Re: A problem with evolution of fonts


"Chip Flintknapper" <nobody@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mvhyh.19544$pQ3.5878@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tom McDonald wrote:
Daryl Krupa wrote:
Tom McDonald wrote:
<snip>
If one is to consider something as vital to archaeology as evolution,
one really ought to start with the absolute, rock-bottom necessity.

What ought to be the font used on this ng?
Cuneiform.

:-)


Would that be complicated? Most alphabets are written to fit the
language, so I wonder how complicated the old Sumerian was? We have
English Latin, a 26 letter alphabet, but there are nearly a million
words (in my opinion, mostly new-slang and scientific entries, which are
not spoken in common usage).

You are wrong. Languages are fitted to alphabets in an almost hap-hazzard
way. There is no correlation at all between the number of letters and words
in the language. Some languages have as few as 800 words, yet require two
dozen letters. Speaking 2,000 words in a language is basic fluency, but it
requires every letter in a phonetic alphabet. (Pictographic languages are
another story).

I can write English with Greek characters very well (although I do not
speak Greek). But Cyrillic, which is based on the Greek alphabet, needs
many extra characters, because of the linguistic differences.

The 26 Latin letters have nothing to do with English because they were
borrowed from Latin. English is written in Latin script because a visiting
church brought the alphabet from Rome. English is worst than most languages
for phonetic bull***. for example, the letter F is used for the sound
associated with it in most languages but English uses two other constructs
for the identical sound. PH as in telephone and GH as in laugh ae the
identical sound. Only one other language AFAIK spells telephone, the rest go
with telefone which makes far more sense. English has the sound "SH"
requiring two latin letters, but in "sugar" and "sure" the single letter S
has the same sound. The word "resume" has two meanings depending on if it is
pronounced from the English verb or the French noun.

There are only five sounds in slavic languages that do not exist in English
yet there are eight (IIRC) more letters in Cyrillic. Conversely, there are
sounds in English that do not exist in slavic languages. There is no
correlation between the number of letters and the number of sounds in a
language as you suggest, apparently you do not know what a dipthong is. My
name takes two latin letters but five in Cyrilic as a result bit in the
opposite some slavic words take 2-3 times as many Latin letters. Two "LL's"
sound like one in English ("parallel") but are silent in Spanish. (Why write
a silent letter?) A latin "J" is one sound in English but an English
phonetic H in Spanish. Russian substitutes a phonetic "G" for English words
beginning with an "H". Swedish and Norwegian use many of the same spellings
but pronounce them differently. Then there are the spellings and
pronounciations of words within one language, English. Tomato as a sound and
"colour and color" as spellings are examples.

It sounds like a great new hobby to me. All we really need is a coder to
write the fonts.

Microsoft Windows?


Another thing about cuniform is that it was written on clay tablets
which were then fired. They have outlasted all the paper, papyrus, and
other forms of bark or skin ever invented. I have always heard that the
only thing everlasting is true stone.

Clay tablets are not "true stone". If you want to say something everlasting,
say it with diamonds.

;)

Z


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