If you are sitting next to someone on public transportation who irritates you...

innerSpaceman · 02-23-2007, 08:07 PM

Yes, beautiful.

But, there's a candidate for the dead languages pool if ever there was one. Sheesh.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

the exact shape of a letter changes based on the letters than come before and after it (as well as the position on the horizontal line).

Whose ancient bright idea was that?

Alex · 02-23-2007, 08:17 PM

It's the same idea we have for cursive English (to a certain degree), there's just no such thing as non-cursive Arabic.

Besides, its positively advanced. There are plenty of other older languages that don't write vowels of any kind and don't have spaces between the words (nor, the relatively recent invention of punctuation). Also, it is helpfully phonetic rather than pictographic.

Cadaverous Pallor · 02-24-2007, 01:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Whose ancient bright idea was that?

Hebrew has a somewhat similar (thought, IMHO, a bit less complex) concept, where certain letters look different if they are the last letter in a word. Five of the 22 letters do this.

The letter "mem" looks like this in the middle of a word מ but like this at the end of a word ם

Of course, it just looks right to me

Alex · 02-24-2007, 09:30 PM

And of course, in Latin and Greek alphabet based writing systems we have the silly idea of having two forms of each letter, one of which is only used as the first letter of a sentence and in other incomprehensible (to non-native writers) situations -- the rules for which change from from specific language to specific language). "Yes, students, aspirin was spelled Aspirin until it was used so much that a form of verbal erosion wore that A into an a."

I have also long wondered if the earliest scribes among the semitic languages were all left handed and that is why they wrote from right to left (as opposed to the more brilliant Chinese who decided on ambidextrous top to bottom).

02-23-2007, 08:17 PM	#2
Alex . Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 13,354	It's the same idea we have for cursive English (to a certain degree), there's just no such thing as non-cursive Arabic. Besides, its positively advanced. There are plenty of other older languages that don't write vowels of any kind and don't have spaces between the words (nor, the relatively recent invention of punctuation). Also, it is helpfully phonetic rather than pictographic.
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02-24-2007, 09:30 PM	#4
Alex . Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 13,354	And of course, in Latin and Greek alphabet based writing systems we have the silly idea of having two forms of each letter, one of which is only used as the first letter of a sentence and in other incomprehensible (to non-native writers) situations -- the rules for which change from from specific language to specific language). "Yes, students, aspirin was spelled Aspirin until it was used so much that a form of verbal erosion wore that A into an a." I have also long wondered if the earliest scribes among the semitic languages were all left handed and that is why they wrote from right to left (as opposed to the more brilliant Chinese who decided on ambidextrous top to bottom).
	Submit to Quotes