[HN Gopher] What character was removed from the alphabet? (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
What character was removed from the alphabet? (2020)
Author : paulkrush
Score : 186 points
Date : 2023-06-17 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dictionary.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dictionary.com)
| contingencies wrote:
| Imagine a roguelike using all of these obscure characters where
| key plot elements are the elucidation of their true histories.
| kazinator wrote:
| Q: What character was removed from the alphabet?
|
| A: 1> (diff (range #\a #\z) "the alphabet")
| (#\c #\d #\f #\g #\i #\j #\k #\m #\n #\o #\q #\r #\s #\u #\v #\w
| #\x #\y #\z)
|
| Plus all all non-alphabetic characters other than space.
| rovr138 wrote:
| ch, ll
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Good old 'che' and 'elle', that used to confusd so many non-
| Spanish speakers when they looked up words in Spanish
| dictionaries before these letters were disolved into their
| constituent parts 'c', 'h' and 'l'. Of course, that was
| possible because they are not technically _characters_ , but
| _letters_ that were removed from the alphabet.
|
| Fun fact though, there is one _character_ that was removed from
| the Spanish alphabet and the whole of Spanish orthography but
| remains in use in many others. Even better, this character
| actually _originated_ in mediaeval Spanish, so it could be
| argued that it wasn 't removed: it was let loose!
|
| That character is the 'c', which is now so closely associated
| to French, but remains in use in other close neighbours of
| Spanish such as Catalan and Portuguese and has been adapted for
| use in many other languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/c
| jwilk wrote:
| Related from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32249465
| ("The History of 'Ampersand' (2020)", 178 comments)
| hirundo wrote:
| This was good planning, if it was still part of the alphabet we
| couldn't use it for an URL query parameter delimiter.
| version_five wrote:
| I think it's too bad that we didn't choose delimters that had
| no chance of appearing in actual text. Commas are a big one,
| when parsing csv there's always the problem of having commas in
| the text of a field. One hack I have used if I don't want to
| delete them is to swap them for a character I imagine will
| never be in the text, such as | (pipe). It all could have been
| avoided if we had some standard delimiters that were not part
| of common text.
| meep0l wrote:
| The tab character (U+0009) is a good candidate for this. Many
| CSV parsers already support it.
| im3w1l wrote:
| This doesn't work. There will always be that one guy thinking
| "what if we put a csv in another csv?!" So escaping it is.
| version_five wrote:
| I've done a lot of csv parsing with shell scripts (usually
| using awk or cut). My rule of thumb is that if i know the
| csv may have some commas in quoted text, I can just remove
| them and work with the shell script. If it's going to have
| newlines or anything more complicated, I need a real csv
| parser.
| mtizim wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Fiel.
| ..
|
| The problem is that any delimiter that has no chance of
| appearing in actual text will be hard to discover, and cannot
| appear on a standard keyboard (so it is not easily human-
| writable). So we are kind of stuck with the comma for human
| readable formats.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The standard characters are ASCII/Unicode field separator,
| group separator, record separator and unit separator.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Field_.
| ..
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I have actually used two of these in some kind of hell SQL
| query that needed to concatenate strings for the fastest
| path between database and frontend as possible. I was
| surprised to see how well it actually worked, I assumed
| surely some kind of step in the middle of the chain would
| break non-printable characters.
|
| Not using these is wasting so many bits of one-byte
| character encodings, I don't understand why we even need to
| bother escaping CSV files if we could just use the
| appropriate control characters instead.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| The more immediate problem with Tim Berners-Lee's choice of
| delimiters in URL syntax is that ampersand starts an entity
| reference in SGML default concrete syntax and thus <a
| href="bla&x=y"> will be rejected as a reference to an
| undeclared entity "x" in SGML (whereas in XML it will be
| rejected as incomplete entity reference missing a terminating
| ";" character).
| arek_nawo wrote:
| Never would I have thought that "&" was ever part of an alphabet.
| It's more of a symbol, like "." or ";". HN is sometimes a source
| of curious things.
| dunham wrote:
| I always thought of it as a ligature for "et" (like ffi is a
| ligature for ffi) rather than a letter. But I suppose the sz
| ligature (ss) eventually became a letter, so there is
| precedent.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| ae (aesc/ash) was a letter in English, too, but, like &,
| stopped being one even though it continued to be used (as a
| ligature).
| mbg721 wrote:
| Spanish also treats multiple-letters as letters in their own
| right, doesn't it? And Dutch with ij.
| thenewwazoo wrote:
| Not really, depending on who you ask. In the 90s, the RAE
| declared that 'll' and 'ch' were no longer letters, but
| they're still taught as letters in many places. 'rr' was
| never a letter in its own right, but many people consider
| it to be, as a kind of parallel to 'll' and 'ch'.
