| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Pronunciation of @ et al. throughout the world Thread poster: Paul Dixon
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Krzysztof Kajetanowicz (X) 
Poland
Local time: 03:46
English to Polish
+ ...
I'm so glad to be the first Pole here to break the news to you.
We call the @ symbol małpa, which literally means monkey.
Someone, somewhere in our country thought once that the @ symbol looked decidedly like a monkey, sitting on a branch somewhere, sleeping, maybe producing monkey guano. Hence, monkey. Amazingly, it's intuitive enough (to me as well) to have been widely a... See more I'm so glad to be the first Pole here to break the news to you.
We call the @ symbol małpa, which literally means monkey.
Someone, somewhere in our country thought once that the @ symbol looked decidedly like a monkey, sitting on a branch somewhere, sleeping, maybe producing monkey guano. Hence, monkey. Amazingly, it's intuitive enough (to me as well) to have been widely adopted.
Because my own address only has my first name before the @ symbol, spelling it out I sound like I'm introducing myself as "Chris the monkey".
[Edited at 2010-10-02 07:00 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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For what it's worth, Greeks perceive this symbol, not as a monkey, or an elephant's trunk, nor even as a dog, but as the head of a cartoon duck (e.g. Donald). The word for that in Greek is papaki (little duck). If you imagine the central a and the space to the right of it as the duck's eyes, and the curl underneath as the beak ... well, you either get it or you don't.
The website papaki.gr is one of the main domain name registrants in Greece.
[Edited at 2010-10-02 09:1... See more For what it's worth, Greeks perceive this symbol, not as a monkey, or an elephant's trunk, nor even as a dog, but as the head of a cartoon duck (e.g. Donald). The word for that in Greek is papaki (little duck). If you imagine the central a and the space to the right of it as the duck's eyes, and the curl underneath as the beak ... well, you either get it or you don't.
The website papaki.gr is one of the main domain name registrants in Greece.
[Edited at 2010-10-02 09:19 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Romeo Mlinar
Portugal
Local time: 02:46
English to Serbian
+ ...
In Serbian colloquial "@" is called "crazy A".
"Yes, yes.. my mail is... 'example', then 'crazy a', 'gmail full stop com'"
| | | | XXXphxxx (X)
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:47
Portuguese to English
+ ...
'Arobase' but also increasingly 'at'.
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Andrea Russo
Italy
Local time: 03:47
English to Italian
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| @ in Italian | Jan 30, 2012 |
Marie-Hélène Hayles wrote: they say chiocciola (kee-OTCH-ola, more or less), which means "snail" - also very appropriate. So [email protected] would be a (like hat) b chee chiociolla d e (like egg) eff-eh (long f, two syllables) punto eat (pronounced as short as possible) or punto ee t - some people pronounce the it as one word, some as separate letters.
Actually, the Italian sound [a] is different from the sound in hat, which is pronounced /'haet/. Also, to make things clearer for an English speaker, the first sound of chiocciola is /k/ (as in count), not the sound in church.
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