“Interesting”

Many years ago, I came across someone whose signs and symptoms could only be interpreted as something serious, and the way I put it was that I couldn’t think of an explanation for their symptoms that wasn’t serious. Actually life-threatening, but I didn’t say that. It was while I was still training, so I wasn’t sure if it was just lack of experience, but in fact it did turn out to be very serious and they died a few months later. Now this blog is not about herbalism, so this might seem a bit off-topic, but sometimes things which are serious are also interesting, and this bothers me because it makes it seem like I don’t care about the people affected by it. It’s possible to broaden this. For instance, shortly before Ceausescu was assassinated (there should be a cedilla in there somewhere, and this is what I mean), I became interested in the Romanian language. It seems kind of cold somehow to do this. On the other hand, the world needs people to be interested in things in that way.

It’s been said that the world needs psychopaths, because for example they might make good surgeons. It probably wouldn’t be a good thing for a surgeon to wince with empathy every time she makes an incision. On the other hand, she then needs to explain the need and the outcome of an operation to her patients, and this ought to be accompanied by a good bedside manner. You can’t win really. Both kinds of people are important, or perhaps I should say that both kinds of attitudes are important.

I expect you know where this is going. Yeah, the Ukraine. More specifically, the similarities and differences between the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Because I couldn’t help noticing on televised interviews from the Ukraine that I could understand bits and pieces of what was being said even though I hadn’t learnt Ukrainian, and in fact I couldn’t tell if the people in question were speaking Russian or Ukrainian. When I looked up the words I recognised, it turned out that the two languages are very close to each other.

Here’s a diagram to explain this:

This image is absolutely lovely. Nonetheless it will be removed on request.

Right now, the relevant bit is the cluster of dark red circles at lower right. These are the Slavic languages. Ukrainian, Belarussian and Russian are East Slavic. Lexical distance is a measure of similar vocabulary, that is, either words which both mean the same thing in the languages concerned or are somewhat similar. It may or may not include faux amis, I’m not sure.

I’ve done something similar with the Romance languages, where I found that Portuguese and Castilian were the closest and Romanian was the outlier, as is reflected in this diagram. However, Catalan has been said to be the most central. There is clearly a linguistic continuum affecting many of the Western Romance languages, and also Western Germanic, where German blends into Dutch. Scots is missing from the Germanic cluster here. Speaking of languages spoken in Scotland, another linguistic continuum is Gàidhlig-Manx-Irish, and there’s a gap in this where Galwegian Gàidhlig has become extinct. The reason I mention these is that they’re more familiar to me than the languages of Eastern Europe because I’ve never been outside my Hexagon.

It’s worth doing a grainy pixelated zooming-in on the Slavic languages:

My attempt to learn Russian rather pre-dates my later flurry of interest in languages. Russian appealed to me because it had a different alphabet than usual, although it was less exciting than Arabic which can’t really even be written properly in the Latin script. My interest was further boosted by my adolescent Stalinist phase, of which I would say the following: many of the boys I knew at school got into fascism and the NF, and most have hopefully left that long behind. I got into Stalinism. I am no longer Stalinist and haven’t been since 1984 CE. Also at that time, I was aware that the grammar school in my city offered Russian, although I wasn’t at that school but a bilateral, and there was a Russian course on BBC2 on Sunday mornings I followed for a while. Also, I learnt a little Polish, and also felt very drawn to Serbo-Croat because it had a reputation for obscurity. I was using the ‘Penguin Russian Course’ primer, and it was the first time I had seriously attempted to acquire a second language, unless you count the French we did at school. Unfortunately schooling had managed to suck all the fun and interest out of French in a variety of ways, such as giving detention for not being able to remember the conjugation of «être» and promising a trip to France, which was just across the way since we were in East Kent, leading to both fluency in and hatred of French lasting decades, which I’ve only just got past. But the thing is, apparently you cannot extricate fluency easily from your brain, so I’m still fluent in French, and my Russian comprehension is slightly better than what they call “post-beginner”, and has sat there since my childhood with practically no progress since, or much practice. There are sadly several languages which have languished like this in my mind, a particular sadness being Gàidhlig. However, I do know enough Russian to make out little bits of conversation and more text, and there are also many loan words from German, Latin and Greek origins which help. There’s also the occasional cognate with other Slavic languages.

Ukrainian is close to Russian but also quite close to Polish, something I didn’t appreciate until recently. My Polish really is not good even though a family member is Polish. The situation is complicated by the fact that some Ukrainians mix Russian and Ukrainian in their speech, and of course some Ukrainians speak Russian as a first language. Listening to Ukrainian reminds me of the experience of hearing Norwegian and understanding it without realising it isn’t Swedish, except that my grasp of Slavic tongues is quite a bit weaker than that of Nordic ones. So would it be fair to say Ukrainian is intermediate between Russian and Polish? I don’t know.

Looking at the other Slavic languages on that diagram, it’s notable that Serbian and Croatian are two blobs in contact with each other. This is because they’re basically the same language, to a much greater extent than is usual for very similar related languages. Serbo-Croat is just the same language written in a different alphabet with different spelling. Bulgarian and Macedonian may be similar but I’m not so familiar with the latter. I do know it wasn’t an official language in the early 1980s CE. In fact, I get the impression that in general, Slavic languages tend to be closer to each other than Germanic or Romance languages are and that identity politics is particularly important in making distinctions between them. Czech and Slovak, for example, are said to be closer than English and Scots.

There are routes between the clusters. One of these is between English and French, and I’m sure we Anglophones can perceive that ourselves. In the case of Slavic, these are between Slovene and Albanian, Polish and Lithuanian, and Ukrainian and Hungarian. This last is quite unexpected because Hungarian is a Uralic language not at all related to any of the Indo-European ones. Although Hungarian is a Uralic language like Finnish and Sami, it’s by no means close to any other language in its family except Mansi and Khanty, which are spoken thousands of kilometres away in Siberia. The distance between it and Finnish has been described as similar to that between English and Farsi, bearing in mind that Farsi has been described as “the English of Asia” because of its grammatical simplicity. Hungary and the Ukraine share a short border and the Hungarian language has a small number of Ukrainian loanwords but several times as many from Russian, so I don’t understand why the link has been made here.