| mbg721 wrote:
| That's good info to learn beyond the strips of letters at
| the tops of classrooms, thanks!
| tmtvl wrote:
| Treating ij as a single letter in Dutch makes no sense,
| unless one also treats au, ei*, eu, ou, and ui as single
| letters. And possibly sch as well.
|
| * especially ei as it's the same sound: eis (demand) and
| ijs (ice) are homonyms.
| sp332 wrote:
| ss is a ligature for ss, right? ss
| dunham wrote:
| It's called es-zett (S Z), and I believe it originally was
| a joined long s and a z, like sz. (There doesn't appear to
| be a fraktur long s in unicode, but I include the fraktur z
| to show where the shape comes from.) I believe these days
| it is typically written as "ss" when the ss character is
| not available.
|
| Edit: The name points to sz, but it's possible that it
| replaced both ss and sz. I'm not an expert.
| lolinder wrote:
| The difference is that ss is actually used to spell words. &
| has never been used as part of a word, it only ever st&s
| alone.
| beardyw wrote:
| Ah, mondegreen
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen
|
| I remember the Maxell tape ads (ibid) "Me ears are alight".
|
| https://youtu.be/XEe0qqPAC6E
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| "Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard"
| sjcsjc wrote:
| The girl with colitis goes by
| rvba wrote:
| Why is M before N in the alphabet. It should be N first, then M!
| [deleted]
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The alternate question is "why are these 26 characters the
| American English alphabet?" It's fairly arbitrary, a collection
| of historical accidents and changes in orthography.
|
| And it's incomplete. You can't really write American English with
| just the usual 26 letters. N and the `okina are proper letters
| and necessary for writing a bunch of American words correctly.
| The various kahako are helpful too but they are treated as
| diacritics and not full fledged separate letters.
| mcv wrote:
| Not just American English; lots of countries use the same
| alphabet. Even countries that have more characters than these
| 26, still often consider these 26 to be their alphabet.
|
| Weirder still: we often call it the Latin alphabet, but Latin
| never had some of these characters. No 'j', 'u' or 'w' in
| Latin, for example.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > N and the `okina are proper letters and necessary for writing
| a bunch of American words correctly
|
| Depends what you mean by "correctly", but in practice they're
| not necessary to write American English, and most people don't
| use them (except in very high-production-value writing, like
| professionally edited books and magazines).
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Tell that to the people who live in Espanola, NM; the
| official name of the city includes the n. Or Hawai`i,
| although for the latter "Hawaii" is at least correct from an
| official government placename perspective.
| permo-w wrote:
| at a push, you can transliterate n as ny or ni, or even use
| the Portuguese nh if you really want to push the boat out,
| but when an n isn't available, most people seem to just
| drop it entirely and let you figure it out from context
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| In the early 1970's, I saw the & appear in some of our older
| alphabet books. The absolutist child in me tried to work out if
| that bit of archaic data was authoritative or not.
|
| Those books were likely printed in the 1950s.
| GloomyBoots wrote:
| A few years ago I was idly thumbing through old books at a used
| store. Looking over a remedial arithmetic book, I was surprised
| to find that they referred to zero as "the cipher".
| Exponentiation and the process of finding a square root were
| "involution" and "evolution", respectively. My math education
| was pretty ad-hoc (complicated story), so maybe these are
| better known than I realize, but I've never heard them. I ended
| up grabbing the book just for the vocabulary. These examples
| are just the ones that jumped out most in the first couple of
| pages.
| jmclnx wrote:
| When I was very young, I remember AE being used in various
| printed materials (school books).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86
|
| But by the time I was in High School it seemed to have
| disappeared.
| opello wrote:
| "AE" as you have it (with your link presumably you mean AE) is
| the letter "ash" from the Old English alphabet.
|
| Th called "thorn" is another, which type setters replaced with
| a Y so as to not add another letter to their collections. It
| made the "th" sound and why "Ye Olde ..." is a spelling
| convention but people of the time would never have said "yee"
| for it.
|
| Other letters were lost too, eth, wynn, and this is all
| contributes to why Modern English spelling conventions are kind
| of awful for ESL learners.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
| version_five wrote:
| We still see this in French semi-regularly, such as oeil and
| coeur
| kzrdude wrote:
| How popular are the ligatures in french in practice?
| stefncb wrote:
| People don't usually use them informally but it's
| technically incorrect not to use them. You'll _mostly_ see
| them in books and articles.
| rdlw wrote:
| I live in Canada and all the egg cartons say oeufs
| simias wrote:
| ex aequo and curriculum vitae are two common examples of ae
| in French (although they're obviously direct borrows from
| Latin).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| You may have been taught using the briefly popular ITA system
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
|
| http://s320709369.onlinehome.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/f...
