The theme for this morning is letters. Aggressive letters that purport to be nice.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The theme for this morning is letters. Aggressive letters that purport to be nice.
Like the letter ‘S’. You start out thinking that it is serene and strong and supportive. Only with time do you learn that it is superficial, shambolic and sanctimonious.
Then there’s Q, that starts out quiet, then proves to be quirky, but ends up being a Quizling.
I never realised S was so bad. I thought it was Z – it tells you it’s all over, but when you ask it WTF it just passive-aggressively pretends to be asleep.
Z is mad at the way you Amurcans pronounce it’s name ,it is Zed ,not Zee .
Þorn (Thorn) — name says it all — a right pain in ye paw. Quite useful in English, originates from ᚦ (Thurs) and is basically equivalent to th, which is ye most common digraph in English. So seems quite friendly. But it’s actually really really aggressive. Been booted out of most scripts (except Icelandic, but þey live on an erupting island where everything is completely unpronounceable, so þorn probably fits right in). Awkward to typeset, and not even in many fonts. Friendlier substitutes like y are being driven out by ye more awkward th (probably a conspiracy of Big Ink and Big Paper, th uses more of both).
What about C, the most useless letter of them all?. Anything it can do on its own can be done better by S or K. The one unique sound it has, the CH sound, it needs help with. Sometimes it needs two letters to help in the TCH combination. The only way it can be redeemed is to use S and K for those sounds, so instead of ‘circle’ we would have ‘sirkle’, and use C alone without help for the CH sound.
On the other hand, Q? Seriously? The only way it can be used is QU to make the KW sound. We already have a two-letter combination for KW. It’s KW. How about we use Q for the KW sound and don’t require the superfluous U?
X is another letter with no independent sounds, it’s KS or Z. Maybe use it for the SH sound and take some of the load off H.
Then there’s GH. That letter combination is irredeemable. Kill it and bury it.
Agreed, GH is ghoulish.
F, a letter that starts softly before land a hard ‘uck’
The “nuclear wessels” bit Star Trek IV always bugged me. Russians actually have a V (“B” in Cyrillic) but they don’t actually have a clear “W” – the closest they get is “yO” (ooo-ah).
It’s not the letters that get me it’s the numbers. Like when you put 7734 in your calculator and turn it upside down. Reminds me of playing the Beatles backwards and you hear “Paul is dead, Paul is dead…”
Spooky.
And don’t even get me started on statistics!
Now, now, you can’t blame everything on GH. It has accomplices. OUGH can be pronounced at least 8 different ways. GH couldn’t manage that all on its own.
@4: It’s “Izzard” or nothing in these parts, pal.
True – but at least they know the space comes after the punctuation mark, not before!
English needs to get rid of those nasty letters, all—counts keys on keyboard—26 of them and replace them with something new.
Unspell.
Note, while this is a good idea, it appears to be another dastardly Soviet/Russian/Communist/Fascist plot viz Tucker Carlson’s metric rant as the idea comes from an American, Dmitry Orlov, who was born in Leningrad just as Putin was!
KG
27 December 2019 at 11:18 am
Z is mad at the way you Amurcans pronounce it’s name ,it is Zed ,not Zee . – davidc1@4
True – but at least they know the space comes after the punctuation mark, not before!
Can’t see any spaces ,anyway us English did do dun inverted the English language ,we don’t tak kindly to Johnny furriner critisizing us on how we speak it like what we do.
Come on, people, you’re getting this all wrong. It’s not about letters, it’s about letters. And the fact that nobody writes actual letters anymore, especially not in longhand. It’s all typing, block printing, and emails these days.
What’s the world coming to, I ask you?
The end of an annual orbit. There’s probably a hieroglyphic for it. (Although the ancient Egyptians counted from (approximately) Nile floods starting, putting annual orbit roughly July–June.)