Asterisk the Gaul
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A learned friend recently sent me a draft composition on medieval Chinese history in which he referred to "*" as an "asterix". This reminded me that ten years ago I wrote a post, "The many pronunciations of '*'" (12/17/15), on this subject and we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about it.
Given that lately we've been talking a lot about Celts, Galatians, and so on, I think it is appropriate to write another post on Asterix the Gaul, that famous French comic book character, and how he got his name. Also inspired / prompted by Chris Button's latest comment.
I often hear "*" pronounced "asterix" or "asterick", and so on (e.g., "astrisk" [two syllables], esp. in rapid speech). It's hard even for me to pronounce "*" or type the symbol those ways, so ingrained is the pronunciation "as-ter-isk".
First, a little refresher course on "*", how / when it came about, how it is written, how it is pronounced, and what it signifies:
The asterisk (/ˈæstərɪsk/ *), from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C*-algebra). An asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in print and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten, though more complex forms exist. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor offensive words.
…
The asterisk was already in use as a symbol in ice age cave paintings. There is also a two-thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark lines that were duplicated. Origen is known to have also used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a symbol used to correct defects remained.
In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a particular part of text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment. However, an asterisk was not always used.
One hypothesis to the origin of the asterisk is that it stems from the 5000-year-old Sumerian character dingir , though this hypothesis seems to only be based on visual appearance.
Now, on to how Asterix the Gaul and the other characters in the comic got their names.
All the fictional characters in Asterix have names which are puns on their roles or personalities, and which follow certain patterns specific to nationality. Certain rules are followed (most of the time) such as Gauls (and their neighbours) having an "-ix" suffix for the men and ending in "-a" for the women; for example, Chief Vitalstatistix (so called due to his portly stature) and his wife Impedimenta (often at odds with the chief). The male Roman names end in "-us", echoing Latin nominative male singular form, as in Gluteus Maximus, a muscle-bound athlete whose name is literally the butt of the joke. Gothic names (present-day Germany) end in "-ic", after Gothic chiefs such as Alaric and Theoderic; for example Rhetoric the interpreter. Greek names end in "-os" or "-es"; for example, Thermos the restaurateur. British names usually end in "-ax" or "-os" and are often puns on the taxation associated with the later United Kingdom; examples include Mykingdomforanos, a British tribal chieftain, Valuaddedtax the druid, and Selectivemploymentax the mercenary. Names of Normans end with "-af", for example Nescaf or Cenotaf. Egyptian characters often end in -is, such as the architects Edifis and Artifis, and the scribe Exlibris. Indic names, apart from the only Indic female characters Orinjade and Lemuhnade, exhibit considerable variation; examples include Watziznehm, Watzit, Owzat, and Howdoo. Other nationalities are treated to pidgin translations from their language, like Huevos y Bacon, a Spanish chieftain (whose name, meaning eggs and bacon, is often guidebook Spanish for tourists), or literary and other popular media references, like Dubbelosix (a sly reference to James Bond's codename "007").[68]
Most of these jokes, and hence the names of the characters, are specific to the translation; for example, the druid named Getafix in English translation – "get a fix", referring to the character's role in dispensing the magic potion – is Panoramix in the original French and Miraculix in German.[69] Even so, occasionally the wordplay has been preserved: Obelix's dog, known in the original French as Idéfix (from idée fixe, a "fixed idea" or obsession), is called Dogmatix in English, which not only renders the original meaning strikingly closely ("dogmatic") but in fact adds another layer of wordplay with the syllable "Dog-" at the beginning of the name.
