I was looking at some book titles today, and one of them had an & in it. I suddenly wondered, do other languages use the & sign? How about # or %?
I would guess anyone with email uses @… 
(I know that & is very uncommon in Esperanto. Esoperanto does, however, use @ for email. We pronounce it ‘cheh’, which means ‘at’.)
Latin at least used &, where it stood for “Et” (and). Look at the board font’s rendition of it carefully; you’ll see its origins.
The percent sign is arithmetic, and used across languages and even alphabets. Of the uses for #, only a few countries use the avoirdupois pound measure of mass/weight which is one major use of it; as a symbol for “number” I’m not sure. I know Spanish uses N[sup]o[/sup] for “numero” far more commonly than English “No.” is used.
Wikipedia implies the symbol goes back to Roman times, and is used in tongues based on Latin. Its use predates English.
The teachers use the ampersand sign at the Alliance Française here during our French lessons. I don’t know whether that’s because it’s common in French, or whether they’ve simply picked it up from the English usage.
The ampersand is used and widely understood in Japanese writing to mean “and.”
Apparently, outside English, @ was next to unknown before e-mail came along. In French, there’s still confusion whether to call it “a commercial” or “arobas.”
In German & is very commonly used in company names (as I believe is the case in most Western nations), % is of course used for per cent (as it is everywhere), and # has very little currency (it is sometimes used as a shorthand for ordinality, but I believe this has only very recently been imported from English).
One glyph that I don’t see in English texts is the section sign § - in German it’s very usual in referring to numbered sections of (esp. legal) texts such as statutes. The English paragraph sign ¶ OTOH isn’t used.
Symbols from English texts that I don’t recall being used in German texts are the dagger and double dagger. The dagger, if used, would be liable to be confused with a Christian cross, i.e.
would be generally understood not to mean “Joseph Example (see footnote marked by dagger)” but “Joseph Example (deceased)”.
Dutch uses &, % all the time. I see #, or the paragraph sign sometimes, but very infrequently.
A bit archaic is No for number, where the o is much smaller then the N and is underlined twice. You only see that in old cash-register books.
Our newest toy is the euro-sign, modelled after the dollarsign: €
Finnish uses & and %. # isn’t that usual; we tend to abbreviate “number” as “nro” (numero). The paragraph sign isn’t used at all; at least I’ve never run into it, not even when reading proofread material. § is used to indicated paragraphs or statutes(?) of legal texts.
The dagger/double-dagger is also quite uncommon. Like tschild indicated, I think it would be seen more as “deceased”. Footnotes are generally indicated with numbers.
For some reason America calls the “#” the “pound” symbol, while down in this part of the world (Australia, New Zealand, and presumably Britain too) call it a “hash”. Not sure why. Most other symbols seem to have similar names, but not that one.
Yup, § is what I meant by “paragraph sign” It’s used the same way in Dutch as in Finnish.
What is the meaning of the double dagger in English tekst?
Isn’t ~ exclusively used in Spanish and Portugese? Like that French thingy under the c in garçon?
The Irish have (or used to have) a symbol for “and” (in Irish “agus”), which looked a bit like a small, italic number 7. I am afraid I don’t know whether it has a special name.
You can still see it in the P 7 T - “pay agus tay” (standing for whatever Post & Telegraphs is in Irish) - inscribed on Irish post- and telephone phone-boxes, as shown in the 8th and 9th pictures here.
It used to be used for footnoting: the symbol structure was asterisk, double asterisk, dagger, double dagger. Nowadays, people tend to use numbers, though.
You’ll see those symbols sometimes in things like scientific papers where notes relating to the text–references, comments, and occasionally full procedures–are marked by numbers. An asterisk or dagger is sometimes used to indicate the corresponding author or similar info, where it’s something the reader might like to know but isn’t integral to the paper.
The tilde (~) is used in Spanish above the n: ñ. It is considered a separate letter, coming after n and o. The sound it makes is somewhat similar to the “ny” in “canyon”. The Portuguese use the tilde to represent a nasal vowel.
Maastricht writes:
> Our newest toy is the euro-sign, modelled after the dollarsign
Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that it’s modelled after the sign for pounds used in the U.K. (and maybe in other countries) and the sign for yen in Japan? It has two horizontal lines crossing it. This is more like the sign for pounds (with one horizontal line crossing it) and the sign for yen (with two horizontal lines crossing it). The dollar sign officially has one vertical line crossing it, although a lot of Americans uses two lines instead. The dollar sign, incidentally, comes from the sign for the peso. If you do a search, you’ll find some threads in which we discussed that fact.
GuanoLad writes:
> For some reason America calls the “#” the “pound” symbol, while down in this
> part of the world (Australia, New Zealand, and presumably Britain too) call it
> a “hash”. Not sure why. Most other symbols seem to have similar names, but
> not that one.
Americans sometimes call it the hash sign, but it’s more common to call it the pound sign. It’s sometimes used to mark the number of pounds that something weighs, but that’s a little old-fashioned now. It would be too confusing to call it the pound sign in the U.K. or anywhere else they use pounds as currency, since that would confuse it with the sign for pounds as currency.
I recall seeing the § symbol in several mathematical texts, and I assume that some of them were in English, although I can’t say for sure. (If not, they were in French.) So I guess it is used, but probably in some specific fields and less often than in other languages.
I don’t really see the hash sign # used here, except on phones. People would understand it to mean “number”, but we usually use “N[sup]o[/sup]”, which is similar to Polycarp’s Spanish sign, without the line under the ‘o’. In the context of mathematics, the hash sign would mean taking the cardinality of a set.
The section sign § is actually fairly common in English but is normally restricted in use to legal and technical writing, referencing a particular section of statute/codified law or a numbered section of something broken down into a list format.
My father, who was about as Irish as Kurt Waldheim, used to use this all the time. As I was growing up, I learned that & and 7 were equally appropriate ways to “shorthand” the word “and.” It was fairly common in my hometown in the 1950s, but seems to have died out in the half century since.
In some languages the word for “and” is only one letter/character long and I might not expect those to use the & because it doesn’t save time or space. I belive that in all of the languages mentioned thus far as using it the word for “and” is at least 2 and more commonly 3 letters long.