On the subject of names of ligatures and other characters, I have
noticed that some Americans call the # sign "pound". AM I right in
thinking this is because its key is in place of the GBP £ sign (shift-
3) on the keyboard?
I call it "hash", though I have also heard it called "hatch" which
would be more (etymo)logical (a hatch being a door made of
crossbars).
Anecdotally, I remember being confused as a kid when I first came
across the usage of # to mean "number" (as in Issue #5). In British
English (at least at that time) its use was restricted to musical
notation ("sharp").
Not sure what any of this has do with corpora however, but it is a
sunny Friday lunchtime here in Manchester!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 13:35:38 MET DST