The museum urn collection is stupidly growing, and its growing is stupefying me. I'm exhausted and sad and sick of being serious. Exploration and explanation will come later, if at all. I'm posting something frivolous.
It may come as some surprise to you that it is possible to read even if all words have their vowels replaced by a marker, in essence meaning that all vowels are represented by a single vowel. With practice it is feasible to read a text even if the vowels are removed altogether.
The reason English has written vowels is that ancient Greek had written vowels. And the reason early Greek had written vowels is that they didn't have as many spoken consonants. This became significant when the Greeks co-opted the Phoenician script. Phoenicians didn't write vowels, but they had more letters than the Greeks has consonants. The Greeks put the excess letters to good use as representatives of vowel sounds.
S f y cn rd ths y mght hv md a gd Phncn. -nd -f y-- c-n't r--d th-s - c-n c-ll y-- -n -d--t w-th -mp-n-ty.
If all that is so, and it is, why do newspapers print expletives with a '*', instead of a vowel? Is there anyone that can read, who is otherwise insufficiently well informed so as to be unable to perform a much-simplified version of the transformation that all literate Phoenicians performed as a matter of course?
Do those f*cking c*nts think we are f*cking morons, or what?
Dawn Whitehand | May 17, 2013 at 01:39 am
L*L