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there is a law inside the alphabet

junkshop said:
I made it very plain in post #whateverthe****itwas that I am a dull and simple lad. I will not, and cannot countenance these high falutin' brainy posts being all clever at me. My proof of the troof of the OP is what it is. It stands or falls and maybe rises once, twice again, indefatigable, eternal, what the ◊◊◊◊ am I going on about?

Time for bed. Boing.
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Hmmm

It seems I inadvertently hit something off a sore spot with you.

Could you point on this doll here where this spot is?
 
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Pixel42 said:
I just want to know who "the alphabet people" are.
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I know, but it's an imprisonable offence to tell you.

(Sorry, couldn't resist, but Google "the alphabetties" or the alphabet women and you'll probably get the story. Someone has already spent time in jail for dropping hints. Amazingly, the central character is actually "woman H".)
 
arthwollipot said:
It's actually not abracadabra magic. It's an artefact of English's adoption of words from many different languages - Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon Old English, Scandinavian Norse, Norman French, even Indian and Hawaiian. Each language has its own spelling conventions, which are ported into English alongside the words that are adopted. When you understand the etymologies of various words, you will find that the words that share a common origin also share the same spelling conventions.

Why do we raise pigs but eat pork? Why do we raise sheep but eat mutton? Why do we raise cows but eat beef?

Because during the feudal period of English history following the Norman conquest of 1066, Anglo-Saxon speaking serfs served under the Norman French speaking aristocracy. As a result, farming words (pig, sheep, cow) come from Anglo-Saxon while culinary words (pork, mutton, beef) come from Norman French.

So English spelling is chaotic, yes, but it's because of the many origins of its words, not because it is abracadabra magic. There is method to the madness. It's a fascinating field of study if you're really interested in the reasons behind it, rather than just making up your own explanations.
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zooterkin said:
How is that different from, for example, Spanish, which is phonetic but using the Latin alphabet?
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From faraway ancient time, from the beginning, from the first Writing it evolved, copy, and multiplied into the many. As the writings evolved, along the way, each must used what is available and invented what is not. If a Writing had 10 glyph symbols, then it must invent a way to use these to write words as much as it could. English has it's way, and others, each has it's way. Mexican Santa would say, "Jo, Jo, Jo", while English Santa would say "Ho, Ho, Ho".
 
Still no indication of a "Law" apart from a childish stick figure.
BTW as you may note a bunch of us are interested in the history of language which remind me: On BBC IPlayer episode 5 of Human with Ella Al-Shamahi has a segment on the origins of the alphabet.
www.bbc.co.uk

Human

Stranger and more dramatic than we ever imagined - these are our untold origins. With stunning visuals and cutting-edge science, Ella Al-Shamahi reveals the story of our species.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
 
arthwollipot said:
It's actually not abracadabra magic. It's an artefact of English's adoption of words from many different languages - Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon Old English, Scandinavian Norse, Norman French, even Indian and Hawaiian. Each language has its own spelling conventions, which are ported into English alongside the words that are adopted. When you understand the etymologies of various words, you will find that the words that share a common origin also share the same spelling conventions.

Why do we raise pigs but eat pork? Why do we raise sheep but eat mutton? Why do we raise cows but eat beef?

Because during the feudal period of English history following the Norman conquest of 1066, Anglo-Saxon speaking serfs served under the Norman French speaking aristocracy. As a result, farming words (pig, sheep, cow) come from Anglo-Saxon while culinary words (pork, mutton, beef) come from Norman French.

So English spelling is chaotic, yes, but it's because of the many origins of its words, not because it is abracadabra magic. There is method to the madness. It's a fascinating field of study if you're really interested in the reasons behind it, rather than just making up your own explanations.
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Honestly I kind of like the economy of summing all that up with single word.
 
8enotto said:
As a native speaker of American English, Midwest states version I have learned that the sound of each of the letters will vary some depending where we learned it.