The Baltic languages are another matter entirely. They have been lumped together with Slavic but in fact they’re not particularly close. There used to be a third, more conservative Baltic language called Old Prussian, not related to the German dialect. Lithuanian and the language I call Lettish but most other people now call Latvian are the most conservative of all widely-spoken Indo-European languages. There are a very small number of people in religious communities who have Sanskrit as a first language, which would be even more conservative. Lettish is Lithuanian with Estonian influences, more or less, which is interesting because it’s thought that Germanic languages are the result of proto-Indo-European influenced by an ancestor of Estonian, so either Lettish is distantly related to English or both languages went through parallel evolution due to similar influences. It makes sense that Lithuanian would have things in common with Polish owing to the fact that the former used to be a major East European country, and included Kyiv.

With the exception of Bulgarian, and therefore presumably Macedonian, the Slavic languages are grammatically similar. They tend to have three genders, although Polish has an extra one for male persons if I remember correctly, around six cases and perfective and imperfective aspects to their verbs. That is, there would be a difference between “drink” and “drink up”. Slovene, uniquely, retains the dual number throughout its inflexions. Bulgarian is special in a number of ways. Firstly, it forms the model for Old Church Slavonic, a liturgical language which is the most primitive recorded Slavic language. Secondly, it was the origin of the Cyrillic script, later to be adopted into other Slavic languages and beyond. Thirdly, it was written at one point in a unique script called Glagolitsa which seems to have been deliberately invented in such a way to obscure its origins. Fourthly, it’s a Balkan language, sharing features with other only distantly related languages such as a definite article suffix (the only Slavic language with an article). Fifthly, it has the most reduced case system of any Slavic language, with I think only two cases. Finally, it’s possibly the only Indo-European language with evidentiality as part of its grammar – that is, verbs are marked according to whether the sentence is hearsay. There are probably some other unusual features which have slipped my mind.

Bulgarian is also influential on all East Slavic languages due to the influence of religious texts. Just in case I haven’t said, East Slavic languages include Ukrainian, Russian, a little-spoken language called Rusyn, and Belarusian. Old Church Slavonic, that is, basically Old Bulgarian, was the liturgical language, occupying a similar position in East Slavic society as Latin did in Western Europe, meaning that it was used as the higher register, again like Latin. This means that as with the Romance languages, and in a different way in English, there can be two sets of words, one posher or more learnèd than the other, but noticeably similar.

During the Tsarist Era, the languages were all seen as varieties of Russian, but nowadays they are considered to be four different languages, three of them associated with a nation. There will also be pairs of dialects sandwiched between them, intermediate, so very “Russian” Ukrainian on one side of the border and very “Ukrainian” Russian on the other for example.

The differences, as I understand them, are fairly minor. Russian misses out the copula and Ukrainian doesn’t. This, along with the absence of articles which is usual in Slavic languages, makes Russian sound a bit like “note form”. Oddly, Russian at least is apparently not pro-drop: it uses subject pronouns even though its verbs are heavily inflected for person or number. I don’t know if Ukrainian does this. Ukrainian also pronounces “o” in the full form even when unstressed. The Russian tendency to pronounce «Г» as «Х» is fairly closely reflected in Ukrainian, which has a voiced H like Czech and uses that letter to represent it. It therefore also has «Ґ» for /g/. Spelling is more phonetic. Ukrainian palatises more. Politically, Russian is also a semi-official language in some other countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union, whereas Ukrainian is just its own national language.

Cyrillic script is, unsurprisingly, named after someone called Cyril, a Greek saint who brought Christianity to the Bulgars. At the time, it was common for languages in the Eastern Med to adopt a slightly modified Greek script. This includes Gothic, Coptic and the single surviving sentence of the earliest Romance language, “τορνε, τορνε, φρατρε”. Old Church Slavonic did the same, in something like the ninth Christian century. In this case, as well as Greek letters, there were also modified Hebrew letters and the occasional Glagolitsic character. Cyrillic has since been adapted for languages over much of Eurasia, Slavonic or not, and most written languages in the former USSR used it. There was a policy of introducing different letters for the same sounds pursued in Soviet Central Asia in order to make rebellion against Moscow more difficult to coördinate by disrupting written communication, which has led to some strange choices in some languages such as “&” being used for a particular vowel in one Turkic language. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, several of the newly independent states adopted Arabic script for religious and nationalistic reasons. In the USSR itself, few languages were written in anything but Cyrillic. The Baltic republics used Latin, Armenia and Georgia had their own scripts, the Jewish communities used Hebrew and certain isolated Siberian communities had a pictographic system where entire phrases were communicated by means of diagrams. Due to its use in very diverse languages, Cyrillic has a potential store of letters able to represent probably the majority of sounds in spoken languages except for clicks.

Cyrillic, Greek and Latin form a closely-related family of scripts used to write the majority of the world’s languages. Each has its own distinctive features. Greek today is, as far as I know, only used to write one language. Latin is of course the world’s most widely used alphabet. It could be argued that Gaelic is a separate script but it’s more like a calligraphic and typographic style of Latin. Cyrillic is exclusively used in the former Soviet Union and associated states such as Outer Mongolia, and in the Balkans. The division between Slavic languages which use Cyrillic and those using Latin is the same as the historical division between Orthodox and Roman Catholic countries. Although it’s strongly associated with Russian, in the same sense as English uses the Latin alphabet, Russian could be said to be using the Bulgarian alphabet, although it’s modified in Russian, as is the English version of Latin with its J, W and V.

The script is distinguished in several ways. One is that it has fewer ascenders and descenders. Since this is one of the major differences between capital and lower case letters in English and Greek, there isn’t much distinction between those in Cyrillic other than their size. There are some, as with «p» for example, and there are also little “ticks” on some letters such as «ц». The italic and cursive versions of the script bring some surprises. For instance, «т» and «и» are written as we would write “m” and “u”. The ideal of Cyrillic handwriting closely resembles our own copperplate style, and I was initially impressed and fascinated by its beauty, but everyday cursive handwriting has a reputation for being practically illegible, even to thoroughly literate native speakers of languages using that script. It basically looks like a scribble of arcades. The problem is that many of the letters are composed of similar elements, including й, ц, ш, щ, п, л, ч, м, и and т, which is almost a third of the alphabet of thirty-three letters. My own Cyrillic handwriting is in two styles. One of them is printed and looks similar to printed Russian, but the other has an interesting hangover from my Marion Richardson days. To digress briefly, I initially learnt Latin cursive twice and then modified it. My initial style, which was more like the cursive most English people use (I don’t know about Wales, Scotland or Ireland), Marion Richardson, was practically illegible and I was asked to go back to printing. A couple of years later, I learnt to write in italic, which I later rounded off. My Cyrillic handwriting has the same issues as my Marion Richardson, which is that it’s difficult for me to make small neat loops because I tend to continue to move the pen in the same direction as the loop after I’ve finished it, and Cyrillic depends more on loops than Latin cursive, particularly to link the letters, and consequently my writing doesn’t stay horizontal and wanders all over the page. So my Cyrillic is as illegible as others’, but not for the same reason. Therefore, most of the time I just print it. Typing in Cyrillic is just “hunt and peck” for me and is incredibly slow. This is because Russian typewriters have a completely different layout to QWERTY and also have more letters, whereas Latin alphabet typewriters and also those for some other languages which don’t use Latin script tend to be close to QWERTY. I’d be interested in knowing the history behind this.