The name Asterix, French Astérix, comes from astérisque, meaning "asterisk", which is the typographical symbol * indicating a footnote, from the Greek word ἀστήρ (aster), meaning a "star". His name is usually left unchanged in translations, aside from accents and the use of local alphabets. For example, in Esperanto, Polish, Slovene, Latvian, and Turkish it is Asteriks (in Turkish he was first named Bücür meaning "shorty", but the name was then standardised). Two exceptions include Icelandic, in which he is known as Ástríkur ("Rich of love"), and Sinhala, where he is known as සූර පප්පා (Soora Pappa), which can be interpreted as "Hero". The name Obelix (Obélix) may refer to "obelisk", a stone column from ancient Egypt (and hence his large size and strength and his task of carrying around menhirs), but also to another typographical symbol, the obelisk or obelus (†).
For explanations of some of the other names, see List of Asterix characters.
The translators who created all of these different versions in so many languages are to be commended for maintaining the humorous spirit of the onomastics in the original. "Vive 'Astérix le Gaulois'!"
Selected readings
- "The many pronunciations of '*'" (12/17/15)
- "Asses and asterisks" (8/14/17)
Robot Therapist said,
July 13, 2025 @ 7:26 am
"I regret that I have but one * for my country"
Robert said,
July 13, 2025 @ 8:13 am
I still regularly hear 'asterix' instead of asterisk, but only once – about a year ago on a podcast – did I hear as a plural the rather delightful hypercorrection 'asterices'.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
July 13, 2025 @ 9:07 am
In the original French version of Asterix, Vitalstatistix is Abraracourcix, and Getafix, the druid, is Panoramix. "Druids" (Greel:δρῦς (drỹs) 'oak tree, and Old Irish druí 'druid, sorcerer). In the Celtic world (from France, Switzerland, and Ireland), they played a very important role. Vercingetorix, in 82 BC (Ver- (« grand »), proto-celt *uer , cingeto- Brave warrior, -rix King) "The Great Warrior King" is still Vercingetorix. Alesia? Connais pas Alesia! Nobody knows where Alesia is!
Victor Mair said,
July 13, 2025 @ 10:21 am
BTW, the plural of "asterisk" is "asterisks", which is not to gainsay what Robert wrote.
Roderick Whitfield said,
July 13, 2025 @ 11:56 am
Dear Vercingetor
I think if you are going to discuss the cartoon character he has to be Astérix, preferably with the accent, and not Asterisk.
Moreover, I never came across rix = king. Lewis and Short must be turning in their graves. The closest they come in their august publication is rixo, a quarrel, and rixator, a brawler. Either sounds quite undignified, quite apart from Rex. Regrettably, the English seem to have opted for risk, with all its unfortunate connotations.
My contemporary at Cambridge might have settled the question, since he was Hugh Vercingetorix Brogan, a noted authority, as was his father, on American history.
Mark Metcalf said,
July 13, 2025 @ 12:55 pm
One Asterix fan has posted PDFs of the English versions of all 38 adventures:
https://readasterix.blogspot.com/
In defending the action, the poster writes:
It is out of the firm belief that reading Asterix adventures on a device is a right to every Asterix fan. The comic books are copyrighted by Les Éditions Albert René/Goscinny-Uderzo, see Copyright, and therefore the comics on this website is not made available for commercial use or for alterations, see Licence. It is just a fun way to provide one of the most beloved comic books in the world to be read in PDF, rather than from traditional books.
Enjoy.
ulr said,
July 13, 2025 @ 1:51 pm
So you never read any introduction to Indo-European linguistics, all of whom somewhere point out that Celtic rix is the exact equivalent of Latin rex (and Sanskrit raj-). Of course you won't find in Lewis/Short, which is a Latin dictionary, not a Gaulish one (and it is long out of date, too – basically the 19th century English translation of Freund's Latin-German dictionary, which in its turn is a translation of Forcellini's 18th century monolingual Latin dictionary).
David Morris said,
July 13, 2025 @ 3:31 pm
For a long time, I couldn't figure out the pun in Vercingetorix (who doesn't appear but is mentioned several times). Then I discovered that there isn't one.
I think we should credit Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge and more recently Adriana Hunter for the English translations, including names. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_Asterix
Yves Rehbein said,
July 13, 2025 @ 3:43 pm
This is one of my petpeeves.
