00:11
So, the first one we're going to share is from アダム・サーティーンさん。
And I have seen his name floating about on the X-verse, Twitter-verse of 科学系ポッドキャスト。
He is an avid listener of 科学系ポッドキャスト.
And so, he is actually coming in with a solid question.
And so, let's go straight into it.
So, his question is, and I'm going to read this in Japanese.
シャープにもやもやしています。
昔は記号を13はナンバー13と読むものだと思っていたのですが、
最近はシャープサーティーンと聞くことが多くなりました。
また、PearlやTwitterではハッシュと言われていますね。
シャープはシャープが正しいけれど、プログラミング言語のCはCシャープはCシャープが正式。
だんだんわからなくなってきました。
この記号の読み方や使い方について教えていただけますでしょうか?
What's his question?
What a wonderful reading.
I tried.
I just realized after I started reading this out,
I'm like, oh damn, the whole point of this authority is that he doesn't know how to say this.
But everyone knows what I'm talking about.
It's two horizontal lines, two slightly slanted vertical lines on top of another.
That's the 記号.
It looks like a slanted tic-tac-toe board.
It looks like a tic-tac-toe.
If you're Japanese enough, it looks like
井の上の井とか井戸の井。
井の頭公園の井。
わかる?
Maybe.
I feel like I need...
ちょっと漢字に似てる気がする。
But anyway,
I'm so glad that Adam Sateen-san brought this up because
in my head,
I read this as シャープ,
like on its own.
Okay, that is right.
You read it first.
How you would refer to musical notes,
notations,
as a notation for half tone up.
Right, okay, yes.
So that's how I read it on its own.
However, when combined with a number following it,
I also do kind of automatically rewire to say number.
03:03
Okay, alright, let's go with that for a second.
Because also,
井の頭の井を調べた。
That first kanji does look like this.
I hadn't put it together, but now I see it.
So, yes.
That shape, right?
And so now on to
exactly the issue you had
reading this question,
which is reminiscent of a few different things, I think,
that I was not prepared to talk about.
But it's definitely reminiscent of in English, right?
When you're trying to ask how something is
expressed or pronounced, right?
And you realize there's more than one way to say it.
For example,
this is not quite the same,
but for us and listeners,
you know the word read as in to read, yes?
Yeah.
Okay, there is also read as in the past tense of read.
Oh yeah, who came up with that rule?
Okay, we won't go down the rabbit hole of why these things are,
but if you get a collection of those words together,
it can be extraordinarily difficult
for even native speakers sometimes
to parse the sentence.
But there is a way to do it.
And so you can find yourself
reading the same set of letters in different ways
in order to create the whole sentence's meaning.
And that is very, very complicated.
And this parsing is harder when you are doing it on a fly.
Yes.
Like I was doing just now.
Yes, exactly.
So it was a perfect demonstration of how hard it is
to actually do this.
I totally intentionally did that to demonstrate this.
I thought that was your plan.
Yeah.
So you look at this typographic character
or this image, this sort of figure,
this icon that we use.
Yes.
And you see it everywhere.
And so some of the options,
I think that Adam13,
is this who had said that?
Yes.
Right.
Had mentioned were the sharp.
They mentioned sort of sharp.
You also mentioned it in terms of music.
Mentioned C sharp in terms of programming language.
They also mentioned, like, you know,
is it hash or is it,
what's the other ones that they have here?
There's also pound,
if anybody's ever heard pound.
Yes, yes.
And also I just noticed reading his comments,
there's a slight difference between the
angledness between the two characters.
06:01
Right.
Okay.
So in the case of the musical note one,
I think there is a stylistic difference.
I don't know.
It's more like a font issue.
Yeah.
And you won't see the really angled,
like, musical note sharp symbol,
I think, anywhere else.
You won't see that as a hashtag.
True.
You won't see it as,
I'm pretty sure C sharp's programming language doesn't use.
I don't remember.
According to Adam13,
C sharp sharp is the horizontal.
The horizontal line ones.
Right.
Well, right.
Yeah.
So I guess it does use the,
that's interesting.
I had just known it as C sharp,
but yeah,
it does actually use,
I think the musical symbol one,
as Adam13 had said.
Oh, okay.
Because I can see the difference in formatting when I look at it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, so you have all these terms for it.
And I think something for the listeners,
I would want them to take away from this,
is that just like in Japanese,
you know,
there is,
there are situations where context matters.
This is one of them.
Right.
And sometimes you won't know how it's pronounced without checking with people using it.
Right.
In that,
in that context,
you can take some guesses,
but you might not know right away unless you have already come across it.
We can talk about a few places where it,
you know,
where it's used in different ways.
But for instance,
the context,
not only of the situation,
but of the person.
