Posted on 09/30/2018 8:04:00 AM PDT by Moonman62
As with a lot of aspects of typography, the history of the ampersand begins with our triumphant and progressive friends, the Ancient Romans.
Roman scribes would write in cursive so as to increase the speed of their transcription, often combining letters into one form to save time while also increasing legibility, where certain characters overlap in a visually discordant manner — this was the birth of the ligature. The ampersand is simply a ligature of the letters E and T (et being the latin word for and).
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The Etymology
Before deconstructing the word ampersand, you must first understand another latin legacy that made its way into our modern language.
By the early seventeen hundreds, schools throughout England had started to use the phrase per se (essentially meaning by itself) when spelling out words. This was specifically useful when encountering words that consist of only a single letter (A, I and originally O).
At the same time, and (the et-ligature &, now pronounced and) had become common place and was all but inducted into the English language as the 27th letter of the alphabet. It became so widely used that children in school, when reciting the alphabet, would include & after the letter Z. The result of this was that phonetically you would hear “X, Y, Z and per se and” indicating that the & stood by itself at the end of the alphabet. The phrase “and per se and” was inevitably slurred into one single term and by 1837, the term ampersand was well and truly immortalised in the English dictionary.
Click the article link if you want the long version. And feel free to offer your own summary.
The summary provided above made perfect sense to me and was a quick read.
You people are so lazy. Click the link. Better yet, find a better source and post it.
Here is some etymology for the internet age: people who complain without adding to a thread are deemed “parasites.”
Someone should tell the Romans that cursive is, like a dead language. Many cannot read it.
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