I could not find a definite reference for the origin of star iconography, yet. Sumeriologists widely agree that the cuneiform god determinative, which normally reads an and means sky, which has been noted multiple times on LLOG (cf. dingir), is the image of a star.
This identification is also "based on visual appearance". The editor used this qualifier to deny a relation to the European tradition. That's just very hypocritical.
Inana / Ishtar is eventually spelled with the same sign and the name seems to be one of the most widely recited Semitic–Indo-European comparisons with PIE *Hstér-. That's Hist.Ling. 101. Alas, "ice age cave paintings", obviously added by an editor from the opposite end of the lumper-splitter spectrum, is insufficient evidence for a general trend, because it will be hard to prove continuity.
It may be noted that dieties are not unambiguously associated with stars in early glyptic. Inana is frequently associated with reed bundles e.g. on the Uruk vase. Gods are more frequently associated with horned crowns, and some of these do resemble the little younger Anatolian hieroglyph SOL. Ironically, this would bring us back to Asterix.
Chris Button said,
July 13, 2025 @ 5:45 pm
Weirdly the UK and US translations for the names weren't always the same. The books have never had anywhere near the same level of popularity in the US in any case, which explains why the UK names became the established standard.
Chris Button said,
July 13, 2025 @ 5:46 pm
*established standard in English, I mean
Scott P. said,
July 13, 2025 @ 8:48 pm
Chris:
On what grounds do you claim Asterix was less popular in the US than the UK?
And if the US and UK versions translate names differently, on what grounds can you clam that the UK names are "standard" in any way?
Chris Button said,
July 13, 2025 @ 9:23 pm
@ Scott P.
Actually, two good reasons:
1. Personal knowledge/experience, which is why I made the comment in the first place.
2. Confirmation from the internet (which I have just checked) of my personal knowledge/experience.
From Wikipedia: "Robert Steven Caron translated five volumes into American English for Dargaud's international branch. These are Asterix and the Great Crossing in 1984, Asterix the Legionary and Asterix at the Olympic Games in 1992, and Asterix in Britain and Asterix and Cleopatra in 1995. For copyright purposes, most of the characters names were changed. With Asterix never achieving great popularity in the United States, this series of re-translations was halted after these albums, leading to some confusion among the few American fans of the series (the other volumes through to Asterix in Belgium were issued with the British translation by Dargaud in the same market)."
Dave J. said,
July 13, 2025 @ 10:51 pm
@Dr. Mair: re Sumerian /dingir/, /tengir/ and Central Asian /tengri/ (etc.): do you have any hypothesis on the relationship of these words for “god(s)”, if there is any such relationship?
J.W. Brewer said,
July 14, 2025 @ 12:47 pm
One anecdotal datapoint re UK v US popularity – I first became aware of Asterix et al. as a boy during the stretch in the 1970's when my family lived in Japan and, even though most English-speaking gaijin kids were American, the English-language books (including Asterix in translation) you could buy in Tokyo back then were definitely skewed toward UK publishers, I suspect because they tended to have regional distribution via Hong Kong branch offices in a way US publishers often didn't. Other perhaps more UK-oriented childrens books I became aware of during the Tokyo years were the Moomintrolls (translated from Swedish) and _Swallows & Amazons_.
Victor Mair said,
July 14, 2025 @ 1:15 pm
@Dave J.
From Julie Lee Wei:
Cites my connecting Sumerian DINGIR "god" and Sinitic DI "god", Sino-Platonic Papers (SPP) no. 164, "Shang and Zhou", page 47, but didn't use the word "heaven".
Acknowledged my connecting 帝 "Lord on High" and Latin _deus_ " God" in SPP no. 165, "Dao and De", page 12. Above that, on the same page, connected 天 tian, *thin (Schuessler), **t-hiin (ZZSF) "sky, heaven" with PIE _DIN_"day, sky", Italic *dinus (Pokorny 186). Did not mention
a connection with _dingir_.