Cyrillic seems to give the impression to readers of the Latin alphabet of homogeneity, where a text in the script tends to be assumed to be Russian. It is certainly true that the language is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world and the most common language to be written in that script, but it can sometimes mislead. 155 million people speak it as a first language, whereas Ukrainian is natively spoken by only thirty-five million. Belarusian is spoken by considerably fewer, estimates varying between 2.5 and six million. Rusyn is spoken by six hundred thousand people, which is slightly less than Welsh, largely in the southwestern Ukraine and Slovakia. It started to become distinct only five centuries ago and wasn’t written down distinctively until the late eighteenth century. I know practically nothing about it.

The romanisation of Cyrillic is different in different Latin script languages. The English version tends to use “H” and apostrophes to indicate palatisation, and strikes me as ugly and cumbersome, and also rather too “English”. German has the amusing practice of transcribing «щ» as “schtsch”, so seven letters corresponding to one in Russian, and Castilian uses the letter J to represent «x», so for example it writes “Khrushchev” as “Jrushchov”. American and British English also transcribe the Russian “E” differently in some circumstances, with American using “O”. I romanise Russian in my own way which I imagine is similar to how Czech and Serbian write their own languages. Serbian I chose because Serbo-Croat uses both alphabets and it’s easier to work out what’s what on the whole. I do the same with Ukrainian, but until now it’s never come up. Hence I would write “Zelenskij”. It’s difficult to type what I actually write romanised Cyrillic as because it’s my own invention and there’s no keyboard layout corresponding exactly to it.

There’s been an issue about the use of Russian names for Ukrainian things until recently. The Ukraine became independent in 1991 and the decision to adopt official Ukrainian spelling for proper names was made in 1995, but until probably this year, Western mass media and other organisations have continued to use the Russian versions, or transcriptions thereof. This is most evident with Kyiv, which was written “Киев” until recently. This reminds me of how the German Ocean was renamed and various places and names, not least that of our royal family, in connection with German hostilities in the last century.

The actual Ukrainian alphabet I’m not that familiar with. I’m aware that it uses the letter “ï”, which is accompanied by “I” and therefore probably represents a sound which occurs only after other vowels. The other distinctive feature I’m aware of is the use of a rounded “E” for the Russian “E” and the presence of “E” for the non-palatised version, which means that the “backwards” “E” is absent from the script. It lacks the hard sign. I suspect that a lot of this is to do with palatisation or the lack thereof, which brings me to my final comment.

I feel very strongly that Q-Celtic orthography is highly defective. Manx attempts to adopt English spelling but only represents pronunciation poorly, and Irish and Gaidhlig use extra vowels to represent the same kind of phenomenon as occur in Slavic languages with what are called “broad” and “slender” letters. Gaidhlig also uses a grave accent which is difficult to type easily. All of this could be circumvented by simply writing the languages in Cyrillic. I realise this is never going to happen, but the script has an elegant and simple way of writing the differences easily and without confusion. However, Q-Celtic words don’t even take advantage of this when transliterated into Cyrillic. They generally just use the anglicised version and change the letters accordingly.

All that, then, is “interesting”, but it doesn’t alter the fact that it’s come to mind due to a serious and tragic turn of events. I suppose it’s important for people to be interested in such things so they can be useful to others, but I often feel somewhat guilty about it. Maybe that’s misplaced.

John Wilkins’ Dream Of Universal Writing

Not all of the keys on this keyboard produce letters. Obviously there are control characters but leaving those aside, if you were to read some of the characters on here, even if you knew no English, if you have been able to hear, a voice would pop up in your own head which would say them in your own language. For instance, I could type “1984”, and the chances are you would hear something like “neunzehnhundertvierundachtzig” or “dix neuf quatre vingt quatre” (sorry about the inverted commas). When I typed that, I thought the first thing but you may have thought “nineteen eighty-four” for example. There is a sense in which these characters transcend language but continue to represent concepts, which are expressed differently in different languages. Just to doodle vaguely on the keyboard, I can produce a list of such signs with ideographic rather than alphabetic meaning, thus:

¦, ¬,£,$,€,&,*,-,+,=,@,#,~,/.

Not all of these are going to mean something to everyone who reads them, and some of them will mean substantially different things, but I read the above list as follows:

Not both . . . and . . ., not, pounds, dollars, euros, and, multiplied by, minus, plus, equals, at, number, roughly, divided by.

A couple of the signs have more than one meaning and for me there’s a substantial number of other signs, widely used in technical contexts, which still have meaning for me but probably not for most people:

℞, c̄, →, ↔, ∨, ⊕, ∀,∃,⊢, ⟡, □.

These are: prescription (I think of it as a Demotic eye of Horus but that may be incorrect), with, materially entails that, if and only if, and/or, either . . . or . . . , for all of, there exists, it is a theorem that, contingently, necessarily.

There’s a third set I don’t know how to type on a computer which is taken from Blissymbols, a system of signs used for people with communication difficulties, but which seems to have been initially invented by Charles Bliss in 1949 as an international language. Since I use these only in writing, I have no idea if they’re in the Unicode character set, and it would defeat the object of typing or writing less if they were because it would take something like eight keystrokes to type the character which means “see” for example, and having just tried to type that it turns out this computer doesn’t have any in its character set, annoyingly.

