Daniel Soar on '@'
The ‘at’ sign, @, which fancy typographers refer to by its French name, arobase, is a once unremarked but now central glyph that rewards closer examination. Many claims are made about its genesis, among them that it began circulation in 16th-century Florence as a symbol for the anfora, a unit of commercial measurement then in currency. A few years ago, La Repubblica published a photograph of a curlicue on a 1536 manuscript to prove it. But the French wouldn’t have got their arobase if they hadn’t derived it not from Italy but from the Spanish and Portuguese term, arroba, which was originally also a unit of measurement, in use from the 11th century onwards. And Italian traders wouldn’t have been dealing in @s in 1536 if they weren’t, as it turns out when you look at the Florentine manuscript, interested in arrobas of South American wine arriving in Europe by way of Seville. There’s a theory that the arroba was itself derived from the Arabic for a quart, ar-rub, but predictably this doesn’t get much airtime on the Latinate internet. Popular etymology in France declares that arobase is actually a contraction of the phrase ‘à rond bas’, where ‘bas’ stands for ‘bas-de-casse’, a bit of printing terminology that refers to lower-case letters, and that it’s somehow therefore related to the word ‘arabesque’. This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem ...I was surprised by Daniel Soar’s inability to see why the Russians call the @ ‘a dog’ (LRB, 28 May). It’s a sleeping dog with its tail curled around itself, isn’t it?
James Watt
Oxford
Daniel Soar notes that in modern Spanish email usage the symbol @ is called an arroba. Arroba beyond any reasonable doubt comes from the Arabic rub, but this does not mean a quart, as Soar writes, but a quarter (of a hundredweight, qintar).
Pat Harvey
Oxford
Polite Russians will sometimes soften @ to sobachka, ‘little dog’ (Letters, 11 June). So Chekhov’s short story ‘Dama s sobachkoi’, sometimes translated as ‘Lady with a Lapdog’, might now be thought of as ‘lady with email’, or perhaps ‘lady with a laptop’. The lovely and too little known Belarusian language calls @ slimak, or ‘snail’. Thus email is also snail mail in this part of the world.
Nigel Gould-Davies
Minsk, Belarus
The ‘little dog’ and ‘snail’ verbalisations of @ in Russian and Belarusian are delightful (Letters, 9 July). In Dutch @ is an apenstaartje or ‘monkey’s tail’. Incidentally, the ‘orphan’ (as in the ‘widow and orphan’ of modern typesetting) is known in Dutch as a hoerenjongetje, or ‘boy prostitute’.
Richard Todd
Leiden
Vol. 31 No. 15 · 6 August 2009
In Greece @ is a papi: ‘a duck’ (Letters, 23 July). And the ubiquitous Honda 50 is a papaki: ‘a little duck’. Real ducks are quite rare in Greece, hence perhaps confusion about what they look like.
Simon Darragh
Walmer, Kent
Vol. 31 No. 16 · 27 August 2009
The delicious Israeli version of @ is strudel: the rolled-up Viennese apple tart served (with a dollop of vanilla ice cream) in the coffee shops on Tel Aviv’s Ben Yehuda ‘Strasse’, by the descendants of the German and Austrian immigrants who came here in the 1930s (Letters, 9 July and Letters, 23 July, Letters, 6 August).
Raymond Aronson
Tel Aviv
The Hungarian addition to the menagerie conjured up by the @ symbol is kukac, meaning ‘grub’ or ‘maggot’.
Les Filotas
Ottawa, Canada
The symbol @ is called snabel-a by Swedish speakers in Sweden and Finland. Snabel is the Swedish word for ‘elephant’s trunk’.
Evert Vedung
Uppsala, Sweden