| xattt wrote:
| If I didn't have dyslexia before, I do now after seeing the
| awful attempts to make specific sounds stand out.
|
| _> Any advantage of the I.T.A. in making it easier for
| children to learn to read English was often offset by ...
| being generally confused by having to deal with two alphabets
| in their early years of reading. _
| wizofaus wrote:
| Japanese kids seem to manage learning 4 of them (5 if
| they're Korean-Japanese. And yes I'm including the Roman
| alphabet). Though it's true early- reading books tend to
| stick to just hiragana & katakana.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They manage but that doesn't mean it's good for learning.
|
| But also, multiple symbols for a sound is a lot simpler
| than having two alphabets that work in completely
| different ways. And even worse is the two alphabets
| sharing symbols and giving them different
| interpretations.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The british spelling is supposedly encyclopaedia and Britannica
| still seems to use it (with and without ae = ae ligature).
| bombcar wrote:
| The advent of the standard typewriter and computer keyboard
| killed many a special letter/ligature.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I naively thought to be "part of the alphabet" our ancestors
| would have needed to, you know, use "&" in words - the article
| weakly hints at this for "&c" as being equivalent to "etc"
| (saving keystrokes even before they had keyboards, I guess). But
| given that they didn't, say, write "sand" as "s&" I will politely
| refuse to accept it as a letter.
| chrischen wrote:
| In the classic alphabet song & comes between Y and Z. It's been
| hiding there all this time.
| re-thc wrote:
| Google
| Symbiote wrote:
| I thought this would be about Old-Middle-Modern English, in which
| case the lost letters are W, d, th and ae.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Alphabet
| mathieuh wrote:
| Also yogh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh
|
| There's a politician in the UK called Menzies Campbell, his
| name is pronounced "mingis" because that "z" actually used to
| be a yogh
| TMWNN wrote:
| That explains why his nickname is "Ming"!
| ignoramous wrote:
| Well, W & th are covered in a separate article:
| https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-alphabet/
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I think it's interesting that despite our access to this sort
| of information, a huge number of people still don't understand
| that "Ye Olde" was not pronounced "Yee" and rather "The".
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Old English is just generally not a priority. There are only
| so many hours in the schoolday and so many schooldays in the
| year.
| irrational wrote:
| Need to teach kids to be self learners. I knew these facts
| about old English, but I wasn't taught them in school. I
| learned them on my own.
| Phil987 wrote:
| Other kids know facts that you don't because people care
| about different things.
| kazinator wrote:
| If you're speaking, and don't pronounce it "yee", nobody will
| know that you're making a reference to the "Ye Olde"
| orthography.
| rocketbop wrote:
| I only learned that in university. I did a joint major in
| English and history, but it actually came up in a history
| module in an offhand comment by the lecturer. I'm not
| surprised it's little known.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| It is because the Y was a character called 'thorn' and it
| symbol was Y drawn as a stick, pronounced the like the 'th'
| in the and thorn. Also s got reversed and became the z we
| know today. This article was written by someone who knows
| noYing.
| dehrmann wrote:
| My immature side just thinks it's fun to write thorn.
| bombolo wrote:
| To mean this song, I presume:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSZBIs0gs0E
| klysm wrote:
| [flagged]
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'd think HN, of all places, with so many software
| developers would actually be a pretty good audience for
| pedantry.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It's very fortunate that we have a place like this where we
| can indulge in <<intellectual curiosity>> and gain relative
| protection from said <<people>>.
|
| I understand you are judgemental about <<people>> like the
| character of Chris O'Dowd, Roy, in "The IT Crowd" -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZv_TARX3lI . There is no
| need to focus about them. You can rest on these refreshing
| notions we are discussing.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I think it's really interesting, both as a view into how
| quickly English was changing around the advent of the
| printing press, and as a way to appreciate how quickly
| common knowledge can be totally lost or supplanted.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I feel the same way about fonts, but if the front page HN
| is any indication, I'm probably in the minority.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| Agreed. Pronunciation is almost always the least
| interesting thing about the evolution of language.
| km3r wrote:
| I know it's pronounced 'the', but 'yee' is more fun
| tornato7 wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EoRBvdVPQ
| hinkley wrote:
| "Yee oldy hat shoppy" is the most fun.
| ashton314 wrote:
| You forgot to throw "timey" in there too ;)
| contingencies wrote:
| _Milliner_ doesn 't have the same ring.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| What if it was a hatter and not a milliner?
| adolph wrote:
| Just mercurial madness
| ljlolel wrote:
| Also from op site: https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-
| alphabet/
| dagmx wrote:
| They mention those with links at the bottom of this article as
| well
| kzrdude wrote:
| Part of the english alphabet, but in which region, all english
| speaking places? I'm curious where it comes from.
| Lio wrote:
| Given the dates involved I'd guess maybe England what with
| English be the language of the English and all. ;)
| umanwizard wrote:
| English was spoken in several places outside of England by
| the 1800s.
| Lio wrote:
| Yes that's true but the article specifically refers to
| ampersand already being part of English alphabet for many
| years before that.
| paulkrush wrote:
| "It would have been confusing to say "X, Y, Z, and." So, the
| students said, "and per se and." Per se means "by itself," so the
| students were essentially saying, "X, Y, Z, and by itself and."
| The term per se was used to denote letters that also doubled as
| words, such as the letter I (for "me") and A. By saying "per se,"
| you clarified that you meant the symbol and not the word.
|
| Over time, "and per se and" was slurred together into the word we
| use today: ampersand."