Chinese characters, of course, are still ideographic although not everyone realises they also have a phonetic element. Nonetheless, in days of yore Chinese writing was considered practically magical because something written in hanzi, or 漢字 in Chinese characters, could be read all over China regardless of the “dialect” of Chinese one spoke. In fact they aren’t dialects but separate languages, and beyond China the same characters were used to write Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese. In principle, they could be used to write almost any spoken language although of course they aren’t, and 國語 is particularly well-suited to being written in 漢字 because it’s tonal, isolating and purports to be monosyllabic. A language which inflected more, such as Japanese, would prove harder to write, which I presume is why that also uses hiragana, katakana, emoji and romaji. Like Japanese, Chinese has one syllable per character but also in a sense one word per character. If you’re familiar with 漢字 you’ll probably have noticed that I always use the traditional forms of the characters rather than the simplified ones, which is because I’m more familiar with them, but also because they more closely represent the meaning visually. I find simplified Chinese characters quite confounding. As I’ve said, 漢字 are partly phonetic, which makes them more suitable for 國語 than other languages as homophones in 國語 may not be in 廣東話 (Cantonese) or 客家話  (Hakka), to take two examples, because they are in reality different languages. This means that were they to be adapted, for example, for English, we would find ourselves using the same phonetic to represent the “-s”, “-en” or mutation plurals such as “teeth” and “feet” as we would to write words like “door” or “gate”, which would be less obvious than if we had our own system.

The West was quite taken by 漢字 when we first encountered them, which, surprisingly, was not from Marco Polo who never mentioned them, which is one reason why some people think his account is based on hearsay. We had had ideographic scripts in Europe, but they had been largely replaced by alphabetic ones, and in the early Mediæval period they were more phonetic for English and French, for example, than they were to become. They proved to be a major influence on the thought of John Wilkins, but not the only one.

West Afrika has a very large number of scripts, as I’ve mentioned previously. Many of them are said to have come to the promoter in a dream or vision, but it’s also claimed that this is a means of avoiding the admission that they were supposed to be secret but someone decided to reveal them to the world, needing a plausible back story. This may be true because the characters used for writing Vai, for example, also crop up in Suriname. Now these sort of stories might be interpreted in a racist kind of way: surely nothing like that would ever happen here in Merrie England? Well, not so, partly because Merrie England is in many ways politically extremely reminiscent of the kind of politics currently practiced in some parts of Afrika, and probably is to an extent even today. The idea of orishas revealing a script to select individuals in West Afrika in fact has a close parallel in Tudor England in the form of the Enochian language, alleged to have been revealed by angels to John Dee in 1583 CE and having a distinctive script, which looks like this:

It’s easy to see from this that the Enochian alphabet is closely based on the English use of the Latin alphabet at the time. However, the Enochian language itself, constructed or not, is clearly most unlike English in vocabulary and grammar. Even the claim that it was revealed by spirits but was in fact a secret script already in existence applies to Enochian because it seems to be based on an earlier script called Transitus Fluvii – “Passing through the river” – used by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1533:

Hebrew square script was the basis of this script, as can be seen from the English below the chart. There were another couple of occult scripts in Renaissance England, including Celestial and Malachim. Since at the time Hebrew was believed to be the original human language, all of them bear some resemblance to it.

Wilkins’ idea was somewhat more modern, conscious, open and practical. John Wilkins was a seventeenth century polymath and clerk and one of the founders of the Royal Society. He also proposed a decimal metric system which didn’t catch on, although it’s interesting to contemplate that if the English-speaking world had come up with it first, the US, Liberia and the “U”K might all be metric now and maybe France would be holding out with its own system instead. I should mention in passing that in Anglo-Saxon times there was also a decimal-based measuring system. Two advantages of the metric system are that it’s international and that it has a logical structure and organisation to it, and one of its features is that it tends to be used by the scientific community. All of these things were also intended to be true of Wilkins’ Real Character or Philosophical Language. His aim was to design an artificial language which was logically structured and based on concepts which would enable natural philosophers and diplomats to communicate effectively with each other, and he propounded this in detail in his 1668 tome ‘An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language’. An example of it can be seen above, in the form of the Lord’s Prayer written in that script. It can be seen to be cursive and appears to break each word down into separate concepts, each represented by a character. It also has its similarities with Arabic script and the associated Pitman system of shorthand.

Real Character is not phonetic. It could therefore be used in principle for any language. Wilkins had found the arbitrary nature of Latin grammar an unnecessary incumbrence to communication and wished to dispose of it as inefficient. It divides concepts into forty genera further divided into differences, themselves divided into species. It can already be seen from the use of the words “genera” and “species” that the work did have some influence on future classification systems such as that of Linnæus. Wilkins also came up with a system where each category could be replaced by a syllable or sound, enabling the language to be pronounced. This made it a priori, like some other constructed languages such as Solresol, unlike a posteriori conlangs like Volapük, Esperanto and Interlingua, which build on already existing foundations, and this approach steepens the start of the learning curve.

Wilkin’s scheme didn’t catch on of course. One reason was that speaking or understanding the spoken language would be very difficult because single-letter (or phoneme) differences could completely change the meaning of a word, and the question also arises, as raised by Jorge Luis Borges, who has written on this matter at length, of whether they can even be a universal classification system of this kind. I’m not sure this last point matters too much for practical purposes, as almost any classification system organised along logical lines is better than none. We have gender in many European languages distinguishing fairly arbitrarily between types of concept, sometimes on its own as with the Danish en øre vs. et øre, meaning “ear” and a unit of currency, and these do appear to descend from an originally logical scheme involving attributes, objects and agents which later became obscured, and there are plenty of other languages with dozens of genders, where this probably helps as well, but in the case of the Universal Character the divisions would possibly be less arbitrary. That said, even for first language speakers of languages which use grammatical gender, research has shown there is a psychological influence. For instance, speakers of languages for which the word for “bridge” is feminine are more likely to see them as elegant and beautiful, whereas those for whom it’s masculine will often describe them as sturdy and protective. Were we to accept Wilkins’ version of Real Character, we might be allowing ourselves to become trapped in one person’s particular way of dividing up the world, and more creative and useful thoughts might be stifled by that.

Nonetheless Wilkins had an influence on today’s world. Roget’s Thesaurus, for example, initially composed in 1805, divides concepts up in a similar way although the schemes are probably very different. There’s also the Dewey Decimal System, used for classifying library materials, and the aforementioned Linnæan taxonomy. Even Esperanto does something rather similar to Real Character in the distinctive way it breaks words down into morphemes in order to reduce the number of words one needs to learn to become fluent.

There is, however, another aspect to Wilkins’ book which has a perhaps surprising connection. One of the sections of Part 2, chapter 4, deals with botany and breaks plants down into species, remarkably similar to how they’re classified today, which has since been verified using DNA sequencing in recent years. This contrasts with Culpepper and Gerard, both of whom have a perfectly valid classification system for them but which isn’t oriented around taxonomy so much as use and flowering and fruiting times – I won’t go into this in any depth as it impinges on one of my other blogs. However, there is another, probably earlier, work, which is somewhat reminiscent of this: the apparently not-very famous (thanks for that everyone!) Voynich Manuscript.

