was enlightened.

The ampersand sign (&) is a ligature, or combination of symbols. In this case, it is the combination of the letters "E" and "t". Some text styles like Trebuchet MS do a better job defining the parts of the "E" and "t", while others display a more abstract cursive glyph. I knew this part of the puzzle and what it signified. In Latin "Et" is translated to "and" which is exactly what the modern ampersand stood for.

Initially, what I tried to do is process "&c" as "and-c" which didn't make sense. Bringing the ligature back to its root "Et" and adding "c" creates the more familiar "Etc" as "et cetera" which means "and the rest" in Latin. That solved the mystery of what "&c" meant but then I was curious. Where did they get the name "ampersand"? The Wikipedia page for Ampersand gives the etymology:

The word ampersand is a conflation of the phrase "and per se and", meaning "and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and". Traditionally, in English-speaking schools when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin expression per se ("by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced and. Thus, the recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z and per se and". This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837. However, in contrast to the other 26, the ampersand is not a phoneme, and other letters that were dropped from the English alphabet, such as the Old English thorn were true phonemes.

So, there you have it. Everything you need to know about Shift+7 on your keyboard.