Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 October 28

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October 28

Number gestures article missing

Hi!

There is a Chinese number gestures article but there is none about the other cultures. I think it would be interesting to create one. The Chinese one could even be merged into it. What do you guys think? 58.186.64.248 (talk) 03:05, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

It doesn't matter what anyone here thinks. What matters is whether reliable, independent, published sources are available. The article you link has only one citation, which is to a blog, so one approach would be to broaden out that article so that it has a global perspective, as long as you can find appropriate sources.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:32, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Well, the primary function of the Reference Desks is to find references for editors, so get you started:-

Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers (p. 201 onwards) by Karl Menninger.

Alansplodge (talk) 11:00, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia Has An Article On Everything! - I have just found our article on Finger-counting which may cover much of the same ground. I have added a link in the "See also" section of the Chinese article. Alansplodge (talk) 11:26, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Names of The Devil?

Is there a list anywhere of all the different names of Satan/The Devil? Don't need this for any nefarious purpose. Just something that I was talking about today with someone. There's supposed to be hundreds?

Apart from Satan and The Devil, I know Lucifer, Beelzebub, Baphomet. --146.200.107.70 (talk) 03:32, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

You could start with Devil in Christianity and then search for the word "devil" in Wikipedia. I don't know that there's an explicit list of the names. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:29, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Wiktionary has a list at wikt:Thesaurus:Satan. Amble (talk) 04:43, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. Had been doing some googling around and come across some of those names, but I find people arguing over whether some of those are *The* Devil, or merely *a* devil. --146.200.107.70 (talk) 05:06, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Old Nick, Old Scratch or Mr. Scratch, Old Harry, the Prince of Darkness (who's the King of Darkness???), Father of Lies. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:07, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Iblis, Samael, Belial are other names I heard. What was the Goat of Mendes? Not sure if that was Satan (or the baphomet) or an associate of Satan. Just been reading the internet after seeing this thread. --Iloveparrots (talk) 08:36, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

In the Abrahamic religions, including mainline Christian sects, there is only one supernatural adversary of God seducing us mortals to sin, so then a discussion whether a synonym refers to any member of a plurality is moot.  --Lambiam 09:28, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Hmm, I think that's putting it too strongly. There's often considered one who's in charge of the others, but there could be lots of others, possibly fallen angels, or in Islam impious djinn (I gather that there are also good djinn; djinn, like men, have free will and will be judged on the Last Day, but they seem to qualify as "supernatural" in any case).

A lot of the Jewish and Christian lore about these beings is not actually in the Bible, but the Bible has references to it, as in the "principalities and powers" of Ephesians 6:12. Principalities and powers are two of the ranks in the hierarchy of angels (in this case, presumably fallen angels). --Trovatore (talk) 23:23, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough. But you will not see them referred to as "devils" in doctrinal texts; it is always "the Devil and his angels".  --Lambiam 14:45, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

"Abbadon" is another. Was "Damian" associated with the devil until the Omen movies? Not sure. --Iloveparrots (talk) 08:53, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Be aware that different traditions have different definitions of "The Devil", and that some names are in some traditions alternative names of that supposed entity whilst in others the same names are names of entities distinct from "The Devil". See for example Demonology. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.65.29 (talk) 13:50, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Indeed. Virtually all the names listed above have articles for them and they explain how difficult the question really is to answer. Because this is mythology with no outside, objective, reality to test and report on, the list of names is going to be very open ended, starting with the person's religion and how pedantic they want to be. For some, all these figures are pseudonyms of "the great evil" but for others they are distinct beings. Epithet#Religion is going to come into play. Matt Deres (talk) 18:58, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

You can find a bunch of them in one of my favorite Robert Burns poems, Address to the Deil. Those are in Scots but you can easily find sites that have it in translation. --Trovatore (talk) 19:41, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I only know him from "there's a moose loose aboot this hoose". Thanks to everyone else who gave answers too. --146.200.107.70 (talk) 20:01, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Don't forget George Spiggott :-) MarnetteD|Talk 16:22, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Who designed the copyright symbol?

The article Copyright symbol doesn't mention who designed it, and I can't find it either. Someone invented a C within a circle, to label stuff that can't be simply copied by anyone, and everyone is copying his work to say you can't copy their work. It just doesn't seem fair. Joepnl (talk) 23:26, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Letters in a circle had already been in use as symbols for a variety of purposes. For example, the symbol ®, a letter R enclosed within a circle, was used to indicated a registered trademark or service mark, as a non-intrusive alternative to a text such as "Registered in U. S. Patent Office",^[1] So when the Copyright Commission needed a less intrusive alternative to the phrase "Copyright Joseph X. Shmoe", a plausible scenario is that they took the familiar encircled R and replaced the letter by a C. The "designers" of the copyright symbol may have been copycats.  --Lambiam 03:56, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Joepnl -- in any case raster renderings of font characters which are used "functionally" (as opposed to pure decoration) are uncopyrightable in the United States, and basically everything published in the U.S. before 1926 is out of copyright (in the form in which it was published before 1926). AnonMoos (talk) 06:34, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

The symbol was introduced in 1909, as noted Here. It does not note who first put it together, however. As noted above, it is ineligible for copyright today, and likely ever, for several reasons. 1) It is out-of-date, meaning that any copyright that may have existed has already expired long ago. 2) As a simple letter and shape, used for functional purposes, it likely does not meet the threshold of originality required for copyright to exist, even hypothetically and EVEN saying all of that 3) as a work for hire, such copyright would belong not to the person, but to their employer, who in this case would be United States Copyright Office, which as a US Federal agency, automatically releases all of its work into the public domain as a matter of policy (see Copyright status of works by the federal government of the United States). --Jayron32 13:23, 29 October 2021 (UTC)