Again, here I run up against my demarcation problem. I said before that I think the supposèd mystery of the Voynich Manuscript isn’t really a mystery at all, but unfortunately it happens to be kind of deeply wedged in the crevasses between my blogs and there isn’t anywhere appropriate to write about it. However, I will say a couple of things about it here, partly because the last time I mentioned it, I got a fair number of hits on the post, but also because it’s relevant to Wilkins. One of the suggestions as to the nature of the writing in that manuscript, referred to as “Voynichese”, is that it is in fact a similar conceptually-based script to Real Character, although inconsistent in its application of characters to concepts and rather amateurishly done, as is the rest of the codex, which in fact is a pretty massive clue as to what it is. It seems weird how something can stare so many people in the face like this and yet not be noticed. Radiocarbon dating sets the materials whereof the MS is composed to the early sixteenth century, so it pre-dates both John Dee’s Enochian and Wilkins’ Real Character although that does make it contemporary with Transitus Fluvii, which was however not a conceptually-based script – a Begriffschrift if you like (!) (PDF alert). There’s a fair bit of botany in the MS too, of course (I mean, there would be). But this is not the interesting bit. Voynichese words are highly regular in structure. Some characters only occur at the beginning of words, some only in the middle and some only at the end of them. The same is, incidentally, true of many other scripts including Devanagari, Hebrew and Arabic, although only Arabic has all three of those features, so it isn’t a clinching argument for it being a conceptually-organised script. No words have fewer than two letters or more than ten.

If you run the above paragraph through Gender Guesser, you might get an interesting result! Or you might not.

Many people believe the MS is a hoax, but this is kind of beside the point. It may also be automatic writing, in which case it might be expected to have similar characteristics to glossolalia. I don’t know if this has been tested. Glossolalia and xenolalia are big topics in themselves which I shall reserve for another post.

To conclude, then, Real Character is a valiant and appealing effort to which John Wilkins seems to have applied his considerably honed intellect, and although as such was doomed to failure, has still left its mark on the world in numerous ways. But was he pre-empted earlier in the century by an anonymous author?

PS: Ironically, without gaming the Gender Guesser algorithm, this text only comes out at 53% male!

Extra Letters

The English version of the Latin script is dull. It rarely uses diacritics and my perception of it is that it only uses basic letters. That is, it adds no new letters to the basic set, but is this true? The alphabet one grows up with is always likely to seem basic, with other languages either missing out letters we see as essential or adding extra superfluous ones. The question is therefore, how common is it to use a twenty-six letter Latin alphabet? What do I mean by “how common”? Am I counting this by languages, number of speakers or number of reader and writers? Is there a relevant historical context?

The alphabet we use now is neither identical to the one the Roman empire used nor the same as the variants used to write English through history. The Roman alphabet itself was as follows:

ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZ

That’s twenty-three letters, with three at the end which were only used in foreign words, actually Greek. K was also rare because initially C was always hard. Q looks at first like a redundant letter as well, but in fact wasn’t because the Latin “QV” was simultaneously articulated, so it was a K and a W pronounced at the same time. I won’t harp on about Latin pronunciation here but V was always pronounced as U or W as English pronounced it. It is a little odd that Latin didn’t just use a Q instead of “QV”, but it didn’t for some reason, and the letter it was adapted from, qoph, is a uvular plosive which is nothing like the pronunciation of Q in Latin.

Latin itself introduced three digraphs later on: Æ, Œ and a third “AV” digraph which I can’t find the Unicode for. “AV” was, as far as I know, lost without trace with the Roman Empire and has never been used in any other language, but the first two throve. All of them seem to represent a gradual shift in the pronunciation of Latin vowels from diphthongs to pure vowels which they seemed to want to represent in spelling. The first two are common in modern English up until quite recently, and the first, known as “æsc” from the name of a rune which represented the same sound, was used in Anglo-Saxon all the way through to the Norman Conquest and beyond, since early Mercian texts in the post-Conquest period persisted with Anglo-Saxon spelling for some time. In English it represented a short “A” sound as in the Southern English English pronunciation of “pant”, and its longer counterpart as in “man”. Later on it was used to write words such as “encyclopædia” or “pæony”, but this was a Latinate approach not connected to its earlier use. There was probably a short period between the change in Midland English spelling and the adoption of Latinate words into English when it wasn’t used. As for Œ, this was used in French and was adopted into English as well, and is not as common as Æ. I’ve seen older alphabets in English-language encyclopædias and dictionaries which are not used for alphabetical order in the book itself but which place Æ, Œ and also the ampersand, &, at the end of the alphabet in that order. There’s a sense in which & is also a digraph, standing for “ET”, but it’s now perceived as an ideogram for a conjunction. Although this ordering didn’t influence alphabetical order in English, it does in Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian, which also put similar letters to these at the end of the alphabet. In the case of Danish and Norwegian, the letters are Æ and Ø, whereas Swedish and Finnish follow the German convention of using Ä and Ö. All of them follow these with Å, although in Finnish this is of only marginal use.

As a child I used to find the existence of extra letters in non-English Latin alphabets exciting and exotic, but of course had I grown up speaking, reading and writing, say, Danish, they would’ve just seemed normal to me. In fact the French use of Œ never really seemed odd or foreign so much as a mildly taunting reminder that there were stranger and more exciting languages out there than that of the people living fifty-seven kilometres southeast of me, regularly spoken by tourists on the streets of my home city and appearing in various signs and notices about the place. One of the oddities about living in East Kent is that far from being part of a gentle blending of culture and language into another milieu, the area digs its heels in and insists on being even more English than anywhere else. It’s no accident that Nigel Farage represented Thanet South (apparently the constituency’s official name is “South Thanet”). It’s a bit like Gibraltar really.

Scots is very slightly different, although not as she is spelt. It occasionally uses a Z in place and proper names such as Menzies to represent what has now become a /j/ sound, or consonantal “Y” for an English speller. This is from the letter yogh, Ȝ, which represents the “ch” sound as in “loch” and the H as in “human”, and is now written “gh”. Yogh evolved from the letter G as written in the Anglo-Saxon script known as Insular Half-Uncial, but didn’t become a letter in its own right until after the Norman Conquest. The Normans were generally unkeen on letters which didn’t exist in the French alphabet at the time, which is why it changed to “GH”. In general they tended to add an H to letters in English to create a new combination for a sound absent in French by analogy with their own “CH”.