You looked at it and,
you know,
thought musical sharp.
Right.
Yeah.
Like now when I saw this comment,
I looked at it and said,
ah,
an octothorpe.
And this is probably not what most people would go and call it.
I have never heard of octothorpe until you said it.
Right.
And I think more people should enjoy the word that is octothorpe.
But it is also,
of course,
much harder to remember than something like hash,
hashtag,
pound,
or sharp.
Yeah.
Right.
But that's so confusing.
Why do we say a pound key?
I always wondered.
Right.
Perfect.
So in most of the stories that I have seen,
and in the most sort of maybe rigorous investigation,
which is from a book titled Glyph,
I think with an asterisk at the end,
that little star shape.
Okay.
There is a whole bunch of exploration of all these types of typographies.
09:02
Wired has done an article on it.
There's a bunch of blog posts about these things.
And so the story tends to go that there used to be,
when we were writing things down,
we would use the Latin abbreviation for pound,
but it was Libra Pondo,
which is LB.
Except if I say that,
it's with a P.
So I'm not going to get too hung up on why it was an LB shape.
But they wrote LB.
Right.
Like pound as in how the British currency goes.
Pound as in-
Pound as in like the weight of something.
Right.
And perhaps there is overlap here with the pound in terms of money,
but I don't know that history enough to say if those are connected.
I also don't know,
but I do know that the British currency looks like the L with a cool typography.
Right.
Which makes me think that it must come from Libra Pond,
but don't quote me on that.
I think that would definitely be another curious thing to look into,
because I'm not actually sure how they're related,
but there very much might be a relation.
But so with this, you have-
Yes.
Pound, because that was okay.
Pound.
Well, how does LB or pound become this crosshatch shape?
This line, line, cross, cross thing.
And so the story is, well,
in order to make sure that it didn't look like a one and then a B,
they would put a little line through the L.
And so this little line through the L would, you know,
often probably cross through the little B top.
Okay.
And so now you've got essentially two lines down,
a line across and a little circle for the B.
Uh-huh.
And as this sort of went, you know, over time, people simplify,
people sort of write more quickly.
You get something closer and closer to the sort of four-line striking look.
I see.
Than anything else.
At that point, you arrive at the story where we hit like the late 60s,
and you get the invention of specifically Bell Labs' telephone,
the touch-tone phone.
Okay.
And this allows, if I quote from the Wired article, I think,
inventors of the touch-tone phone, so Bell Labs,
who used it in phone systems to separate between strings of numbers.
So, end quote.
This was, you know, the sign they chose to begin separating a number sequence
that calls somebody and say an extension to get somebody else in the building.
Right?
Ah, yes, yes, yes.
Right.
And this is why you hear, like, you know,
12:00
press pound after, you know, putting in a number or something.
Yeah, after the tone or something.
Yeah.
Is that the same in Japanese?
Would you hear that on the phone if they're like, you know,
パウンドしてください, you know, type of like.
I tell you what, I am millennial enough to avoid phone calls of official type.
And I have also never worked in corporate Japan where extensions exist, you know.
So, I have never thought about it.
Then it's a mystery for the time being.
Well, maybe a listener can send into the inbox informing us.
Yeah, maybe they can vouch in for how they typically interact with this,
you know, line, line, slash, slash, slash character.
Yeah, yeah.
Tell us, tell us how you've interacted with it.
Tell us if on the phone, you know, in, you know,
日本語で like, do they, is it pound?
Do they, do they tell you to press the pound button?
Do they tell you to press the pound button?
それはね、たぶんね、シャープって言ってる。
I mean, シャープ押して。
シャープキーを押してください。
えー、OK.
だと思う。
あー、わかんないな。
でもね、I do remember pound key,
when I first heard it in the US,
I was so confused, like, which key are you talking about?
Because I had never, it's like, there's no pounds on my keys.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, yeah, but that, maybe that's it then.
Maybe it was シャープ.
Maybe that's the, or シャープキー.
So do you have the answers for connecting sharp and pound?
Right, so the sharp and pound is interesting.
I don't have a great answer for that,
but I do have a way of getting from pound to octothorpe.
OK, OK.
So go with that, go with that.
So the rest of that story, and there,
I wasn't able to pinpoint anything more than the sort of legend
that is passed down and that is also shared in this book
by some of the, like, sort of inventors and people around it,
is that, like, while they had done this,
they wanted to come up with a name for the symbol
that was more recognizable,
that was essentially more, like, impactful
than just the, you know, pound or something, right?
Like more unique, basically.
Yes, exactly.
And so this, again, this is,
as sort of quoted in all of the articles I looked at,
it begins with, legend has it, or, you know,
the legend says something like that.
We're entering the mythical world.
