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Alphabet Soup (Linguistics)
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Grant



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It's always struck me when watching one of the many Scandinavian TV shows, just how often a Danish or Swedish phrase sounds just like English.

I think there is an even simpler explanation than your linguist's - English, Norwegian and Danish all descended from the language spoken in Doggerland. When this was flooded 6,000 years ago the inhabitants moved to the British Isles and Scandinavia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
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Jeff Green



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Tut/ankh/amun
Tut (tote) - hold or carry/Ankh - life or spirit (not soul), as in sperm - blood(line)/Amun
Tut (French tout, Italian tutti) - all/Ankh - blood (line)/Amun
Elites - 'pure' (inbred) blood.

Moses/Mousa/Muse - mes, mesu - child, son (Hermes/Ur-mes, son of Zeus & Maia (Jesus & Mary?) for another thread)
Children (esp. little boys) aMuse their peers.
Elites view/subdue the masses (moses/muses?) as children.
Mos/es or Mes/Is - child (son) of Is(is)
Ra/mess/es or Ra/mes/is - Sun/son child of Is(is)

Ra - sun - father - man
Isis - moon - mother - woman
Mes(u) - (planet?) child -son, continuance of bloodline (plant is "welsh" for children (Plantagenet - children of the Argonaut, for a different thread maybe))
Original 'Trinity'?
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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I liked Hermes/Ur-mes, son of Zeus & Maia since it chimed in (though I don't know quite how) with Castor and Pollux, James and John and so forth. Perhaps you might be a little bit more forthcoming. Still, nice to have you about.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Wile scored a pitiful 550 points.....

http://greatlanguagegame.com/
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Grant



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I only scored 500!
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Why does written English lack umlauts, stresses, and emphasis marks?
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N R Scott


In: Middlesbrough
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Ishmael wrote:
Why does written English lack umlauts, stresses, and emphasis marks?


That's a brilliant question. My first thought is because no one has fixed it. That would then lead to the next question - why has no one fixed it?

It's quite timely for me as I've been doing a blog series where I've been trying to remove all the useless letters from the English alphabet. However, I realised I needed more vowels, so I had to use diacritics to differentiate between the vowel sounds. I've ended up with 16 consonants and 10 vowel sounds at the moment.



The accents I've used were pretty much just randomly chosen.



I haven't trialled this alphabet out yet, but I'm hoping it will be able to represent phonetically all the words in the English language.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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I find it interesting that you ended up with 16 consonants.

I think you will find that the number of vowels change depending on the regional dialect. The consonants should be more-or-less stable with some minor fluctuation in count.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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"Why does written English lack umlauts, stresses, and emphasis marks?"

I asked this question because I believe I know the answer. It is, in fact, the obvious answer.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Blimey, someone must have got as far as the last chapter of Forgeries.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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I don't recall this being your thesis.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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I don't recall reading your thesis so it is difficult to be more precise.
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N R Scott


In: Middlesbrough
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Mick Harper wrote:
Blimey, someone must have got as far as the last chapter of Forgeries.

I re-read this chapter last night, it was quite a helpful refresh.

Ishmael wrote:
I think you will find that the number of vowels change depending on the regional dialect. The consonants should be more-or-less stable with some minor fluctuation in count.

I agree. My thinking is vowels are infinite, whereas consonants are finite. I think it's possible to have an alphabet that represents each possible consonant, but ultimately pointless to try to represent the vowel sounds.

I think the number of consonants is limited by the mechanics of the mouth, so it's a limited palette. Though like Mick points out in that final chapter - without a tape recorder to record what each consonant symbol sounds like no one can know for sure if one culture is using a symbol in the same way another is.

I think some consonant "sounds" are possibly hardwired into language though by the mechanics of the mouth. For instance, the "M" sound made by the mouth closing. We use it as the onomatopoeic sound of eating ...Mmm ..or in text speak nom. Then many of the words associated with feeding; mouth, mother, mam, mammary, milk..
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N R Scott


In: Middlesbrough
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This might also be why M has religious connotations too. The "Ohm" sound in mediation for example. Also, the name Muhammed has the repeated "M" sound. Similar to the old word mammet meaning a doll or puppet.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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I don't want to hold either of you back but my general point in Forgeries is that natural languages consist of an infinite number of sounds for both vowels and consonants (think bird song) but once a natural language is crammed into the straitjacket of the finite (very finite) number of alphabetic letters, the speakers of that language gradually squeeze those sounds into the limited palette permitted by that alphabet.

But there is no reason in principle why they should. We don't know how the early English pronounced, say, 'window' but those five letters don't actually denote what it was. The first w is scarcely a consonant, the i is called a short i but actually even this can be pronounced variously. The nd is just an approximation of an unknown sound (though we all now sort of pronounce an n and a d because we have learned that is how it is spelled) and as for that last vowel sound -- well it can go all sorts of ways but none of them will contain a w.

So the answer to Ishamel's query is, tentatively, that the Latin alphabet wasn't invented by English-speakers. But why the English use digraphs like nd for consonants and ow for vowels rather than umlauts, stresses and emphasis marks is something we await with anticipation..
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