W is more or less a foreign letter for all Romance languages so far as I know. French uses it for loanwords such as “weekend” and “waggon”, and since many of these are from German it’s often pronounced as /v/. Italian lacks quite a few letters found in our alphabet, including J, K, W, X and Y. Presumably to an Italian-language reader, English looks exotic for using these letters, but the weight of population is against this deeming them as unusual or “extra” since it isn’t a particularly widely-spoken language. Of H pronounced as an actual sound instead of an indication of a different pronunciation, only Romanian now has a strongly-pronounced version among the Romance languages, although I did once own a Spanish dictionary published in the twentieth century CE which reported that older Spanish speakers faintly pronounced it, so I presume it only disappeared from the language in the nineteenth. That might also be Castilian rather than Spanish overall.

H is more or less what English has instead of diacritics, and is used for similar purposes in Irish and Gàidhlig when those are written in the same script as English. Gàidhlig has a short alphabet compared to English:

ABCDEFGHILMNOPRSTU

(Plus the letters using a grave accent). The traditional Irish script was based on uncial and therefore differed from English in various ways:

As a dot was often used to replace H, that letter was practically non-existent in Irish, making the alphabet even shorter. English also used to use this script if you go back far enough, sans dots, although for some reason it dotted the Y but not the I. This gave Irish only seventeen letters for a time. Q-Celtic letters are named after trees incidentally.

The shortest alphabet of all, Latin or otherwise, is used by Rotokas, a Papuan language spoken on the island of Bougainville:

A E G I K O P R S T U V

Perhaps surprisingly, this includes two redundant letters as T and S can replace each other, and V is sometimes written B. The Hawaiian alphabet is also quite short:

AEHIKLMNOPUW

However, Hawaiian also has the ʻokina, ʻ, representing the glottal stop, which does count as a letter. Another short alphabet, this time in an unusual order, is used by Samoan:

AEIOUFGLMNPSTVHKR.

H, K and R are only used in foreign loanwords and R is often pronounced L. Samoan G has an odd history. When the first printing press was being sent over to Samoa, there was a storm and many of the N’s got washed overboard, so G was used for the “ng” sound which would otherwise have been spelt that way. So the story goes, anyway.

To people familiar with any of these alphabets as first languages, English would surely seem quite exotic, as our alphabet is twice as long as these, but at least in the case of Hawaiian, English is so dominant that this is unlikely to happen. Samoan is sometimes in a similar situation as it’s spoken on American Samoa.

In European languages, almost every one using the Latin script also uses diacritics, even including Welsh and Gàidhlig, although at least one orthography for Cornish doesn’t really. However, Dutch and Flemish don’t. Dutch, however, views “IJ” as a single letter and capitalises it as one, sticking it between Y and Z. Flemish just uses a Y for this. Frisian does use them, but seems to consider I and Y as variants of the same letter, and uses C only in the combination CH. Scots, as well as using Z and Y occasionally for yogh in proper names, also properly avoids apostrophes in many places where English would put them, because for Scots they’re not historically correct. Scots is descended from Northumbrian rather than Mercian and not all the letters deemed to be missing in English spelling are in fact missing in Scots, so some uses of apostrophes are culturally imperialist.

When I first started to learn German at thirteen, I was excited to be able to use a language with an extra letter, namely the Eszet, ß. However, it isn’t really compulsory, is absent in Swiss German and amounts to a digraph. It’s a long S followed by a final one, and like the ʻokina, lacks separate capital and lowercase forms, making it look a bit weird when something is written in all-caps.

Old English had three other letters it has since lost as well as æsc: Þ,ð and Ƿ. The first, þorn, represents voiceless “TH” and was a worthwhile letter of the alphabet although it’s easily confused with P. The difference is that it has an ascender and a descender. Ð, which is ð in lowercase, is often interchangeable with Þ in Old English manuscripts but is used to represent the voiced “TH” sound. Finally, ƿynn, like þorn, is an adapted rune, but represents /w/. The oddity about the two runic letters is that they were both so similar to P, and I imagine this is one reason why they stopped using them, although there was also suspicion around the use of runes as they were perceived as pagan by the Normans. Even so, the loss of Þ and Ð is unfortunate.

There are two diacritics which I do in fact use in English. One is the diæresis, which marks out the second vowel in a pair when they don’t form a diphthong but are pronounced as separate syllables. There was a trend in the mid-twentieth century to replace hyphenation in words which caused two vowels to be placed adjacently with this diacritic, which seems like a neater solution and also saves space, but it has gone out of fashion. The other thing I do is use a grave accent over an E in a past participle ending when I would pronounce the “-ed” as a separate syllable, which is a poetic thing rather than used in prose. I also use diacritics over some French loanwords into English. All of this is really because I find it quite sad that we don’t really use them. I kind of feel like our failure to use them is a kind of insular assertion of English, not British, identity which is pretty pathetic and spurious, and I’d prefer to join the rest of Europe and employ them. It’s notable that Irish, Gàidhlig and Welsh are all fine with them but English isn’t.

Afrikan languages which adopted the Latin alphabet have a basis for their spelling expressed as “vowels as in Italian, consonants as in English” or some such. This certainly applies to (Ki)Swahili for example, such as the word “jambo”. This is probably one cause of what I think of as the notorious “Afrika” with a K issue, which I came down on the K side of rather than the C side (“seaside”?). Because English could in theory completely abandon C were it not for its occurrence in CH, many Afrikan languages which use Latin script only use K for /k/. I’ve been into this already because although it doesn’t feel quite right in terms of its rational justification, I do it out of respect for those who claim it’s imperialist to spell it with a C because I see them as having specialised experience. Some Afrikan languages which do use the Latin alphabet, such as Yoruba, strictly Yorùbá, do use diacritics, in this case to represent tones, but also dots under the letters to indicate different pronunciations. In the case of Yorùbá, the situation is complicated. What I’ve just described is the approach taken in Nigeria, but in Benin ε and Ɔ are used instead of dotted E and O, and Odùduwà the divine king is said to have revealed a script to Tolúlàṣẹ Ògúntósìn in Benin, so that’s also used. This is typical of West Afrika in that there are more than two dozen recently invented scripts in the region.

