Section sign

The section sign or paragraph sign is prepended in legal texts of a number and thus indicates the beginning of a new paragraph, which is designated by the numeral, for example, § 433 Pronounced it is " four hundred thirty-three Clause " in this context as well. If you want in a text refer to multiple paragraphs, the symbol is used twice, for example, § § 433 et seq Pronounced this is called " four hundred thirty-three following paragraphs " ( often wrongly " seq " read).

Origin

The origin of the character is controversial.

• The paragraphos (Greek παράγραφος sc γραμμή " next to Written " ) was originally a horizontal line with a vertical hook in front, which was set at the beginning of a line, in which a portion ended. In Roman times it was a "T" or " Γ ", in the Middle Ages, one understood the latter as " C" (or " K") for caput ( " Section start "). The paragraph symbol " ¶" and "§" have evolved from a Gothic "C" ( ℭ ).

• The German Paläograf Paul Lehmann was of the opinion that the section sign originated with the letter " C" for capitulum.

• According to one view, it is a double -S, which stands for the abbreviation signum sectionis (Latin for " sign of the section "). As paper used to be very expensive, the writer saved the insertion of a new line and painted the section sign as separation characters (including Latin signum separandi ) to the edge. This was written as ineinandergeschlungenes " SS ." From then the familiar paragraph sign is said to have developed. indication of this was that read in older language of the paragraph as the " hyphen " and in many older certifications, eg "/ 3 / " also, the abbreviation of the term Senatus Sententia was written instead of " § 3 ." (Latin for " sentence of the senate " ), as the source of the double S in conversation.

• As a further statement also mentions the possibility, it could be a prescription of the Digest Letter D, or a combination of the paragraph mark of the Romans, which resembled the Greek letter rho, the letter C, for caput (Latin for " main, main section " ), which was used at the beginning of a new chapter.

• According to the Dictionary of the Greek Language in 1857 the character goes to the Egyptian hieroglyph; Transliteration: " goreh "; Transcription: GRH back end, completion, suspension and in a broader sense to pause. This hieroglyph (U 130 A2) written in red standing in Ancient Egypt in manuscripts often as the final character in a text or a verse and is therefore also referred to as " break character".

Representation in computer systems and replacement

Coding

In the international character encoding system is Unicode "§ " to position

• U 00 A7 " section sign" ( section sign ).

In the ASCII character set, the character is not included, which is why many older computer systems it could not represent readily. For data processing the character was introduced on a large scale with the ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1), where it is also at position 167 or 0xA7. Also in ISO 6937, it is on this position.

In HTML, the character is coded as follows:

• § (hexadecimal),
• § (decimal) and
• § ( named characters).

The keysym name for use with xmodmap in the X Window System is section.

Typesetting

Substitution

If the character can not be displayed because it is missing in the font or character set, so it should be " paragraph" are replaced by the word " paragraph" or.

Since it can be the sign processed, transmitted, and archived using modern computer systems, a replacement for technical reasons is not necessary. Even if the keyboard you are using does not have the character, it can be practically always inserted through a corresponding function of the operating system or the respective text editor.

Trivia

The paragraph sign replaced in the logo of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice the letter " s".