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yep, I learned this from the History of English podcast. I
| highly recommend it for anyone who likes this sort of trivia
| about the evolution of English.
| atdrummond wrote:
| The reason I'm inclined to accept this narrative is that not
| only have I not seen any plausible alternative etymology, there
| is no alternative etymology available period.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I would recommend against that methodology. A lot of
| etymology is not easy to find, but plausible etymology is
| easy to make up.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| You must know my wife. She's quite confident that the idiom
| "balls to the wall" has something to do with a person being
| put up against a wall to be executed by gunshot.
| caturopath wrote:
| A and I used to sometimes get 'per se' to clarify that people
| were referring to the letter, not the one-letter word
| asciimov wrote:
| I have seen this explanation printed so many times, and
| unattributed, that I wonder if students of that era actually
| said "and per se and".
| mbg721 wrote:
| Some probably did, the same ones that addressed their dad as
| "pay-ter".
| adzm wrote:
| I'm sorry, can you explain this one?
| rossitter wrote:
| From _The Frumentary_ by William King (1699)[0]:
| U's conversation 's equal to his wine, You sup with
| W, whene'er you dine: X, Y, and Z, hating to be
| confin'd, Ramble to the next Eating-house they
| find;... And Per Se And alone, as Poets use...
|
| See also an elaborate classroom game described in the
| _Documents of the Board of Education of the City of New York_
| (1861)[1]: "One [student] represents &--called ' _And per se
| and_ '--as being appended to the alphabet, but not belonging
| to it....The merriment of this pastime turns upon the
| endeavor of _An' per s'and_ to take precedence of Z, and so
| get fairly into the alphabet... "
|
| [0] A 1781 printing: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=n
| jp.32101068156031&vi...
|
| [1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433075984876
| &vi...
| sanderjd wrote:
| These are great. Did you just know about these already or
| did you research them just now? If the latter, how did you
| find these in such short order?
|
| Always impressed by people who can find primary sources for
| things quickly!
| rossitter wrote:
| In this case I just did a full-text search of
| HathiTrust's catalog for _" and per se and"_ (quotes of
| course are part of the query in this case). These are two
| results of many.
| tiffanyg wrote:
| Not just a fisherman, but a teacher. Gracias!
| tgv wrote:
| Me too, but given certain educational methods of the past, I
| can also imagine it happening. Here's an example of teaching
| Latin in the 19th century. Read the first 1/3 from the link
| from today's front page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354213. Latin was
| taught by rote, by repeating without understanding. One of
| those head masters must once have thought it would be correct
| to call it "and per se and," and had the power to make
| generations do it.
|
| On the other hand, why it would have become so widespread as
| to become a word is what makes me doubt the story.
| behnamoh wrote:
| And here I thought ampersand had something to do with Ampere,
| the unit of electric current...
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I really like this as an alt etymology. If it got popularized
| to save characters in telegrams, it could have been the
| "electric and". Another way it could be from Ampere is that
| his son was a philologist and could have conceivably promoted
| the idea of an ampersand.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| Cicero's educated Greek body slave, Tiro, invented it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Tullius_Tiro
|
| https://creativepro.com/ampersand-history-
| usage/#:~:text=The....
| I_complete_me wrote:
| I think you might be confusing ampersand with the Tironian
| et which looks like a 7 - Unicode point U+204A. It is still
| visible in Ireland on the old Post 7 Telegraph boxes. Tiro
| invented a shorthhand system and his Tironian et
| represented the sound "et". I recently dived into this
| whole subject so it's kinda fresh in my mind.
| kokanee wrote:
| I've heard some people say that as a child they thought the
| letter before P was "Elemeno." So it certainly tracks that if
| you ask kids to recite "and per se and" that they might think
| the whole phrase is the name of the letter.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I thought there must be two versions of the letter P: regular
| P and elemeno P.
|
| I wasn't sure why there would be two kinds or when to use
| each kind, but I figured they'd explain later.
| koheripbal wrote:
| My kids thought Elmo was part of the alphabet for an
| embarrassing amount of time.
