[WAY OT] Parenthese, was Re: [gentoo-user] I can RTFM, but can I understand it: re elog messages

[Mike Edenfield <kutulu@kutulu.org>]

On 8/20/2010 11:40 AM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

> As to the thingies, I enjoyed discovering that to many people a
> parenthesis is not a glyph or punctuation mark, but instead the contents
> of the language set aside in one way or another.  I had always regarded
> parentheses as the round glyphs (), but this turns out to be normative
> primarily in mathematics, computer programming languages and similar
> fields.  But I find several competing meanings and sources using
> http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna
> <http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=parenthesis&ia=luna>

In American English usage, the three forms of puncutation mark have
distinct names.  Contrary to previous assertions, these names are not
informal; authoritative American English dictionaries like M-W define
"bracket", "brace", and "parenthesis" separately as punctuation marks.

In British English they're all called "brackets", e.g. square, curly, or
round.

The Romance languages are somewhat varied, but they mostly use the Greek
word parenthesis to derive their term for () marks; in some cases, that
word is use for *all* brackets; in other cases [] and {} have separate
terms:

() = parenthèses (Fr.), paréntesis (Sp.), parentesi tonde (It.)
[] = crochets (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi quadre (It.)
{} = accolades (Fr.), corchetes (Sp.), parentesi graffe (It.)

For what it's worth, Unicode defines U+0028 AND U+0029 as "LEFT
PARENTHESIS" and "RIGHT PARENTHESIS" (also "OPENING PARENTHESIS" and
"CLOSING PARENTHESIS").

--Mike