Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[whoops ... sorry about earlier -- running the qotd script manually now ...]

"As a uniformed crew member, I am given more latitude in regards to carrying liquids. In uniform: shirt with epaulets, tie and I.D. badge, I get through security with all the toothpaste, after shave and water bottles I can carry. However, take away the shirt with epaulets and the tie, IOW, dressed in civilian clothes, and I am subject to the same liquid restrictions as the traveling public, despite my I.D. badge. So the difference is not my airline I.D., but a shirt and tie." -- Howard J. Marcus, 2007-12-29 (comment)

[whoops ... sorry about earlier -- running the qotd script manually now ...]

"As a uniformed crew member, I am given more latitude in regards to carrying liquids. In uniform: shirt with epaulets, tie and I.D. badge, I get through security with all the toothpaste, after shave and water bottles I can carry. However, take away the shirt with epaulets and the tie, IOW, dressed in civilian clothes, and I am subject to the same liquid restrictions as the traveling public, despite my I.D. badge. So the difference is not my airline I.D., but a shirt and tie." -- Howard J. Marcus, 2007-12-29 (comment)

Oh my goodness ... there exists digamma fanfiction!

The Internet is truly a marvelous thing!

Oh my goodness ... there exists digamma fanfiction!

The Internet is truly a marvelous thing!

Ugh/Ow. I've gotten distracted by a web site with a metric shitload of info about typography for a dozen or so languages, dialects, and writing systems that are all Greek (pre-Homeric, Doric, Attic, Corinthian, Koine, outdated Modern formal, current Modern -- polytonic and monotonic -- Western conventions from various centuries and countries for transcribing & discussing the different ancient forms, church and academic forms ...), mostly in terms of how they relate to Unicode and what Unicode has gotten right or wrong, with lots and lots and lots of background (including a few letters I didn't already know -- I've known about digamma since seventh or eighth grade, but there are more -- and it's way more information than is going to sink in at the speed I'm going through it, but all (well 85-90%) very interesting stuff. And now I know why a Latin uppercase 'H' looks just like an uppercase Eta, among other things. (Huh, not a coincidence after all ... the Greek letter had been pronounced like 'h', but then Greek pronounciation changed to h-less, the letter got recycled to eta, and when h-sound came back again, a modified form of it became the rough breathing-mark since the old character was busy representing a vowel sound. Latin swiped the old letter from a dialect that hadn't forgotten h-sounds. It was pretty cool seeing an example of text using heta, and realising when I tried to pronounce a word that had a heta after a pi that it was from before phi (and chi) got added to Greek!)

And though I found the lunate sigma jarring (hey, the similar Russian letter finally makes sense to me!), and the existence of heta took some getting used to (including both the examples using 'h' to represent it, and the ones where the uppercase form was used as both heta and eta at opposite ends of the same word (to illustrate some of the transcription challenges scholars of ancient languages face)), I was mostly doing okay until the chapter on puncatuation. Because in the discussion about possible confusion between the Greek question mark and the Latin semicolon, the author brought in an example where that confusion becomes a problem: mailing list/newsgroup discussions in ASCII, conducted in transliterated Greek.

My brain was zipping along the page until it hit the Roman-letters-meant-to-be-perceived-as-Greek-ones, and [expletive]ing bounced off. (I mean, my eyes bounced away from the monitor and I felt dizzy. Worse when I slowed down and tried to actually parse it.) Here, it's about halfway down this page, with the same text repeated in Greek characters and then in English translation under it.

Something about the way I process written language makes that hard for me. Lots of folks online communicate that way routinely (or at least did so before Unicode gained serious traction; I'm not really certain how common it is in 2008), I know this, I've peeked at Greek newsgroups and mailing lists before. And I couldn't deal with it for more than a few words at a time then, either (though it wasn't so painful, because I wasn't going so fast when I hit it as I was this time). So it cannot be this big an obstacle for most people.

Note that I know a few Homeric Greek words and slightly fewer Modern Greek ones (some useful phrases), remember a not-quite-useful fraction of the Homeric conjugations & declensions, have had the Ancient Greek pronounciations I learned in middle school distorted by hearing my relatives speaking Modern Greek but don't automatically convert text to Modern phonemes either, and find myself slowing down after the first few words when reading Greek aloud. So I can't really say I "know Greek" (any more -- though I'd like to get it back). But the Greek alphabet, which has been a part of my visual environment since before I learned to read English, is as reassuringly familiar to me as the Latin one even if I don't use it quite as well. I can handle phonetic transliteration a phrase at a time -- like you usually see in etymologies in English dictionaries -- though even in etymology I'm more comfortable reading the Greek letters than the transliteration. For whole sentences, phonetic transliteration makes it harder for me to recognize words, and visual transliteration like what I crashed into today (where letters are replaced by the Roman letters that most look like them) feels a bit like doing ROT-13 in my head without having practiced it for a few years. It feels like I've run into a paragraph that got scrambled by a flaky modem. It takes a conscious step to recognize it as being in another language instead of just being broken somehow.