| bitwize wrote:
| That reminds me of how Big Bird (the child proxy in _Sesame
| Street_ before Elmo came along) thought the alphabet was one
| long word, pronouncing it "Ab-kuh-def-ghee-jeckle-manop-
| kwer-stoov-wixizz", and sang a song pondering what it might
| mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTvhKZHAP8U
|
| Those Sesame Street people really understood how a kid's mind
| works.
| mhovan wrote:
| Reminds me of a silly skit one of my old coworkers did a
| while back (one of many):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH_ynnZzJjg
| doodlebugging wrote:
| And this is how windows are opened, skeptics are born, and
| deep thinkers who are not afraid to challenge conventional
| wisdom are created. Pull back the curtains to reveal how
| everything really works.
| threads2 wrote:
| pre-kindergarten I thought it was elemeno!
| doodlebugging wrote:
| This is why I taught my kids to sing the alphabet forwards
| and backwards. If you sing it forwards it can sound like you
| are saying "elemental pee" which sounds scientifically
| interesting but doesn't help anyone learn what that letter is
| supposed to look like.
|
| We used wooden alphabet puzzles as a guide so it could
| reinforce the idea the you are saying L-M-N-O pretty fast.
|
| Since the ABC song is one of three songs that use the same
| tune it is easy to teach an infant or toddler their alphabet
| as you sing them to sleep.
|
| The ABC song, Baa-Baa Black Sheep, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little
| Star all use the same tune.
|
| Add in the backwards ABC's and you get four songs sung with
| the same tune so that the whole thing becomes tonally
| monotonous and soothing and it will tend to relax your child
| as you rock and sing.
|
| With practice I got pretty good at mixing verses from these
| four songs on the fly so that the song eventually morphed
| into a single tune with disconnected lyrics. I used it as a
| challenge to keep myself awake while I rocked them to sleep.
|
| For grins, the Backward ABC lyrics are:
|
| Z, y, x, w, v, u, t...
|
| S, r, q, p, o, n, m...
|
| L, k, j, i, h, g, f...
|
| E, d, c, b, and a.
|
| Now I've sung them backwards to you,
|
| Can you sing them backwards too?
|
| Pretty easy to see how each letter breaks free of the
| original forward limitations.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I like this post, but I cannot get your backwards ABC
| rhythm to make sense.
| Riseed wrote:
| This works for me:
|
| Z, y, x, w, v, u, t...
|
| S, r, q, p, o, n, m...
|
| L, k, j,
|
| I, h, g,
|
| F, e, d, c, b, and a.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Yes this also works but the reason I went with "L-K-J-I-
| H-G-F" over this deals with the fact that I can get each
| letter distinctly enunciated whereas if I mash the last
| line as you did there can be some muddying of the first
| two letters and you end up with another "elemental pee"
| problem in teaching the letters.
|
| I think F and E are too easy to turn into "effy" when you
| sing it out.
|
| It's a personal preference. Yours works too.
| Riseed wrote:
| Oh, you're right. That is a good point. And after looking
| at your detailed breakdown [0], your original line breaks
| do make sense. It does work better singing as "Baa Baa
| Black Sheep" with different lyrics than as "The Alphabet
| Song" with backwards lyrics.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373590
| doodlebugging wrote:
| You have to do it like you handle the switch from
| Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star to Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.
|
| NOTES = 0
|
| ABC = 1
|
| BWABC = 2
|
| TTLS = 3
|
| BBBS = 4
|
| [0] C, C, G, G, A, A, (long G)
|
| [1] A, b, c, d, e, f, (g)...
|
| [2] Z, y, x, w, v, u, (t)...
|
| [3] Twin, -kle, twin, -kle, lit, -tle, (star),
|
| [4] Baa, baa, black, sheep, have, you, (any wool)?
|
| [0] F, F, E, E, D, D, (long C)
|
| [1] H, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, (p)... (the elemental problem
| rises because they crammed an extra letter into this line
| and distinguishing each individual letter gets muddy
| because they used the two D notes for four letters - l,
| m, n, o. This is not optimum)
|
| [2] S, r, q, p, o, n, (m)... (gives each letter an
| opportunity to be clearly enunciated)
|
| [3] How, I, won, -der, what, you, (are)...
