In this blog Wednesdays are about words. What are words in a blog without the characters that make up an alphabet? Which set me one day to thinking about the different alphabets in the world for various languages. I started doing some research and learned that there seems to be a sweet spot for the number of characters in a written language. Yet given that there is a great variation from 50,000 character alphabet to a 12 character one. What’s the outliers and what’s the sweet spot?
All languages have their shortcomings. Sometimes words in our native tongue fail us. For me that seems to happen in English when it comes to emotions. There are feelings we all have but are hard to describe. Today I turn to German for a feeling I once described as melancholia but knew that didn’t quite capture the nuisances of the feeling now I have a word that does and I shall, in great English tradition, borrow it from German. It’s…
Long ago I quit watching the news on TV. There were three things that drove me away.
1) Blatant Political Slant – I don’t care which way it was. None were reporting the news they were spinning it.
2) News-tainment – Who won the previous night’s Dancing With The Stars isn’t a lead news story. Taylor Swift’s latest break up isn’t either. (Let’s face it the girl needs break-ups to write songs and she’s got a whole album to fill so there’s many of these)
But I never had a word the third thing. Now I do it was the… (more…)
I’ve always wished Latin had been taught in my middle school and high school. Many of our words are based upon Latin. I’ve studied Latin and can often tease out meanings from seeing the Latin root. So when writing a fantasy world with spies I went looking in Latin for spies. My thoughts were I’d base the word or name of the spy network on the Latin root. Well the story is still in development but here’s what I found about spying in the Roman Empire. (more…)
Ever seen something that just on first sight seemed malevolent to you? Say a doll that felt threatening? A sculpture that made Weeping Angels in Dr. Who seem tame? Your rational side knows it’s just an object but your gut screams threat. Yep there’s a word for that feeling. It is…
Once I wondered if I was to meet an alien and they asked me where I was from what would be the right answer. Yeah I knew Earth but heck what’s the name of my solar system? Okay I know the alien might have different names for the same places yet I didn’t want to look like a lost kid in the police station that didn’t know their address. So I did a bit of research… (more…)
As I said in the Monday post it’s time to rearrange the blog furniture. It’ll give it a fresh feel and keep it flowing for me. So Wednesday is going from being a wildcard to being about words. Here I’ll share answers to my questions, words I’ve found that I like, and quotations I like. What questions you ask… well things like what’s our cosmic address? what is the distribution of eye color in the world population? what do you call things that give you a creepy feeling? What did Romans call their spies? how many written characters does language need? I promise I’ll give you the answers I found for these and other things in the following Wednesday Words posts.
Mary Louise Eklund 