A word or two of visually transliterated Greek isn't all that hard to convert (just, for me, annoyingly slow), but when it gets to a whole sentence or a paragraph, my brain glitches painfully.

Why visually-transliterated Greek has that effect when bumping into passages in other languages I don't know doesn't, puzzles me a bit. Maybe it's just the expectation that it should make more sense than it does? When I hit a Latin-alphabet language I don't speak, most such languages don't look wrong to me, but not-readable. (Though if it's a Romance language, there's a fair chance one or two cognates will jump out of the muddle for me.) An unfamiliar language in Roman script may even look pronounceable to me (though, of course, if I don't know what language it is or have never heard it spoken in my presence -- and sometimes even if I have -- my naive guesses as to how to pronounce it may wind up being laughably wrong). An unfamiliar non-cursive alphabet[*] doesn't disturb me either; it's just another degree of unreadable -- I see a cluster of Cyrillic and just mentally insert 'open-square-bracket-something-in-Russian-close-square-bracket' (unless I'm paying enough attention to remember that there are other languages that use Cyrillic characters, and amend the thought accordingly ... or unless the first several letters are ones that also appear in Greek, in which case the first obviously non-Greek letter is a bit of a hiccup). Pretty much the same goes for Hebrew, or Futhark, or a bunch of other alphabets. And phonetic transliterations of languages I don't speak at all don't hurt my brain either -- I just recognize them as not-English-and-not-French, and move on. But the almost-makes-sense phonetically transliterated Greek and the looks-like-something-went-wrong visually transliterated Greek just hurt my brain. I mean, in ways that 133t-5p34|< d02n'7 3\/3n 70uc|-|, even though that ought to present an even greater unravelling-task. (It's to the dominant alphabet in my brain, but the mappings are deliberately obscured for the sake of cleverness, if not for the sake of the obscurity itself, instead of being as 'obvious' as the writer can make them.)

I'm interested in human languages (though I do not, alas, learn them easily), and I'm interested in how-the-brain-works, so when smacked upside the head with something like this, I have to stop and wonder what it means about how I process language, and text in particular.

Fortunately, what the sample text I ran into says isn't important to understanding the rest of the page, so once I stop wincing, I'll flip back to the browser window and resume reading below that.

I really should crack open my old middle-school Greek textbooks that I hauled over from my mother's house and try to get back what minor ability I once had in that language. Then again, there are a lot of other, more urgent things I should be doing, once I have a decent day body-wise again.

[*] Running into an unexpected block of Arabic or Farsi doesn't upset me either, but I nonetheless consider it a different case because instead of seeing a bunch of unfamiliar letters, I see something that's obviously text but I can't even tell where any of the letters begin and end. So it doesn't look unnatural or 'broken' to me, but it does have an extra layer of 'alien'. Someday I'll get around to learning the script even if I never learn the language, just to remove that layer and be able to see the letters.

Ugh/Ow. I've gotten distracted by a web site with a metric shitload of info about typography for a dozen or so languages, dialects, and writing systems that are all Greek (pre-Homeric, Doric, Attic, Corinthian, Koine, outdated Modern formal, current Modern -- polytonic and monotonic -- Western conventions from various centuries and countries for transcribing & discussing the different ancient forms, church and academic forms ...), mostly in terms of how they relate to Unicode and what Unicode has gotten right or wrong, with lots and lots and lots of background (including a few letters I didn't already know -- I've known about digamma since seventh or eighth grade, but there are more -- and it's way more information than is going to sink in at the speed I'm going through it, but all (well 85-90%) very interesting stuff. And now I know why a Latin uppercase 'H' looks just like an uppercase Eta, among other things. (Huh, not a coincidence after all ... the Greek letter had been pronounced like 'h', but then Greek pronounciation changed to h-less, the letter got recycled to eta, and when h-sound came back again, a modified form of it became the rough breathing-mark since the old character was busy representing a vowel sound. Latin swiped the old letter from a dialect that hadn't forgotten h-sounds. It was pretty cool seeing an example of text using heta, and realising when I tried to pronounce a word that had a heta after a pi that it was from before phi (and chi) got added to Greek!)

And though I found the lunate sigma jarring (hey, the similar Russian letter finally makes sense to me!), and the existence of heta took some getting used to (including both the examples using 'h' to represent it, and the ones where the uppercase form was used as both heta and eta at opposite ends of the same word (to illustrate some of the transcription challenges scholars of ancient languages face)), I was mostly doing okay until the chapter on puncatuation. Because in the discussion about possible confusion between the Greek question mark and the Latin semicolon, the author brought in an example where that confusion becomes a problem: mailing list/newsgroup discussions in ASCII, conducted in transliterated Greek.