|
| [4] Yes, sir, yes, sir, three, bags, (full)
|
| [0] G, G, F, F, E, E, (long D)
|
| [1] Q, r, s, t, u, (v)... (pause on the F at S, or use a
| long F between S and T sop that the third and fourth
| notes merge on S)
|
| [2] L, k, j, i, h, g, (f)... (fits the flow and allows
| each letter to have a distinct sound)
|
| [3] Up, a, -bove, the, world, so, (high)
|
| [4] One, for the, mas, -ter, one, for the, (dame)
|
| [0] G, G, F, F, E, E, (long D)
|
| [1] W, x, y, and, (z)... (Both notes G, F are merged to
| handle the single letter they are sounding and the E
| includes "Y and" to get you to the last letter)
|
| [2] E, d, c, b, and (a). (This handles the rhythm like we
| see in [1] treatment of the stretching or pause on the
| third letter of the series)
|
| [3] Like, a, dia, -mond, in, the, (sky)
|
| [4] One, for the, lit -tle, girl, who, lives, down the,
| (lane)
|
| [0] C, C, G, G, A, A, (long G)
|
| [1] Now, I've, sung, my, A, B, (C's)
|
| [2] Now, I've, sung, them, back, -wards, (to you),
|
| [3] Twin, -kle, twin, -kle, lit, -tle, (star)
|
| [4] Baa, baa, black, sheep, have, you, (any wool)?
|
| [0] F, F, E, E, D, D, (long C)
|
| [1] Tell, me, what, you, think, of, (me).
|
| [2] Can, you, sing, them, back, -wards, (too)?
|
| [3] How, I, won, -der, what, you, (are)
|
| [4] Yes, sir, yes, sir, three, bags, (full)
|
| That's all I got. That's how I sing it. I tried to break
| out the notes as they flow in each song. Commas separate
| each note in the song and the parentheses around the last
| word or letter denote a long note. Where you see two
| words behind one comma those two words use the same note
| - "for the" is an example. It all fits for me though I
| guarantee that there is more than one way to skin this
| cat. This way works for me.
| Riseed wrote:
| It took me a bit to get it, but this is an excellent
| explanation. Thank you :)
| rocketbop wrote:
| Yeah I can't get it to fit the usual melody. Did you
| happen to put it on YouTube?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| No I haven't recorded it for YouTube. I do have it on
| some home video somewhere, maybe. I would probably have
| to dig for that and maybe do a format conversion from 8mm
| tape.
|
| I diagrammed it out in the post above. I hope that helps.
| ekaryotic wrote:
| Are there any colemak enthusiasts teaching their kids the
| alphabet in colemak order as read from the keyboard.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I for one will teach my kids Dvorak.
|
| Single-quote/quote comma/less dot/greater p y ... a o e u
| i d h t n s ...
| kazinator wrote:
| By the way, there is a really irritating Japanese version
| of the English alphabet song whose verses don't end on the
| "ee" letters: G, P, V, Z. (Z being "zee" in the USA). So
| there is no rhyme, and less variety in rhythm.
|
| It goes something like.
|
| A B C D E F G
|
| H I J K L M N
|
| O P Q R S T U
|
| V W and X Y Z
|
| Y and Z
|
| Here is an example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlZNXUWh9Do
|
| *facepalm*
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Your kids will beat the field sobriety test!
| jrockway wrote:
| Something I've always wondered is how people actually do
| the backwards alphabet test. I don't think I could
| efficiently do it sober, but I do have an O(n^2)
| algorithm for doing it; sing the ABCs in your head, and
| only say the letter before the one you've already said.
|
| So like, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyZ,
| abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxY, ...
|
| You can also use this algorithm to reverse a linked list,
| though you will not get the job if you do. I'm wondering
| if the cops are as picky as Google interviewers.
| saghm wrote:
| A few years back for fun, I learned to say the alphabet
| backwards as quickly as I could. I used basically the
| same technique I use as a musician to learn complex
| phrases; start with a short sequence (like "z y x w") and
| repeat it over as slowly as you need, and increase the
| speed as you get better at it, then either extend it a
| few more letters (e.g. "z y x w v u t") using the same
| strategy or learn the sequence starting with the next
| letter separately ("v u t s r q") and then "glue" them
| together when you're proficient with both. It took me
| only a few minutes of practice to get the whole alphabet
| this way, and it's stuck fairly well despite not really
| ever practicing it other than to occasionally show people
| as a party trick. Strangely, the letters seem to work
| better in that order for me; I can actually say the
| alphabet faster backwards rather than forwards, although
| it's hard for me to to tell if that's actually due to the
| sounds blending better objectively or due to the fact
| that I tend to have a bit of trouble with enunciating
| clearly in general and the "backwards" route skipping
| some learned bad habits that the forwards route uses.
|
| Since I don't drink any alcohol and don't drive, I can't
| imagine I'd ever have a chance to use this in a field
| sobriety test, but I also suspect that a cop who pulled
| me over wouldn't find it particularly amusing, so I
| wouldn't be eager to try it anyways.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I've always assumed a gotcha here is when the driver says
| "officer, I don't think I could do this sober" and now
| they've admitted guilt.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Funny you mention that since the first time I heard them
| sung backwards involved a field sobriety test that the
| driver passed.
