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I wonder if any historians may actually be concerned about this.

Thinking back to my college days, there is much of antiquity that is not well understood due to the inability to understand its written languages. The Rosetta Stone was an as incredible as it was rare. So much history is locked away in written language that will likely never be understood. (See this page for some examples.) A culture's language is its bridge to understanding the culture itself.

If emoticons are linguistically ambiguous, we run a risk that our culture will not be understood in the future, either.

http://www.omniglot.com/langua...

Found the original release and FAQ and documentation. I actually wrote an extension that will convert that document into a LaTeX document, with actual post script Tamil font support. You could print in Tamil from the Madurai encoded Tamil document. Fun times, 26 years ago!

How so? A hebrew daleth doesn't look anything like a triangle.

At the time of King David, Hebrew was still using Phoenician-based script http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (which used a triangle for daleth), rather than the modern Aramaic-based script http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (Aramaic) http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (Hebrew), so the doubled-daleth could be a valid explanation for the Star of David symbol.

How so? A hebrew daleth doesn't look anything like a triangle.

At the time of King David, Hebrew was still using Phoenician-based script http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (which used a triangle for daleth), rather than the modern Aramaic-based script http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (Aramaic) http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (Hebrew), so the doubled-daleth could be a valid explanation for the Star of David symbol.

How so? A hebrew daleth doesn't look anything like a triangle.

At the time of King David, Hebrew was still using Phoenician-based script http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (which used a triangle for daleth), rather than the modern Aramaic-based script http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (Aramaic) http://www.omniglot.com/writin... (Hebrew), so the doubled-daleth could be a valid explanation for the Star of David symbol.

English being a de facto international language, as has been thoroughly pointed out, might be something to start with. Simplified Technical English, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S..., is used by various government agencies to remove some of the ambiguity of English. While it and similar efforts may or may not be sufficient as an everyday language, it is an idea to consider.

You should also include these sites as a source of ideas and to see some of what has already been done, http://conlang.org/, http://omniglot.com/

Linear Script A is still not decoded - though apparently related to Linear Script B (which has been decoded) it is still not translatable.

There are others - http://www.omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm

The problem is not exactly solvable. All translated texts in existence have something related to base the translation on. The Egyptian Hieroglyphs were untranslatable, until the Rosetta stone provided a sequence of texts. Two were already known, which matched in their translations - thus implying that the unknown third was the same text in that language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone).

This article from a few weeks back could provide a possible entry point for beginning to decipher texts like that. Since it relies not on dictionaries, but rather the relationships between words, it may be possible to narrow down the meanings of words in unknown languages into smaller groups of possible translations, or at least I imagine so from reading it.

Ben Franklin thought of the 'th' character in 1768, published in 1779 in A Scheme for a new Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling.

I couldn't remember where that was from, and in my search I found this site Translations of My hovercraft.

Completely off-topic, the logo for today (in Tengwar) is complete gibberish. Whoever prepared it didn't realise that the keyboard layout didn't correspond to QWERTY, and apparently that Tengwar doesn't even map onto the Latin alphabet. Here is the correct orthography for English, and here is an Elvish orthography. Today's logo actually consists of the letters "zh h ch g j wh m". A fitting tribute to Slashdot that garbage from the submitter was posted without any editorial oversight.

Completely off-topic, the logo for today (in Tengwar) is complete gibberish. Whoever prepared it didn't realise that the keyboard layout didn't correspond to QWERTY, and apparently that Tengwar doesn't even map onto the Latin alphabet. Here is the correct orthography for English, and here is an Elvish orthography. Today's logo actually consists of the letters "zh h ch g j wh m". A fitting tribute to Slashdot that garbage from the submitter was posted without any editorial oversight.

And of course, my hovercraft is full of eels.

Unlike the Chinese, European governments do not draw idiotic conclusions from some random doodles found on a rock then run with it to create a vast complex theory that makes them look really good!

If you use the Chinese model of "truthyness" the following shows that Europe had writings 10,000 years ago!
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/vinca.htm

So, did Genghis or Genghis or any other Mongol contemporary use the Roman alphabet?

Omniglot is your friend.

