27.6.21

Sandro Veronesi, lavorare a Venezia e la storia dell'asterisco

Recensione entusiastica di The Hummingbird (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, tradotto da Elena Pala) del nostro Sandro Veronesi, "Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here: warmth, wit, intelligence, love, death, high seriousness, low comedy, philosophy, subtle personal relationships and the complex interior life of human beings". Edward Docx, The Guardian

Sconfortante analisi del mercato del lavoro a Venezia, "Among the lousy job options for Venetians: serving pizza, selling fake local “artifacts,” and working at the Venice Biennal", Giulio Piovesan, Hyperallergic

Molto interessante questa recente storia dell'asterisco (Claire Cock-Starkey, Hyphens & Hashtags*: *The Stories Behind the Symbols on Our Keyboard, Bodleian Library Publishing), che lo fa risalire ad Aristarco di Samotracia, "Sumerian pictographic writing includes a sign for “star” that looks like a modern asterisk. These early writings from five thousand years ago are the first known depiction of an asterisk; however, it seems unlikely that these pictograms are the forerunner of the symbol we use today. Palaeographers know that Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 bc) used an asterisk symbol when editing Homer in the second century bc, because later scholars wrote about him doing so. Physical examples of Aristarchus’ asterisks have not survived, so we cannot know their physical shape, but as the word asterisk derives from the Greek asteriskos, meaning “little star,” an assumption has been made that they resembled a small star. Aristarchus used the symbols to mark places in Homer’s text that he was copying where he thought passages were from another source".  Claire Cock-Starkey, Lapham's

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