Re: Accents

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Henrik Mathiesen" <thorinn@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2002 6:28 PM
Subject: Re: Accents


> > Date:         Tue, 8 Jan 2002 12:55:37 -0500
> > From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
> >
> > Stephen Mulraney wrote:
> >
> > > BTW, why do Americans call # ('hash', 'octothorp') the 'pound symbol'
??
> >
> > Because it used to be written *following* a number on bags full of
> > stuff to indicate their weight in pounds, thus:  20# = 20 pounds
> > weight.
>
> My theory is that this use of the # sign is derived from the L B BAR
> SYMBOL at U-2114, or a script version of it. Older Danish cookbooks
> (and my grandmother's handwritten recipes) use a symbol for a pound
> that looks like a script lowercase u with the right tail going back
> across the legs --- that would be an intermediate stage.
>
> BTW, John, would that be a candidate for encoding in Unicode? It
> doesn't really look like either a NUMBER SIGN or an L B BAR SYMBOL.
>
> I don't know how the symbol came to be used for a number sign, though.
> Perhaps the current shape is really a merger of two different signs.
>
Well, on an English keyboard, the '£' sign takes its place...£(pound)
instead of #(hash, pound)