See also:
"Hu Shih and God: thearchs across Eurasia" (12/28/24)
These are just a few places that mention my discussion of matters related to your questions.
Miriam Robbins Dexter said,
July 14, 2025 @ 9:50 pm
The Sumerian classifier dingir, 'deity', may well be in origin the term for a particular deity, Inanna, who was the morning and evening star. Because of Inanna's functions, the classifier/character dingir would indeed look like a star.
ajay said,
July 15, 2025 @ 4:58 am
Weirdly the UK and US translations for the names weren't always the same.
What were the US versions?
The translations in general are a thing of beauty. In "Asterix in Britain" in French, Asterix comments on his cousin Anticlimax's trousers – they're tweed, and Asterix asks "are they expensive?"
In French, Anticlimax (or rather Jolitorax) replies "mon tailleur est riche" – an untranslatable joke, referring to one of the first sentences that French people of a certain generation learning English would learn.
English readers wouldn't know this (though there is a "plume de ma tante" joke later) so the English version has instead "my tailor makes a good thing out of it" which is an OK but not great pun. The audiobook version read by Willie Rushton has the far superior but now dated "my tailor makes bags out of it" – if someone in BrE "makes bags", it is assumed that they are bags of money. But "bags" is also an obsolete BrE slang word for "trousers".
Philip Taylor said,
July 16, 2025 @ 5:51 pm
"bags" is also an obsolete BrE slang word for "trousers" — I respectfully disagree (with the "obsolete" classification, that is). The phrase "Oxford bags" occurs in the Google Ngrams database moer than half as frequently during the period 2009–2013 as it did at its peak in 1927.
ajay said,
July 17, 2025 @ 6:32 am
I am extremely surprised by that because I have never in my entire life as a native BrE speaker and resident of Britain heard anyone use it, or seen it used in print – except in sources from the 1920s or so.
I would also add that I've just looked at the Ngram viewer and it shows something very different from your description – as at 2022 we're at about a fifth of the 1920s peak.
And this isn't a great measure anyway because there is an actual style of trouser called "Oxford bags" and there isn't another name for it, but just because people are still talking about Oxford bags does not mean that people are using "bags" as a synonym for "trousers" generally. Oxford bags are not called Oxford bags because they are baggy, they are called Oxford bags because they are from Oxford. "Bags" meaning trousers predates the Oxford bags by almost a century, and is now in my experience completely extinct.
Many of you may be thinking at this point "But doesn't 'bags' mean shorts, anyway, not long trousers? Didn't Bertie Wooster mock the awful Roderick Spode by pointing out that his fascist followers, the Blackshorts, swanked around in footer bags?"
Well, no. It seems that "bags" meaning shorts in British slang may have been entirely invented by PG Wodehouse (who had at this point been living mostly outside Britain for the previous quarter of a century and may have lost his ear for British slang).
There are no mentions whatsoever of "footer bags" in the entire Google Books corpus before the publication of "The Code of the Woosters" in 1938, and the only mentions of the phrase after that are talking about Wodehouse or pastiching Wodehouse. Footer, yes. Bags, yes. But no footer bags.
David Marjanović said,
July 18, 2025 @ 9:38 am
That's unknown to Wiktionary. Pokorny had the bad habit of including everything that might conceivably be traced to PIE even if two or three irregular developments would have to be assumed, so half of his dictionary is considered obsolete. Is there another source for it?
Yves Rehbein said,
July 20, 2025 @ 10:21 am
@ David Marjanovic, cf. nundinum, nundinus
"From Proto-Italic *novenos (“ninth”) + Proto-Italic *dinos (“day”, attested only in compounds), related to diēs (“day”)." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nundinus#Latin cited to de Vaan, which I did not check.
David Marjanović said,
July 23, 2025 @ 12:29 pm
Oh, that. Interesting.