Counting languages written using the Latin script by numbers of speakers, which may be much larger than numbers of writers, the dozen most spoken languages of this kind are:  English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Indonesian, German, Turkish, Vietnamese, Hausa, (Ki)Swahili, Italian and Nigerian Pidgin.  Yorùbá is the fourteenth, incidentally.  That's nearly fifteen hundred million as a first language, but many of them are more widely used as second languages. Of these, English, Nigerian Pidgin, Indonesian and Swahili lack diacritics, counting the use of the hooks on implosive letters in Hausa as diacritics.  Turkish uses the dot over the I as a diacritic, so it's hard to know what to do with that because if it's accepted as one that would mean that English just does have diacritics, over I and J, but Turkish romanisation was quite unusual generally and is a bit of an anomaly.  Vietnamese uses what strikes me as an excessive amount of them.  The total number of first language speakers of English, Indonesian, Nigerian Pidgin and Swahili is 479 million, which puts English in the "unusual" category for not using diacritics.

The next question is, does English have any unusual letters by number of first language alphabet users in this group? In other words, do any of our letters count as exotic? In toto, the letters missing from at least one of these languages which are present in English, including those used only in foreign loanwords in them, are: C (only as CH in Swahili), F, J, K, Q, V, W, X, Y and Z. Vietnamese is phonologically unusual as a language, and it alone excludes F and W. Of the other letters, W is not used for native words in six of them, Q and X in three, and J and K in two. This means that over a thousand million language users in this group have no native use for W. As for the others, K is not used by 297 million, Q is eschewed by forty-seven million, J by 141 million and X by 130 million. In terms of how “European” these absences are, Q is only absent in the non-European versions unless Turkish is counted as a European language, and K is only absent in European languages.

Therefore, the best candidate for an unusual or “extra” letter in English seems to be W. This letter is not found in the majority of scripts for the twelve most spoken first languages using the Latin alphabet. Yet I can, as a native English user, look at the alphabet and not see W as exotic, even though it kind of is. In fact it’s so exotic that even the Old English alphabet lacked it.

There’s also a kind of “core” of “normal” letters, though some languages lack these too. These are: A, B, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T and U. The surprises here are L and R, as many languages lack one or the other.

What, then, is English like as a written language aside from its weird orthography? Well, it’s remarkably unadorned with accents and the like, it uses one slightly unusual letter, W, and it tends to use H instead of diacritics. Don’t even get me or anyone else started on the spelling, but if someone with no reading knowledge of the Latin alphabet were to attempt to recognise written English, they should look for a language which uses C not followed by H, and also W, but lacks accents. If they did this, the chances are they would be left with a choice between English, Dutch, Flemish and Indonesian.

Writing this has made me think about West Afrika a lot, so now you’ve got something on that coming.

Hebrew Script

The Hebrew alphabet is the oldest non-ideographic script still used today, although it hasn’t always had its current form. The above image represents some of the letters twice because they are written differently at the ends of words. They’re also written from right to left, unlike this Latin script, Greek, Cyrillic and the Indian and Indo-Chinese scripts. It interests me that characters written from left to right tend to be open on the right hand side and those written the other way are on the left. Vertically written scripts are not open at the top or bottom though.

Technically, Hebrew script isn’t an alphabet but an abjad, because in their purest form the actual letters only represent consonants. This is also the case with the related Arabic script, for the same reason: Semitic languages rely on triliteral consonantal roots for the basic meaning of their words and the vowels provide the inflection. This may seem foreign at first until one realises that both English and the insular Celtic languages do something similar for some words. For instance, we talk of one “foot” but two “feet” and we “take” a pill but “took” it in the past. The difference with Semitic languages is that this is the norm. We can also manage quite well even in English without vowels a lot of the time, as with text messages and note form, so it isn’t that big an issue that Hebrew is traditionally written without vowels.

The original Hebrew script looked like this:

A slightly modified of this script is still used by the Samaritans, and it should be remembered that although they are quite a small community, the Samaritans do still exist and are by no means pursuing a dead or dying religion. The Samaritan faith is still Abrahamic and they claim that their own written Torah is the original, unlike the one followed by the Jews and Christians. This older script is the one which appeared on the wall at Belshazzar’s Feast in Daniel chapter 5:

This is not how it would’ve looked. The absence of vowels allows the writing to be read in at least two different ways. As verbs they read “numbered, weighed, divided”. As nouns, they appear to be a list of monetary units. The two are of course compatible because of the link between weights of precious metals and money, as can be seen in English with the word “pound”.

The absence of vowels from the original Hebrew script is the original state of alphabetic writing. Egyptian hieroglyphics also lack vowels, although there’s a tendency to treat them as if `ayin and the glottal stop are in fact vowels. Again, Ancient Egyptian and its modern descendant Coptic are Semitic languages, and hieroglyphics had a lot else going on in it which made it more legible. Another feature of Hebrew is that since the Semitic peoples invented entirely letter-based scripts in the first place, the names of the letters reflect their predecessor symbols and the objects they represented. For instance ד , daleth, still means “door” and ג , gimel, still means “camel”. This connection was lost after the letters were adopted into Greek because that’s an Indo-European language.

The older Hebrew script appeared during the Dark Age after the Bronze Age Collapse, an unexplained incident in the late Bronze Age when the civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean all fell at the same time. This was about 3 300 years ago. The style in which it’s written in today dates from about a millennium later. For Hebrew, two attempts were made to include vowels. The first, matres lectionis, used certain consonants to represent them, which is also how Greek did it: our current vowels all used to be consonantal letters whose sounds were absent or not considered significant in Greek. For Hebrew this meant that some letters would be used as vowels in some instances and consonants in others. However, because there are semivowels this wasn’t necessarily a problem, since in a way some vowels are simply semivowels pronounced as syllables such as W and U, and Y and I. Incidentally, for some reason Latin is used a lot to refer to aspects of Hebrew writing, and I’m not sure why this is or whether the Jews themselves use these terms. I suspect it’s something to do with the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

The other method, similar to the system used in Arabic, is to express the vowels using dots and other shapes above and below the consonants, in conjunction with semivowels used within the line. This is known as Tiberian niqqud. Neqqudot were introduced, I hear, so as not to alter the sacred script of the Tanakh, although I’m not seeing this because of its use of yod and waw (more on my spelling of those shortly) for long vowels. A text with neqqudot looks like this:

בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ.

(that’s the beginning of Genesis).

There’s also daghesh and the schwas. Daghesh is a dot which converts a letter from a stop such as V to a plosive such as B, and is similar to, although also opposite to, a similar practice in Irish script where dots are placed about letters such as B and C, which is another odd connection between Insular Celtic and Semitic languages although this time probably coincidental, assuming the others aren’t. Schwas, which I feel pressure to write as “Š^ewas” because then it contains one of them, are murmured vowels such as are common in English, but in the case of Hebrew there are a number of them, including silent ones, each with their own pronunciation (except the silent ones!).

