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There was a post a long time ago that quoted a AT&T researcher as saying that when the dial telephone was being developed, they needed a new symbol, and invented the name octothorp for it.
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From http://www.ablepanasonic.com/missoffirmus.html"Octothorpe" is one of many names for the # key - usually found below the 9 and to the right of 0 on a touch-tone phone. It's also called the tick-tack-toe sign, cross-hash, cross-hatch, enter, hash, number-sign, noughts-and-crosses, octothorp, pound, pound-sign and probably other things.
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Carpal Tunnel
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and its easy to see how thorp, when spelled with the throrn--Žorp became Dorp in africaners.. i think of the movie The 39 steps-- in which a key to solving the mystery is a "a one shay dorp" (or a one horse town-- as it is translated in the movie.. though a shay and horse are not the same thing)
now days, we call such small hamlets a "one traffic light town" but CK seems to think such towns no longer exist.
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Carpal Tunnel
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we call such small hamlets a "one traffic light town" but CK seems to think such towns no longer exist.
No stop lights in Trumbull's Corners! None in Newfield, either, now that I think about it.
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Carpal Tunnel
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In Indonesian it's tanda pagar, the fence sign.
Bingley
Bingley
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Pooh-Bah
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though a shay and horse are not the same thing says of troy.
Indeed they are not, but a "shay", in the Cockney cant, was a one-horse carriage or wagon - indeed, I think a corruption of "chaise."
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and its easy to see how thorp, when spelled with the throrn--Žorp became Dorp in africaners
No, thorp is common Germanic, meaning 'village': it existed in Old English as that and also metathesized to throp (in place names such as Winthrop, Adlestrop, and the Spencer pronunciation of Althorpe as Althrop). It also occurred in Old Norse, so Danish settlements in England used it.
th changed to d in the common ancestor of German and Dutch (and Afrikaans), after it had parted company with Old English: thus dorp. It's a sound change, nothing to do with the letter thorn. As you travel south from Holland across Germany you get further sound changes gradually coming in (the "Rhenish fan"). There's a line across Germany south of which the word is Dorf. These are of course common in Dutch and German place names.
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Thanks for that, NicholasW - great amplification. So there is a direct linguistic link between say Dusseldorf and Althorpe?
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