Right, where, you know, people were out selling the device
15:01
and they had to come up with it on the spot,
and, well, it has eight points, and that's the octo, right?
The sort of, like, root, the Latin root of eight.
Okay, okay.
And then Thorpe was apparently the name
of the inventor's favorite athlete,
Olympian Jim Thorpe, at the time.
Oh, it wasn't even the inventor's name.
It was, like, inventor's favorite athlete.
Right, which is, you know, again, legend,
and seems a little strange.
It is interesting, because Olympian Jim Thorpe
has his own sort of history,
which we maybe don't have the time to get into right now,
about, like, their metal being taken away
and then brought back, like, 30 years after their death,
and, like, it's a whole thing.
But the, yeah, that's sort of the story,
is that we went, we needed a cooler-sounding name for this,
and so the OctoThorpe came out of the attempt
to sort of sell and bring the Bell Labs touchtone phone
into the mainstream, right?
Very interesting.
Also very interesting that they decided to go
with a number of points rather than number of lines
or number of empty spaces that it creates.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you see, the points are what make it so sharp.
Get it?
Ah, good jokes, good jokes.
I mean, okay, that was actually quite nice.
Sharp, I would say.
It was sharp, but, yeah, I don't actually know the connection.
Because I tried to hold myself off from asking this question
of, like, why Octo?
I don't see anything eight, but then...
Yeah, okay, yep.
But then you mentioned points, and it's like,
okay, I do see eight now.
Yep, I think that's...
In the quad-thorpe?
What's the prefix for nine?
Oh, my gosh, you've asked me a question,
and now I'm like, non?
Isn't it non?
Non?
Yeah.
Okay, yeah.
Non-thorpe doesn't work.
This is a non-thorpe.
Quad-thorpe doesn't work.
Unlike a regular thorpe, this is a non-thorpe.
Yeah, like OctoThorpe.
Yeah, it just sounds kind of funny and fancy.
It sounds more legit.
Legit is, yeah, that was what they were probably hoping for, right?
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
Okay, well, so there you go, Adamsati sound.
Did we give you a...
Sufficient explanation.
Sufficient explanation.
Context.
I mean, as for what is correct between number...
Yeah, so...
Something?
To his specific question, which is like, when do you say number versus hash versus...
Okay, if you are outside of, say, a context where a hashtag would exist,
18:06
then it is likely, and especially if it's followed by a number,
it's probably number and then the number.
Right, right, right.
And I think he's right about it,
coming from sort of my experiential Japanese exposures.
Yeah.
That I do remember it definitely used to be called a number when it was followed by a real number.
Yeah.
But I do hear more recently people referring to it as sharp, like sharp 13 or sharp 14.
And I always thought it was kind of weird or maybe I was like, oh, maybe it's generational differences.
But I feel like I learned it as number when it was followed by a number.
So I agree with you, Adamsati-san.
Yeah.
It used to be a number.
Perhaps the kids have changed it.
I think it's been changed.
It sounds like Gen Z slang.
And I don't mean that as in like, it's definitely Gen Z slang,
but more like to us in a separate version of like a separate generation.
This could have been picked up as sharp because the way that that might have been introduced to them is sharp.
And then they pick it up as sharp.
It's not actually sharp 13, but that is now the way of like reading that.
So I wonder if that will cause some issues in communication down the line.
Yeah, I mean, I've only also heard the combination of this character and the number being referred to as sharp 13 in Japanese.
I'm going to note something and I just did a quick search.
And so the Japanese context is probably the most critical piece here where sharp is perhaps sort of overtaking any of the other uses in the case of these ones.
Barring the use probably for hashtags.
I don't know if people are saying like sharp, you know, pancake Sunday or something.
Hashtag pancake Sunday.
I don't know.
Oh my God.
I actually don't know.
Because in Japanese Twitter lingo, I feel like they say just tags.
They just say tags.
Okay.
Which they are tags, right?
But like they're hashtags.
And then they've been chosen as either tags or hashes.
I have never tried to say things like hashtag pancake Sunday in Japanese.
So I have no idea.
Again, please do share your wisdom if you have done so.
21:01
Yeah.
Share your experience.
We're sort of, I just saw another separate thing pop up and it's given me the word crowdsourcing.
We can crowdsource some sort of answer here, right?
Yes.
I'll also add, and then I think we've sufficiently added context at least for this question,
which is when I saw sharp 13, I thought, is that a band name?
And so I was thinking in like a music context, in like a movie or a creative context
where somebody has chosen to pronounce it that way for some reason, right?
Yeah.
Interesting.
Well, we somehow managed to talk about this for half an hour.
We can stop this now.
You're welcome, Adam13.
And thank you for the cool question.
Thank you, Adam13, for asking us this very insightful questions.
That's up here.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