|
| I decided that it was a useful skill. Later when our kids
| were born and the long early morning hours were filled
| with rocking chairs noises, diaper changes, feeding and
| burping I took the opportunity to add that version to my
| song list. Sometimes I ended up singing every song that I
| knew any words from so it helped a lot when I was tired
| to focus on one tune.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you don't care about rhyming you might as well just
| change the original song.
|
| abcdefg, hijklmn, opq, rst, uvw xyz
| narcraft wrote:
| Tom Bombadil
| justin_oaks wrote:
| I was hoping this article would be about the letter C and be from
| the future.
|
| The letter C is useless. It either makes the sound that S does or
| the sound K does. Instead of C we should just use an S or a K for
| every place a C is.
|
| Some may argue that without C we wouldn't have CH. And then I
| say, "Why do we need two characters to represent a single sound?
| It should have it's own letter."
|
| Alas, English spelling is all kinds of messed up. And I'll have
| to resign myself to that fact.
| xattt wrote:
| C is also used for sounds that sound like "ts"; you can't make
| that sound with an s or k alone.
|
| Sidenote: I see that some transliteration systems make Q
| represent "ch".
| mcv wrote:
| In Slavic languages and in German, the 'c' is (almost?)
| always the 'ts' sound. That makes it as useful as the 'x',
| although that's also one we could do without.
|
| The 'c' could also be considered useful exactly because it
| has the unique property of changing its sound depending on
| the surroundings. In Dutch, for example, the word for
| politician is "politicus" where the 'c' had a k sound, but
| the plural is "politici", where the 'c' has an 's' sound. It
| would be a lot less clean if we had to swap 'k' and 's'.
| Maybe we should only use the 'c' for words where that
| property matters.
|
| I hope you all remember the various "language reform" essays
| that get progressively less readable as various redundant
| letters are dropped or replaced.
|
| Although you could also argue we should add some. The 'e' can
| be pronounced in several different ways, and not being able
| to tell the difference can occasionally lead to confusion. In
| Dutch, for example, the words for "a" and "one" are the same:
| "een", but pronounced differently.
| saalweachter wrote:
| > That makes it as useful as the 'x', although that's also
| one we could do without.
|
| I would like to further improve the 'x' by making its
| pronunciation 'sk' at the beginning of a phoneme, rather
| than 'z', 'ex', or maybe 'k'.
|
| It sounds fine in words like 'xylophone' or 'xray', and
| there are plenty of words like 'xy', 'xate', 'xunk', or
| 'xeleton' so we could re-balance our alphabet.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I hope you all remember the various "language reform"
| essays that get progressively less readable as various
| redundant letters are dropped or replaced.
|
| Can you cite any that are putting in legitimate effort and
| expertise into the letter choices, and not picking a whole
| bunch of things that are half bad on purpose?
|
| Also it's a bad idea to rate an orthography based on how it
| looks with 0 hours of practice.
| mbg721 wrote:
| I'm told that this is a consequence of the Romans absorbing the
| Etruscans and being so heavily influenced by the Greeks. There
| were just too many velar consonants to go around, and they were
| exchanged sometimes, like Caius and Gaius.
| qqtt wrote:
| For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped
| to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no
| longer be part of the alphabet.
|
| The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch"
| formation, which will be dealt with later.
|
| Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one"
| would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish
| "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j"
| anomali wonse and for all.
|
| Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear
| with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and
| iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and
| unvoist konsonants.
|
| Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi
| ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in
| the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th"
| rispektivli.
|
| Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud
| hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking
| werld.
| yc-kraln wrote:
| The further down you got, the more like German it sounded as
| I was mentally pronouncing it--but it was somehow a smooth
| gradient. Weird!
| Muromec wrote:
| Which was exactly de point of de joke originally.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I know this is a popular joke, but with English spelling
| failing to adapt to the great vowel shift and pronunciation
| shifting in other ways as well (like no longer pronouncing
| the k in knight), you might as well apply these rules. They
| make no less sense than the current spelling, and perhaps the
| removal of unnecessary letters makes the situation even
| slightly better as well.
|
| With some kids even learning to read English by learning the
| general shape of the words rather than the individual letter
| pronunciations (based on some flawed research), I wouldn't
| mind a general spelling reform to bring the situation under
| control.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Yeah yeah yeah but this starts to fall apart on the second
| wave. Why would you get rid of y? The last thing we need is
| _fewer_ vowel glyphs.
|
| This is just a fun little writing and should not be used to
| imply _anything_.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Did you transform the text to Esperanto orthography? Nice.
| franciscop wrote:
| I keep saying that, by chance, it's a pity that the English
| alphabet has exactly 23 letters and doesn't have a single one
| more. Had it one more letter, say "n" or "c" or some other,
| that'd make it perfect for base64: 24*2 + 10 = 64. Instead now we
| have 62 "base" alphanumeric alphabet, and two symbols that are
| disagreed upon since they have to be chosen depending on the
| context.
