One year ago, on 28 February 2025, Wikipedia user Moyogo updated the page for Angzarr with a citation to the type foundry H. Berthold AG’s 1950 symbol catalogue listing ⍼ as Azimut, Richtungswinkel,…
Schriftproben (1900), p. 217 (no ⍼) A friend on Mastodon pointed out that the glyph ⍼ itself resembles the way a light ray passes through a sextant to measure an azimuth, with the right angle being a standard symbol for an angle in general. Wikipedia has a lovely illustration demonstrating how a sextant works to measure latitude of the sun; it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian.
Great detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian. That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridian and a landmark.
A sextant can be used to obtain the relative horizontal angle between two landmarks, but it is much easier to use an azimuth ring. A sextant is designed to be used vertically. Holding and using one horizontally is difficult and time-consuming in comparison and is probably a less than a 1% use case, used only during the training of apprentices as a theoretical exercise (source: professional mariner for many years and daily user of a sextant back in the day). A comparison would be using a screwdriver to drive in a nail; you could do it given enough time, but a hammer is much easier.
I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth) avoiding the use of any lettering (like “N”) or the use of a compass-like symbol which would be difficult to represent at such small scale.
Also (pedant warning for another poster) Polaris is not the brightest star, it’s around the 40th and has no practical use for navigation other than “north is roughly that way”.
> I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth)
The way I see it, it appears to be an arrow curling around the vertical axis, representing the turn from the angle's start to the angle's end. In that sense, the modern curvy arrow actually makes more sense than the original jagged one (which maybe was easier to typeset - or maybe just disproves my theory).
Sextants were used for coastal mapping though, albeit specialized ones called hydrographic sextants.
You can see one here: https://sextantbook.com/2019/01/13/a-french-hydrographic-sex...
The linked article is by W.J. Morris, and his book on sextants is in my opinion one of the standard works and much recommended.
Note that the description says "Azimut, Richtungswinkel". Those seem to be somewhat different concepts today. The respective Wikipedia articles don't even mention each other:
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> Great detective work
"Haussystem Didot" in the article's referenced typesetting catalog refers to the typesetting of the Didot family's printing agency. And they used that symbol 1700 and onwards in their map navigation descriptions in these books:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
I am gonna repeat myself, but search for the Gallica links in each of those books to find the scans. There you can see earlier usage and evidence that as I pointed out in other - downvoted comments - that this was commonly used for sextant navigation instructions.
The image referencing "Haussystem Didot" is an example of a catalog not containing the Angzarr symbol in question.
I did not find any evidence for earlier examples in any of the very few scans I looked at, nor does a search through the Google Books scans give any indication for words that seem related to the concept.
This would be such a fantastic find! Could you point out a specific example?
Fascinating links, but I could not find an example of the glyph in question? My point was that a sextant is not (and cannot be) used to measure azimuth. It primarily measures the angle between a celestial body and the horizon (i.e. altitude). It can also (theoretically, very rarely) be used to measure the horizontal angle between two or more landmarks, but that is not azimuth in the accepted sense of the word. I am happy to be corrected though; my experience of sextants may be too narrow or modern for this context.
I prefer to think these characters have an antimemetic field that causes anyone who learns their true meaning to forget shortly after.
> There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what U+237C is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Paraphrased from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
context: a follow up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 (2022), a post which started the hunt for the mysterios origin of this unicode symbol.
That's become of the most memorable threads on Hacker News to me. I definitely think about it at least once most weeks.
Closure finally!
Well not really though. It still doesn't answer where the symbol came from; just where it was first catalogued.
Presumably its original use was in some yet-unfound paper or manual where they needed a symbol for azimuth.
what will i do... with all this extra time....
