A few weeks ago, from Benita Bendon Campbell, two cartoons from the strip One Big Happy (information on the strip here), with little kids coping with English. Ruthie plays with alphabetical ordering:
And Joe commits an eggcorn on unnamed source, using a topic he knows something about, namely dinosaurs:
Passed on from the Archaeosoup site (via Facebook), this New Yorker cartoon (1/26/63) by Ed Fisher:
This tickles archaeologists’ funny bones. And epigraphers’, of course.
My friend Max Vasilatos has been creating wooden fridge magnets for various alphabets. She’s a woodworker, and the project is an exercise in art and craft. Yes, you can get plastic fridge magnets for a number of alphabets, but that’s not the point.
From last month, the Hebrew alefbet as carved by Max:
The medium determined many of her choices, so her letters are more stylized than, say, the plastic Megcos Magnetic Hebrew Letters.
Note: The Hebrew alefbet has 22 letters, but five of them are written differently when they appear at the end of a word (rather than at the beginning or in the middle), so that there are 27 different forms. Here’s the full alefbet as printed by hand:
The Old English letter þ (known as thorn) played a central role in my posting on a “frugal typographer” who proposed in 1929 to save space by replacing the word the by þ. Now thorn is the subject of a New Yorker blog piece by editor Mary Norris: “The Thorn Word” (note play on The Thorn Birds).
Annals of silliness: from the Medford [Oregon] Daily News, June 23, 1929, a story about one man’s quest to save space by replacing the word the by a single symbol:
Note the wry conclusion to the jocular piece:
Its general use should prove a great boon to newspapers, facilitating composition and reserving space now given over to “the’s” for more comic strips and letters to the editor.
Maybe Mason was just an eccentric whose ideas never caught on. Or maybe Mason was the invention of a mischievous journalist; notice that we hear nothing about Mason except for his campaign to replace the.
(Hat tip to Ben Truwe, who operated the Medford typography firm ProType for 22 years. The image of the newspaper page is the one he sent me; I understand that it’s not easy to read, even when you click on it to embiggen it.)
(I’m not experienced in dealing with newspaper archives and haven’t been able to find this story, datelined New York, in any other publication.)
Two recent items in the New York Times: “Everyone Speaks Text Message” by Tina Rosenberg in the 12/11 Magazine; “Athhilezar? Watch Your Fantasy World Language” by Amy Chozick in the 12/12 paper.
In the latest (October 31st) New Yorker, a cartoon by Robert Leighton about early writing systems:
When I teach about writing systems, the students are always fascinated with the idea that we can learn about long-distant civilizations from what their people wrote. And, eventually, we can. But at the beginning, what people wrote wasn’t love letters, tales of court, imaginative fiction, travel stories, or anything like that. Instead, much more practically, they made records of traded items (grain, animals, other things of value). Tallies, as in the cartoon.
(Not that people tallied things thousands of years ago the way we do now. Or that Stonehenge was a gigantic tally done by huge standing stones.)
Over on Language Log, Victor Mair ignited some passionate discussion with a posting about the tattoos on the face of a young man (in a mug shot). The largest tattoo was on his forehead:
A reporter for the Daily Mail interpreted this as a misspelling of Genius, with a J instead of a G. Victor countered by saying that the letter was “a nicely formed cursive capital” G. Commenters in the U.K. were generally baffled by this claim.
A Zippy on art and writing:
(Earlier Zippy on cave painting here.)
The cave paintings tell a story — every picture tells a story, as they say — but not in words. As Griffy notes, the extraordinary cave paintings came long before there was written language. And even then, the earliest writing seems to have been used for pedestrian purposes (like marking property and keeping inventories); it was some time before we got to narratives, love letters, and all the good stuff. I wonder when jokes came into it.
So: fascinating art, but not yet stories in words. And no punch lines.
In the NYT today, a story (by Elisabeth Malkin) about the Spanish Academy’s forthcoming spelling reforms and the reactions worldwide to them, focusing especially on objections from Spanish-speaking nations in the Americas to what is seen a dictate coming from abroad (headline: Rebelling Against Spain, This Time With Words). And a certain amount of silliness over one much-discussed aspect of the reforms, the elimination of CH and LL as separate letters of the alphabet, with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela weighing in on the issue:
If the academy no longer considers “ch” a separate letter, Mr. Chávez chortled to his cabinet, then he would henceforth be known simply as “Ávez.” (In fact, his name will stay the same, though his place in the alphabetic order will change, because “ch” used to be the letter after “c.”)
The elimination of the digraphs CH and LL as letters of the alphabet won’t change the spelling of any word, just the order of words in alphabetic lists — though that will entail a massive re-working of dictionaries (for new editions) and armies of copyeditors to ensure consistency in them and in other alphabetical lists. (Other reforms will entail re-spellings.)
Here’s the current Spanish alphabet, with 29 letters:
The revision will reduce the number of letters to 27; palatal Ñ will remain a separate letter.
For contrast, look at the current Welsh alphabet, with 28 letters:
Here there are plenty of digraphs — CH DD FF NG LL PH RH and TH — most of them representing “mutated” forms of basic phonemes; CH, for instance, represents the fricative /x/, a mutation of /k/. (One exception is FF, which represents /f/; the letter F represents /v/.)
The letters K Q V X and Z from the Latin alphabet are not used, since there are other spellings for borrowed words that have these letters in their spellings in source languages; for instance, K and CK from other languages, where they are pronounced with a /k/, are spelled with C, which represents /k/ in Welsh orthography, and PH from other languages, where it’s pronounced with /f/, is spelled with FF, as in FFÔN ‘phone’.
For consonants, the only real complexity is that there are two spellings for /f/: FF for a basic /f/ and PH for /f/ as a mutated form of /p/. (Vowels are another story.)
Actually, a pretty straightforward system, though it looks odd to people used to other spelling systems based on the Latin alphabet.
