Esperluette

The esperluette , also called “perluète”, “esperluète” or “and commercial”, is the Logogramme & . It corresponds to the conjunction and has the same direction as this one.

Its inventor would be Tiron, also author of the first method of described Sténographie, the Notes tironiennes.

Historical use

It results from the binding of the E and the T . In the beginning, this bound C-W communication was more or less systematically used by the medieval Copiste S , which used many others In fact Abréviation S., one finds the esperluette frequently employed for the terms and etc. ( &c. ). Whereas generally, in the European manuscripts , only these two terms were shortened in & , the English scribes also made use of it for any sequence - and : deberet could be written deber& . One finds however also such C-Ws communication on the Continent: fazet , in the Serments of Strasbourg is written faz& .

Origin

  • It seems that she was regarded as the 27e letter of the alphabet until the 19th century. According to the Treasure of the French language , the & , last letter of the alphabet, was called be ; however, with the elementary school, one learned how to the children to recite the alphabet by adding after “Z” the Latin words “and, per, and” (“and, in oneself, “and””) marked “-per himself-be”, kind of rhyme ludic and singing which helped the memory. The use made that one called finally the character “&” perluète or esperluette . An etymology of Provence is also evoked be-per-lou-and , in French it is for the " et" , stating clearly that the character & wants to say " et". It is to be noticed that the etymology of the English word ampersand is very similar (“ and, per, and ”).
See ampersand and on the Wiktionnaire.
  • Another assumption was formulated: esperluette would come from “hopes for read and ” (It is hoped that it is read “and”), but which seems contradicted by the English etymology of the sign “&” (cf above).
  • the esperluette was already used by the Roman scribes.
  • For the French etymology, one can also imagine a mixture of these two assumptions (“and, per, read and” - and in oneself, read: and).
  • the historical Robert of the French language, in its edition of 1992, straightforwardly has two articles (“Esperluette” in the E and “Perluète or Esperluette, Esperluète” in P) which are contradicted:
    • the second evokes childish creation described well above (as well as the influence “to spell” and of “pirouette”),
    • but first esperluette makes come from the Latin perna , “leg, thigh, knuckle of ham,” via pernula (which gave “pearl, perlette”) with influence of sphaerula , “small sphere”. The name of the sign would thus come from its form and not from its direction.

Contemporary use

Currently, in French, the esperluette is used very little, and even rejected into the literary language. Its use is primarily circumscribed with the commercial language, more specifically advertizing. That explains why the esperluette is sometimes called “ and commercial ”. It seems on the other hand more current in English (under the name of ampersand) and perhaps in certain dialectal varieties African of French.

In some data-processing languages, the & or && is employed to indicate the operation AND logic and the operation AND binary in the Boolean algebra. Under a system UNIX, placed at the end of the line of a Interpreter of orders, it indicates that one wishes to carry out a program in background. In C and C++, it is an operator who returns the address memory of a variable when it precedes this variable. This address can then be stored in a pointer .

In the documents HTML or based on the language XML, for example XHTML, the esperluette is an escape character intended to indicate that the following characters to the first semicolon met will be used for posting of an entity (a variable, to some extent). That results in to prevent the validation of a code “&” when naively employed, without taking account of the special character of the esperluette. To post a esperluette in a document (X) HTML without the view of entities being engaged, one can replace it by the chain “& amp; ”.

It is a question of one of the rare characters to have the same direction in many languages.

External bonds

  • Nodes & esperluettes: current events and perenniality of a sign Gerard BLANCHARD, Book GUTenberg #22 (pp. 43-59)

esperluette|esperluette

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