In case you are interested, genuine alphabet of middle history Iran has been Pahlavi

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mpersian.htm

and the more older one (i.e. thousands of years of history) is Mikhi alphabet:

http://www.persiancalligraphy.org/History-of-Calligraphy.html

don't necessarily represent ideas or words, they actually represent sounds and are used like your alphabet is (see e.g. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian.htm). now, if those user-created symbols would function like pictograms, not dissimilar to the traditional chinesich characters we love and cherish, it'd be a totally different matter.</nitpick>

There are many more translations on the site http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm

That one has been done already, now the rest of his lecture. http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm

You're right, Farsi is not an Arabic language. It's not even in the same language group as Arabic - Farsi is an Indo-European language

I thought the Quran was written in Farsi, it appears I was wrong, it was written in a Classical Arabic language.

Falcon

Heh. Certainly there's some resemblance to Ogham, the old native Irish alphabet. However, read as Ogham, the top says something like "uououuuaaaoauo", "uuuouauooaouua", "oaaauuaauouaoouu", "uuuoaoaouoauaau", "uaauuuuauuuaaaa", "uaauuuuououooaa", "ououauuuaaoaoua", "uuouauao".

Even when really very drunk indeed, Irish people tend be more coherent than that. I'm drunk right now!

For further information, please visit this page.

The children's concept reception is much better than before. Despite the use of US keyboards (all we had at the time), the children have had little problem adapting, and have figured out all they keys.

This is an interesting problem. We have virtual keyboards that mean that any set of keys can be used to type any set of alphabetic characters, but we don't have a way to display those virtually on the physical keyboard. Anyone who has tried typing a text on a keyboard designed for a different language knows the difficulties of using the "wrong" keyboard. I'm thinking we need something like a backlit display or e-ink key cap so the physical keyboard can show the right character values on the keys, and you can even switch from one alphabet to another with the same keyboard. We don't want new language learners to be learning incorrectly, that is, without the actual character set of their language. Also, there are languages, such as Inuktitut, that are only now getting written forms, for whom creating actual key caps may not be economical.

I never denied that languages change. However that doesn't mean that there isn't a correct form at any given time. If an exam tells you to write in Latin and you write in Spanish you can't claim that languages change and you're 2000 years in advance when you fail.

And while the punny sentence is understandable given the context it might not be so if one word in twenty were misspelled.

What Shaw said applies to writing too. Would you higher sum won who wright's like this?

You beat me to it!

Min bröstvårta explodera med nöje!

My hovercraft is full of eels in other languages

Exactly. *ANY* single source is a problem, which is why most people get worried if, for example, there is only one news media outlet in print or other media in a country, or if there is only one party in a democracy, or if there is only a single published paper on a particular scientific claim. The whole point of having multiple sources isn't that having multiple sources will make something magically infallible, but that it will be consistently less fallible than if you rely on a single source for information. People should look for and critically evaluate multiple sources for themselves.

Ironically, the fact that Wikipedia gets input from so many people is one of its strengths. The value of multiple sources is defeated, however, if people treat it as an endpoint of an investigation rather than the start.

Wikipedia, just like any other source, is always going to be subject to the possibility of a "my hovercraft is full of eels" Hungarian phrasebook event. It is still a good starting point.

Also, there is ALREADY an alphabet used all over for phonetic spelling. The International Phonetic Alphabet. A mapping to english should be a sufficent start. Using this would normalize both spelling and pronunciation. IPA isn't that hard to learn, it can be used to write any language that a human can pronounce, it's great! The problem is that very few non-linguists will ever see it. Even those who are interested in spelling reform don't seem to notice that their work has been done for them by linguists.

Also, there is ALREADY an alphabet used all over for phonetic spelling. The International Phonetic Alphabet. A mapping to english should be a sufficent start. Using this would normalize both spelling and pronunciation. IPA isn't that hard to learn, it can be used to write any language that a human can pronounce, it's great! The problem is that very few non-linguists will ever see it. Even those who are interested in spelling reform don't seem to notice that their work has been done for them by linguists.

You'd think that, but apparently Russians and Germans (probably others as well), still managed to do exactly that. I've heard it myself, so I'm not making it up

Germans don't have the /w/ phomene.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cyrillic.htm

Neither does Russian.

