Al Haines (shaw) wrote:

- A book I'm working on has a small dagger or sword symbol (point down, handle up) next to some dates....What does this symbol mean?

Date of death.

On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Al Haines (shaw) wrote:

A couple of questions, just to satisfy my curiosity:

- A book I'm working on has a small dagger or sword symbol (point down, handle up) next to some dates. It looks something like the "dagger" symbol in Windows' Arial font, Unicode U2020. Two examples, with an exclamation mark substituting for the symbol, are "Occam ! c. 1349" and "Colet ! 1519". What does this symbol mean?

Yes, as already mentioned, the dagger symbol is used to indicate date of death. You might also occassionally see it used as a footnote marker. And yes, U+2020 is the correct code point for this character.

- On several books' copyright page, I've seen the statement "all rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian." Why are Scandinavian languages specially noted like this?

I only have guesses here. It could be something to do with the state of international laws at the time. Or perhaps there had been a significant number of unauthorized scandanavian translations. I do know that many of the Finnish texts in PG are translations of a surprisingly broad spectrum of works from other languages. For example, Beaumarchais' "Marriage of Figaro", Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887", Dante's "Divine Comedy", Dickens' "David Copperfield", and works by Epictetus, Gustave Flaubert, Goethe, Henrik Ibsen, Moliere, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Tolstoy, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Jules Verne. Andrew