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On 8/20/2010 11:40 AM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote: |
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> As to the thingies, I enjoyed discovering that to many people a |
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> parenthesis is not a glyph or punctuation mark, but instead the contents |
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> of the language set aside in one way or another. I had always regarded |
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> parentheses as the round glyphs (), but this turns out to be normative |
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> primarily in mathematics, computer programming languages and similar |
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> fields. But I find several competing meanings and sources using |
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> http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna |
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> <http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna> |
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|
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In American English usage, the three forms of puncutation mark have |
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distinct names. Contrary to previous assertions, these names are not |
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informal; authoritative American English dictionaries like M-W define |
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"bracket", "brace", and "parenthesis" separately as punctuation marks. |
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In British English they're all called "brackets", e.g. square, curly, or |
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round. |
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|
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The Romance languages are somewhat varied, but they mostly use the Greek |
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word parenthesis to derive their term for () marks; in some cases, that |
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word is use for *all* brackets; in other cases [] and {} have separate |
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terms: |
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|
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() = parenthèses (Fr.), paréntesis (Sp.), parentesi tonde (It.) |
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[] = crochets (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi quadre (It.) |
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{} = accolades (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi graffe (It.) |
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|
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For what it's worth, Unicode defines U+0028 AND U+0029 as "LEFT |
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PARENTHESIS" and "RIGHT PARENTHESIS" (also "OPENING PARENTHESIS" and |
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"CLOSING PARENTHESIS"). |
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--Mike |