To apply a sort of fixed law to 10,000 local dialects of a base language could be quite a challenge. The number of exceptions would outnumber the points of compliance by just crossing a nation.

It is interesting how Vietnamese works. And quite simple compared to other languages.
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Yup. We know where the letters of Latin alphabet originated and how they evolved from pictograms, for example the letter a from alpha from aleph from the representation for an ox .

Hangul, I understand, was deliberately aimed at representing the shape of the mouth and tongue when making the sound it represents, which sounds really neat.
 
erwinl said:
Well
There’s of course WET.
Which is the Dutch word for LAW.

So now it appears there are indeed multiple LAWs in the Alphabet. Both in different places but overlapping and as such clearly linked.
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Everyone knows that Dutch law ultimately derives from Vietnamese law that was established under the Ngyuen Dynasty. So, still just one law.
 
alphabetlaw2018 said:
this Alphabet Law states H is the central of consonants, and I is the central of vowels. It unified and pointed out the elemental vowels and elemental consonants inside the human speech sounds. This is similar to the way the elements in the periodic table were found; and it ended the era where alchemists were trying to make gold out of lead, i guess.
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What do you mean by "central"?

Also, it is nothing like how the elements in the periodic table were "found".
 
This has been one of the most entertaining things about moving to Utah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet

If you scour rare book stores (which I do), you can still find the occasional material printed in this alphabet. It also occasionally appears ironically around town when people want to make a heritage statement. Phonetic alphabets exist for English, and are used in such activities as transcription. But the common spellings arose organically and remain so despite all efforts from the various "alphabet people" to reform or standardize them.
 
Rock carvings in caves in the area of El Castillo are 65.000 years old, or older, so made by Neandertals, and may be messages to other groups, since the same 32 geometric figures can be found all over Europe. They could just be saying "I was here" of course, but paleoanthropologists (Genevieve van Petzinger, among others) have speculated about a proto-language - maybe path markers, or symbols telling others where to find food/game and water, for instance.

So maybe Neandertals were the first abracadabra magicians? The thought makes me shiver in awe.
 
Helen said:
Rock carvings in caves in the area of El Castillo are 65.000 years old, or older, so made by Neandertals, and may be messages to other groups, since the same 32 geometric figures can be found all over Europe. They could just be saying "I was here" of course, but paleoanthropologists (Genevieve van Petzinger, among others) have speculated about a proto-language - maybe path markers, or symbols telling others where to find food/game and water, for instance.

So maybe Neandertals were the first abracadabra magicians? The thought makes me shiver in awe.
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Similarly I have read that the clicks in some African languages may be survivals from early hunting languages as those click sounds don't carry far and thus less likely to scare game. Best reference I can find quickly, rebuttals welcomed
link
 
jimbob said:
Yup. We know where the letters of Latin alphabet originated and how they evolved from pictograms, for example the letter a from alpha from aleph from the representation for an ox .
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And we know from the history of the Roman empire that those characters did not result in uniform pronunciation across the empire. Because of the different groups I associate with (lawyers, church musicians, scientists, etc.), I'm confronted with an ongoing debate over the "correct" pronunciation of Latin. Author Patrick O'Brian notes with humor that even during the Regency, the English pronounced Latin very differently than most of the rest of the world. When I was in Jerusalem looking for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I stopped a Catholic monk and was able to ask him in Latin where to find it, and he was able to answer in Latin. We could do this only because of the artificial imposition of Italianate pronunciation for Latin-lipping Vaticani. Elsewhere I have to grapple with luceat being said one way if it's Mozart and another way if it's Palestrina.
 
Similarly in A.P. Herbert's "Uncommon Law" one sketch has a lawyer pronouncing Latin as his school believed the way Romans pronounced it with "ooltra weeres" for ultra vires as one example and being rebuked by the judge. From my junkheap of a memory. I couldn't see it on Gutenberg despite its age.
 
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