h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Uhm yes, I've seen that bull about upside down capital As. Saw it illustrated and animated on some tv history documentary and it left me in doubt. As you have just done.

I was thinking of the lower case 'a' which this link suggests was the profile of some sorta bird:

http://www.egyptartsite.com/hiero.html

In searching for that I came across several pages making assertions that all hieroglyphs are phonetic symbols and somehow associated with the name of whatever is imaged. But few explained further. I suspect the problem there is that the sounds were different in ancient languages.

Birds in profile are also shown for O, U, W and M. You'd have to be a birdwatcher to know which one was which, but O, U and W are the same bird! The M looks like an owl and the 'a' like a hawk (or seagull, know locally as a shithawk).

So hieroglyphics may be turn out to be a blind alley in seeking the essence of primitive pre-language utterances and their connection to pure physical/emotional responses, like sighs, laughter, anger, pride, frustration, hunger, sex, etc.


~jwf~

The hieroglyphs worked on the principle of drawing pictures of Jello, Wall, Fence and taking the initial sounds of each to spell out the word jwf. It was purely symbolic.

time zones - are you a fellow insomniac or far away from GMT?

I am very surprised by all this. I just assumed, for example, that our lower case "a" (the shape of it) came from the Greek "alpha" - although I suppose that had to come from somewhere originally.

Now I am pondering which came first: the letter "delta" or the word "delta" for the mouth of a river with all those little rivers. Although the Greeks probably didn't call a delta a delta. Or the Egyptians, either.

Will we ever know for sure? So much of this seems to depend upon pronunciation, which is to some extent, surely impossible to reconstruct.

I thought I could hear the actor coming out in jwf's hypotheses a few posts back.

Pit - jwf is in Nova Scotia. As he will probably mention soon. (When he gets up!)

I'm fairly sure river deltas are so-called because they're the same shape as the letter 'delta', ie triangular.

Like Gnomon says, the Phoenician letters were named after things which started with that sound - so alef (bull) started with an 'a' sound, gamma derives from 'gamel' which obviously enough starts with g and means camel. A bit like our phonetic alphabet really, a for alpha etc.

>Will we ever know for sure? Not likely. But at least we do know which came first, chicken or Or do we? Please vote on the following solutions: a chicken b egg c there was no first chicken: chicken is a hopelessly vague category that merges seamlessly into others over evolutionary time d they were both there at the Big Bang, along with everything else past present and future e flying spaghetti monster Don't vote here, but here http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F1702939?thread=6997736&post=87039994#p87039994

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHQ2756cyD8

Best Fry & Laurie clip I've seen! So Fry! So Laurie!

Thanks Christopheles!

>> And I know a friend of mine who was furious because her child's first recognisable sound was "da da", even though the child had no dada, and nobody had ever said the word to the child. (Gnomon, 157771)

Solnushka, of this parish, says that da is easier to say than ma, (I'll take her word on it, she's a linguist) and has a concommitant theory that simple self-interest among women over the millenia made them ascribe a child's first recognisable words to naming the father not the mother.

>> Pit - jwf is in Nova Scotia. <<


Well if we're gonna be letting all our out of the bag I might's well
tell you that Trillian's Child is really Random Dent, President of the Universe
and Then Some.


~jwf~

jwf, as a Nouveau Scotian (or whatever) you´ll probably gang up with my very pretty ex colleage from Moscow.
"You pennypinching Germans can´t afford cold. We have *real* winter."

Snaildirt Lirch, our (lowercase) "a" comes from writing a capital A quickly. Our capital A comes from the ancient Greek Alpha which looked almost identical (the horizontal line sloped downward slightly). This came from the Phoenician Alef which was a picture of a bull. At this stage our knowledge starts to get sketchy. We're not sure where the Phoenicians got their letters from - the most likely place is the southern Sinai, where older similar-looking letters have been found although we're not fully sure what they mean. And an even older inscription near Luxor suggests that the southern Sinai letters might have come from Luxor. If this is true, then the alphabet was invented by people who were familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs, but decided to make up their own to suit their own language, probably a Semitic language. (The main Semitic language spoken these days is Arabic).

The Nile Delta was named after the letter. The Phoenician name for the letter was Delt and it appears to have meant 'door'.

Thank you for the new anagram!

>> Thank you for the new anagram! <<

Puzzled over that one for half a day before I finally saw
'Snaildirt Lirch' in Gnomon's address to you above. As the
Halloween season of anagrams passes and people revert to
their trew ID I feel a need to register 'Snaildirt Chill' in
a posting for posterity and ask you about your homepage.

God bless your little heart for showing all the new smileys!
I'd never seen them all at once before. Quite a cartload really.
And you've just updated in Oct 17, 2009.

So I'm delighted to see your spelling of Pan Galactical Gargle Blaster!

Please don't tell me if it was deliberate, unconscious or ironic.
The new image of Random Dent currently being presented in And Another Thing
has left my fixed impressions of you in a state of flux. No, not Germany, Flux!


~jwf~

PS: You and Gnomon should both know that I am so crap at anagrams
that I can't tell which version is correct. Unless I had a pencil and who has pencils anymore. Sheesh!

This thread may be of interest to those here who haven't yet seen it.

F19585?thread=7014722

The action gets hot around post #21.

Cheers,
jwf

Apropos the IELTS thread
Over 45 years ago, a prof on my first week of a linguistics course made the statement that "native speakers do not make errors in their own language"
There are of course, things that make our teeth curl because we were taught they were wrong: for me that's the less/fewer confusion and people who talk about "an historical event", but if you can persuade the majority to join you, that's OK.

The less and fewer confusion is the worst!

That it occurs at least twice (always the wrong way round) in any given half hour of BBC Whirled News can send me into paroxisms of despair. Does no one there care. Does no one there know the difference. Is there no supervising editor. How can they claim to be maintaining any sort of standards.

I know I have my own problems - like affect and effect. And like a lot of Canadians I am torn (and fluctuate) between Brit and Yankee terminologies and spellings, but I know there would be less traffic if there were fewer cars.


jwf

...paroxysms...

And spellchecker didn`t even care!

jwf

"Hello, how are you today?"
"I'm good."

-and I'm paroxysmic. (and my spell checker didn't like that one)