Perhaps you're not hearing what you're expecting, and thus hearing them swapping them. This happens with Japanese with English-speaking listeners. The listeners usually hear "l" when they expect "r", and "r" when they expect "l", but in fact, the Japanese are saying neither. They're using the Japanese "r" for both. But since we're attempting to distinguish difference between phomenes to distinguish each of them, the English-speaking listener will usually hear both "l" and "r" as the other one.

Honestly, I've never heard a German use the /w/ sound at all.

Hangul/hangeul is much easier to learn to read then Chinese and Japanese.

True, except the 's'. There is no such a thing in Cyrillic [...]

Actually, there is: it's used in the Macedonian version of the Cyrillic alphabet.

It's in Unicode, too: U+0455 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER DZE

...Cyrillic has a, e, o, p, c, y, x, and s...

True, except the 's'. There is no such a thing in Cyrillic, unless you mean the Old Churh Slavonic

Sure about that?
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm

I've got one (pardon the translation):

The real horse is your mother.

Get it?

In spoken Chinese (or rather, the group of languages collectively called Chinese), each syllable is given one of four "tones". The meaning of the word changes if even one syllable is mis-toned. The whole language group is one big pun waiting to happen!

See http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese_spoken.htm
for more details.

it appears that using GPL-licensed fonts in a document makes your document subject to the GPL

That's probably the stupidest thing I've read in weeks.

If any IP lawyers read slashdot these days, you might give The Tower of Babel. another read.

Let's say you use, Cyrillic , f'rinstance.

And the random string looks like this:

CTECMPCHP

The "Raiding" software would read it as:

CTECMPCHP

which will be wrong, as it should be read:

STESMRSNR

So, the person sitting there would look at the image, then look at the table next to it, find the C and see that it is the letter for S, T and E are the same, but there's that C=S thing followed by an M, which is the same, but the P is an R and the H is an N, etc...

Once they develop software that can read Cyrillic, switch to some other language or even make one up!

Here are some really fucked up alphabets that would be really cool that way:

Glagolithic

Enochian

Cherokee

Malayam

Heck - there's bunchies of them. And since there would be a visible key next to it, it would make things a little slow, but it would be hella secure against automated intrusions, since the letter composition would be randomised.

also: It would look | Comments?

RS

Let's say you use, Cyrillic , f'rinstance.

And the random string looks like this:

CTECMPCHP

The "Raiding" software would read it as:

CTECMPCHP

which will be wrong, as it should be read:

STESMRSNR

So, the person sitting there would look at the image, then look at the table next to it, find the C and see that it is the letter for S, T and E are the same, but there's that C=S thing followed by an M, which is the same, but the P is an R and the H is an N, etc...

Once they develop software that can read Cyrillic, switch to some other language or even make one up!

Here are some really fucked up alphabets that would be really cool that way:

Glagolithic

Enochian

Cherokee

Malayam

Heck - there's bunchies of them. And since there would be a visible key next to it, it would make things a little slow, but it would be hella secure against automated intrusions, since the letter composition would be randomised.

also: It would look | Comments?

RS

enlish is actually pretty damn easy :)

I'll just pretend you meant to say Elvish, and agree. It is beautiful, though.

pedo mellon a minno (Speak, friend, and enter)

No.

"In an effort to increase literacy, about 2,000 of the characters used in China have been simplified. These simplified characters are also used in Singapore, but in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Malaysia the traditional characters are still used."

And many of the simplified characters _really_ look different - no resemblance to the traditional versions.

Then there are the stylized versions of these (similar to cursive vs print).

Actually, there are a number of ancient languages that we can't read today.

The topic is programming languages. Neither Slashdot, UTF-8, nor HTML serve as programming languages.

Even setting that aside, though, I still fail to see anything ironic. I don't speak Japanese, and I can't read or write Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. Does that alone imply some kind of irony since I'm posting here? If so, how? Is it more ironic or less so that I have some knowledge of Devanagari, but absolutely none of Cyrillic?

Finally, HTML entities are for non-English alphabets, not languages. I have no difficulty, for example, posting what little French I know (je n'ai pas étudié le français depuis douze ans), and that is most definitely a non-English language.