| franciscop wrote:
| Edit: I mistakenly wrote 23 _now in this post_ while I've had
| this thought many times with the correct alphabet number count,
| 26. In fact my math above only works for 26 (or 27 if it had
| one more letter).
| smeej wrote:
| Wait, here I've been thinking the alphabet has 26 letters all
| this time?
|
| (double checks keyboard)
| quesera wrote:
| > 26 letters
|
| J, U, and W are sometimes considered pretenders. Late
| additions, at least.
|
| J is just a stylized I. U is a variation of V. W is of course
| just a double U.
|
| G is also a relatively recent entry, if you go back to the
| Romans from which the Latin/English alphabet is derived.
| franciscop wrote:
| wow how did I mess up my post so badly? I didn't even do the
| proper math _now_, ofc the alphabet has 26 letters and my
| math above only works for 26 and not 23. I did check back
| when I had this thought many times. I guess I might have just
| had a brain fart now, I just copied what googled said while
| writing my post and somehow Google said 23 in a quick/bad
| search, so I just copied that number without checking it.
|
| 26 * 2 + 10 = 62, almost 64
|
| (26 + 1) * 2 + 10 = 64
| wizofaus wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me in the least if ChatGPT gave the
| alphabet written out as an example of a word with 23
| letters.
|
| I wonder what the history is behind why base-64 encoding
| became so widespread. Sadly I can even recognise certain
| sequences now without having to decode them. But the fact
| it's not even safe for use in URLs/filenames (due to + and
| /) would suggest it's not really fit for purpose (and yes I
| know base64-url encoding exists, I once had to write code
| that had to deal with strings that could use either
| encoding, and you could only tell by looking for the
| presence of _ or -. Certainly that _ was not originally
| chosen as one the extra 2 characters needed on top of
| A-Za-z0-9 for full encoding is a bit baffling. "-" is often
| used as delimeter though - my other pick would have been
| #.)
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I used to see typos like that and double check that I didn't
| shift universes. I eventually figured out the the shifts
| aren't that obvious.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Nope, it's 23, the same as the number of fingers and toes you
| have.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| >the same as the number of fingers and toes you have.
|
| You really only have 18 fingers and toes when you think
| about it - 10 toes + 8 fingers.
|
| Those other two appendages are thumbs. Even my kids know
| this.
|
| EDIT: You also have two sets of knees - your low knees, and
| your high knees.
| etrevino wrote:
| You're right
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| &totse
| paulkrush wrote:
| I think of Hacker News as a source of interesting things that I
| as a nerd, did not know & this fits.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Ever wondered about those old 'U's that look like V?
|
| Now you know why 'W' is so named.
| mcdonje wrote:
| "&" wasn't ever in the alphabet in the same capacity as the
| letters that represent sounds. It was there as a keyword
| signifying the end of the list. Then its name was expanded to
| clarify that it was not a normal letter but a keyword. Then that
| expanded name was misinterpreted by people who never needed the
| list termination signifier to begin with.
|
| Lesson? KISS. They should've implemented it with brackets.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > It was there as a keyword signifying the end of the list.
|
| as opposed to simply not continuing the list, or using the word
| "end" somewhere? this doesn't make sense, to me. I find it
| difficult to believe this.
| mcdonje wrote:
| I made an assumption based on how I understood the article.
| After reading your comment, I searched around for more info.
| Unfortunately, I can't find anything definitive. There are a
| lot of articles about when and why it was removed (alphabet
| song based on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star), but not much
| about why it was added.
|
| The common speculation seems to be that they put it in there
| simply because it's a symbol. I think about the alphabet as
| representing a class of characters that represents sounds,
| which biased my interpretation of the story. However, others
| could have thought of it as a list of symbols to know in
| order to read (besides punctuation).
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| It's supported by the several references to old teaching
| materials people have posted.
| [deleted]
| saalweachter wrote:
| What, you don't use & in your everyday spelling of words? &,
| b&, c&le, d&y, gr&, p&a, r&om, v&al, w&er...
| adzm wrote:
| Let's not forget &c
| mauvehaus wrote:
| $ cat /&c/passwd
| dagmx wrote:
| Really they should have had a null. Create extra havoc with C
| strings if null had the need to be a common char
| kibwen wrote:
| Danes and Norwegians are way ahead of you:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98
| skrebbel wrote:
| What does O have to do with null? I mean sure it has a
| similar shape to zero but so does O.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| It's also the alternate representation of an empty set in
| maths.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| But it goes the other way. That's math using non-latin
| letters, which is a common practice. Not a weird
| coincidence.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I always thought _amper_ was another word for merchant because in
| my native German the & symbol is called _" Kaufmanns-Und"_,
| literally " _merchants-and "_.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-17 23:00 UTC)