My brain was zipping along the page until it hit the Roman-letters-meant-to-be-perceived-as-Greek-ones, and [expletive]ing bounced off. (I mean, my eyes bounced away from the monitor and I felt dizzy. Worse when I slowed down and tried to actually parse it.) Here, it's about halfway down this page, with the same text repeated in Greek characters and then in English translation under it.

Something about the way I process written language makes that hard for me. Lots of folks online communicate that way routinely (or at least did so before Unicode gained serious traction; I'm not really certain how common it is in 2008), I know this, I've peeked at Greek newsgroups and mailing lists before. And I couldn't deal with it for more than a few words at a time then, either (though it wasn't so painful, because I wasn't going so fast when I hit it as I was this time). So it cannot be this big an obstacle for most people.

Note that I know a few Homeric Greek words and slightly fewer Modern Greek ones (some useful phrases), remember a not-quite-useful fraction of the Homeric conjugations & declensions, have had the Ancient Greek pronounciations I learned in middle school distorted by hearing my relatives speaking Modern Greek but don't automatically convert text to Modern phonemes either, and find myself slowing down after the first few words when reading Greek aloud. So I can't really say I "know Greek" (any more -- though I'd like to get it back). But the Greek alphabet, which has been a part of my visual environment since before I learned to read English, is as reassuringly familiar to me as the Latin one even if I don't use it quite as well. I can handle phonetic transliteration a phrase at a time -- like you usually see in etymologies in English dictionaries -- though even in etymology I'm more comfortable reading the Greek letters than the transliteration. For whole sentences, phonetic transliteration makes it harder for me to recognize words, and visual transliteration like what I crashed into today (where letters are replaced by the Roman letters that most look like them) feels a bit like doing ROT-13 in my head without having practiced it for a few years. It feels like I've run into a paragraph that got scrambled by a flaky modem. It takes a conscious step to recognize it as being in another language instead of just being broken somehow.

A word or two of visually transliterated Greek isn't all that hard to convert (just, for me, annoyingly slow), but when it gets to a whole sentence or a paragraph, my brain glitches painfully.

Why visually-transliterated Greek has that effect when bumping into passages in other languages I don't know doesn't, puzzles me a bit. Maybe it's just the expectation that it should make more sense than it does? When I hit a Latin-alphabet language I don't speak, most such languages don't look wrong to me, but not-readable. (Though if it's a Romance language, there's a fair chance one or two cognates will jump out of the muddle for me.) An unfamiliar language in Roman script may even look pronounceable to me (though, of course, if I don't know what language it is or have never heard it spoken in my presence -- and sometimes even if I have -- my naive guesses as to how to pronounce it may wind up being laughably wrong). An unfamiliar non-cursive alphabet[*] doesn't disturb me either; it's just another degree of unreadable -- I see a cluster of Cyrillic and just mentally insert 'open-square-bracket-something-in-Russian-close-square-bracket' (unless I'm paying enough attention to remember that there are other languages that use Cyrillic characters, and amend the thought accordingly ... or unless the first several letters are ones that also appear in Greek, in which case the first obviously non-Greek letter is a bit of a hiccup). Pretty much the same goes for Hebrew, or Futhark, or a bunch of other alphabets. And phonetic transliterations of languages I don't speak at all don't hurt my brain either -- I just recognize them as not-English-and-not-French, and move on. But the almost-makes-sense phonetically transliterated Greek and the looks-like-something-went-wrong visually transliterated Greek just hurt my brain. I mean, in ways that 133t-5p34|< d02n'7 3\/3n 70uc|-|, even though that ought to present an even greater unravelling-task. (It's to the dominant alphabet in my brain, but the mappings are deliberately obscured for the sake of cleverness, if not for the sake of the obscurity itself, instead of being as 'obvious' as the writer can make them.)

I'm interested in human languages (though I do not, alas, learn them easily), and I'm interested in how-the-brain-works, so when smacked upside the head with something like this, I have to stop and wonder what it means about how I process language, and text in particular.

Fortunately, what the sample text I ran into says isn't important to understanding the rest of the page, so once I stop wincing, I'll flip back to the browser window and resume reading below that.

I really should crack open my old middle-school Greek textbooks that I hauled over from my mother's house and try to get back what minor ability I once had in that language. Then again, there are a lot of other, more urgent things I should be doing, once I have a decent day body-wise again.

[*] Running into an unexpected block of Arabic or Farsi doesn't upset me either, but I nonetheless consider it a different case because instead of seeing a bunch of unfamiliar letters, I see something that's obviously text but I can't even tell where any of the letters begin and end. So it doesn't look unnatural or 'broken' to me, but it does have an extra layer of 'alien'. Someday I'll get around to learning the script even if I never learn the language, just to remove that layer and be able to see the letters.