Did you notice the runes in this picture? What's up with that?

Esperanto? A quick google search finds the top estimates to be anywhere from one million to ten million, and possibly much lower if you require fluency above that of, say, Arnold Rimmer. Feel free to refute this, it was merely a quick search. I suppose there might be a wider distribution of speakers than most other languages with that few speakers, but they'd still probably be better off learning some other language. French is pretty widely distributed, too.

If you like languages, please check out these websites. If you're bored, check them out too... you might learn that you are interested in something new!

http://www.ancientscripts.com/
http://www.omniglot.com
http://www.langmaker.com/

Whoops, looks like I was wrong about Mayan. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mayan.htm says "Further progress in the decipherment was made during the 1970s and 1980s when more linguistics began to take an interest in the script. Today most Mayan texts can be read, though there are still some unknown glyphs" (and that it is in fact logographic rather than phonetic).

Their system of language is based on ideograms where one ideogram represents a word or part of a word. It's the same with

• Korean
  Nope. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, but now all writing in North Korea and almost all writing in South Korea is alphabetic. (Chinese characters are occasionally scattered into highbrow writing in South Korea, but it's still mostly alphabetic.) Korean writing arranges the letters into syllables in such a way that the syllables sort of look like Chinese characters, though -- quite pretty. (Link with examples)
• Japanese
  Japanese writing is a mix of phonetic and ideographic writing (with the ideograms borrowed from Chinese; they're called kanji, which is just Japanese-borrowed-from-Chinese for "Chinese characters").
• Mayan
  Unless there's recent news I've missed, Mayan hieroglyphs haven't been deciphered yet. (I guess people could still have an idea whether they're likely to be phonetic or likely to be ideographic based on the variety and distribution of symbols, though -- I don't know much about them.)
• Egyptian
  Egyptian is a fascinating mix of ideographic and phonetic writing. There are symbols that are used only for their sound, and symbols that are used only for their meaning, and lots of symbols that can be used rebus-like for either. I found a neat page about it at http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm .

Hahah...your post just reminded me of something.

I remember when I was in junior high, I had a few friends of the "nerd" persuasion, and we would occasionally write things out in the Standard Galactic Alphabet for each others' benefit.

No, it isn't quite on the same level as writing lecture notes in elvish since the SGA is nothing more than substitutions for letters in the English alphabet (whoda thunk that advanced species like the Vorticons, the Shikadi, and the entirety of the population on the planet Fribbulus Xax would be speaking and writing in perfect modern English, just with a different alphabet?), but it was a fun inside joke. :-)

-- Nathan

We will not discuss the Cirth, the angular letters seen in the inscription on Balin's tomb. The Cirth are also called runes, while Tengwar is translated as "letters".

I'm no Tolkein expert, but can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes, that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?

If they are, then typing them is no difficult feat, given that there are fonts available (as the page I linked to shows), and the fact that the alphabet is already recognised by the Unicode 2.0 (here as well it seems, although I'm too lazy to actually check it).

(/.-tters from the Indian sub-continent will, of course, note the irony in being able to effortlessly type obscure ancient and artificial scripts, while struggling for normal, regular, alive Indic languages)

"pan", for bread, is apparently from the "root language", a patched together half understood language that linguists have been working on figuring out. If you look, "pan" or a close cognate, is the word for bread in many different, non related languages. Just one of those words that kept making it up through.

spanish->pan
french->pain
italian->pane
japan ese,romanjii->pan
portuguese->pão

course, four of those are gimmes 'cause they're all just dialects of Latin, if you look at it that way.

ok here's one i can back up a little more:

the word "father" in a wide array:

Sanskrit Greek Latin Gothic English
pita pater pater fadar father

anyways, i'm no expert, just interested-- check out ancientscripts.com for a ton more about this stuff, and then hop over to omniglot when you want some more, but a little different.

Why settle for second best when you can write in the klingon alphabet? If there has to be a written record of what the patient speaks, and the patient for some reason only speaks klingon, then we may assume that he also reads it.. and at least here there is a rule that says that a patient can demand to see his papers - and then they better be in a launguage he understands.