Many thanks to all people who let me know what the AT sign is called in
their own language(s). I was practically inundated with email! A number of
people pointed out that there was a similar discussion in the LINGUIST list
(LINGUIST List 7.968 Tue Jul 2 1996;
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-968.html), and now I am simply
copying the summary from that list. I will, however, compare my replies with
the data in the LINGUIST list and will let you know if there are any
differences.
Best wishes,
Tadeusz Piotrowski
English Department
Opole University
Oleska 48
Opole
Poland
tel/fax +48-71-3165847
mobile +48-607-159263
The survey was done by Karen Steffen Chung
National Taiwan University
karchung@ccms.ntu.edu.tw
37 languages were covered: Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, Catalan, Czech,
Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Frisian, German,
Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Lithuanian, Mandarin, Chinese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian,
Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, and
Turkish.
...
A broad spectrum of metaphors, some very concrete and others relatively
abstract, is used to describe @, ranging from animals and body parts (e.g.
Chinese 'little mouse', Danish 'elephant's trunk', Dutch 'monkey's tail',
French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean 'snail', Hungarian 'worm/maggot', Russian
'little dog', Swedish 'cat's foot', Arabic, German, Turkish, 'ear') to food
(e.g. Hebrew 'strudel', Swedish 'cinnamon bun', Czech/Slovak 'collared
herring/rollmop') to letters of an alphabet (e.g. Norwegian 'curled alpha',
Tamil _du_; and the more abstract French, Italian, Russian 'commercial "a"',
Serbian 'crazy "a"'); some are direct borrowings (e.g. Icelandic, Cantonese)
or translations (e.g. Romanian, Greek) of the English 'at'; and there are a
few variants of the Spanish weight measure _arroba_, (e.g. Catalan
_arrova_/_rova_, French _arobase_).
...
What the report does not say is that for speakers of at least two languages
(Polish, Slovak) the sign is called 'monkey', and they think it is a
borrowing from German.
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