All of the above is not a complete description of how Hebrew script works, and I’ve learned it as a gradual process once I picked up the consonants. I’m not sure when I started, but one of the things which has characterised my study of the script is that much of it was done in fairly emotionally fraught circumstances. One way of dating it is the birth and naming of my brother Jonathan. He was born a dozen weeks premature and not expected to live, although he did. My mother named him Jonathan, which in Hebrew is יוֹנָתָן, meaning “a gift from G-d” because of his unexpected arrival and survival. I nicknamed him “Jod”, pronounced “yod”, at an early stage because it was the first letter of his name and, like it, he was very small, at birth that is. This implies that I had some knowledge of Hebrew script when I was six, and the situation in which I used it was rather stressful and upsetting. A few years later, when I think I was nine, I’d familiarised myself thoroughly with the Greek alphabet, I was once again in difficult circumstances but was able to avail myself of a one-volume encyclopædia which listed several scripts side by side, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Phœnician along with their meanings and names. I escaped into this to avoid the difficulties in my life at the time, as a form of escapism, and consequently memorised the whole Hebrew alphabet along with the Phœnician script in less than a week. Later on, I attempted to learn Hebrew itself, which I’ve found very difficult and I’ve had several goes.

One result of the way I learnt Hebrew writing is that my pronunciation of the language is most unlike that of either the Ashkenazim or Sephardim and follows the reconstructed pronunciation used in the times the Tanakh was first being set down in writing. I can’t hear modern Hebrew pronunciation without perceiving it as really grating and strongly accented, might I say “wrongly accented”? Several of the letter pronunciations have changed or fallen together, and these also vary according to accent. I mentioned “yod” and “waw” earlier. In fact, waw is now pronounced something like “vov” because, I think, of the influence of the German language, and also it goes against the grain to write “yod” with a Y rather than a J, but that’s just me. Also, perhaps the most difficult thing to accept of all is the way “resh” is pronounced, as it’s now a uvular R as in Parisian French and Southern German rather than an alveolar one as in Russian or Arabic, and this just sounds really wrong to me. I presume the Sephardic pronunciation is still alveolar but the vowels are all pronounced “clearly” as they would be in Castilian. One issue with pronouncing resh as uvular is that it brings it quite close to the fricative version of gimel, which I would expect to lead to confusion. `Ayin and ‘aleph seem to have combined as the latter, and the emphatic consonants, which are simultaneously articulated in the throat and the mouth, have become identical to their dental or alveolar equivalents. Also quite grating is the way cheth is now pronounced as “ch” in “loch” rather than as a voiceless pharyngeal. Modern Hebrew has diverged quite drastically from Arabic in its pronunciation. It’s a matter of personal taste, but so much of Modern Hebrew pronunciation, at least in Israel, just seems very “wrong” to me. I don’t know about the political and historical significance of this approach, although I find it strange that the revival of Hebrew, which seemed so purist and conservative in many ways (e.g. many more of the words are taken from Hebrew morphemes rather than adopting Greek and Latin forms) also seemed to adopt such a radically different set of pronunciations. It probably comes down to accent.

This change is reflected in the letters used, for instance ת, ט are both “t”, ס, שׂ are both “s”, and this is where it gets weird, because of the way the Hebrew script has been used to write Yiddish and Ladino (for more on those languages see this post), which makes them both hard for me to read. I’m unsurprisingly more familiar with Yiddish and can follow the spoken version quite easily on the whole, but when written it seems to make consistently strange choices regarding consonants. Yiddish spelling does vary, in a similar way to English, in that it doesn’t modify the way Hebrew words in the language are written, so they will appear with the usual vowel pointing and consonants as they would in the Tanakh, but the Indo-European portion of the language writes /t/ as “ט‎” and /k/ as “ק”, which to me is “Q”, pronounced uvularly. This is very distracting when reading it. It also has a quite different approach to vowels, which are generally adapted consonantal letters in writing. For instance, “ע” is “E”, and “אַ” representing “A” can occur anywhere in a word even if there’s no glottal stop. “יי” is used to represent “ey” and “ײַ” “ay”, and there are a number of other oddities which mean that a language I ought to be able to read easily is in fact quite difficult for me. Incidentally, there is a language academy for it called YIVO, which stands for “ייִדישער װיסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט” or “Yiddisher Visnshaftlekher Institut”, now based in New York City but actually founded in the 1920s in Vilnius, which not all Yiddish writing or spelling follows.

As for Ladino, I’m less familiar with it or its spelling. I’ve talked about its appeal before, but for me it amounts to Spanish with all the weird stuff taken out of it. It’s not Castilian of course, and it kind of feels like the way Latin ought to be if it had survived to the present day. I can easily imagine a timeline where Rome never fell and most people on the planet speak this language, minus its specifically Jewish elements. However, it is a Jewish language and as such is written using the Hebrew script. That said, the actual forms of the letters are somewhat altered as it uses Rashi Script, the letters in which the writings of the French rabbi Rashi, whose pseudonym is an acronym for the Hebrew for “Rabbi of Israel” or “Our Rabbi, may he live” and whose real name is Shlomo Yitzchaki and lived in the eleventh Christian century, were written:

Rashi is substantially known for his extensive commentary on the Talmud, and commentaries have in turn been written on his own commentary, leading to the distinctive layout of the Talmud page:

It can be seen that Rashi’s commentary, in a square ring around the central text, is notably different than the rest of the text on the page. Rashi also wrote a commentary on the Tanakh, focussing particularly on the written Torah. Ladino is written using this script.

Unlike Yiddish, Ladino lacks an official standard and this applies to spelling as well as everything else. It’s also written in Latin script. When Rashi script is used, the vowels in particular are somewhat vague, because letters are used for them and each can have several values. Aleph, for example (I don’t know how to type Rashi script on a computer) can be A, E or O, and double vav (i.e. “waw”) can stand for U, O, V or W. This is reminiscent of Scandinavian runes, each of which can stand for more than one sound. The consonants are easier to read, with a tendency to add yod to them to indicate some form of palatisation.

Then there’s the cursive.

I have to admit I simply cannot read or write Hebrew cursive, as I’ve mentioned before. When I write Hebrew, I use the square script and it probably looks quite infantile. Unfortunately for me, it’s a popular script for Ladino and it also gave rise to the handwriting used in Israel and among the Ashkenazim. I can’t say much about it because I don’t know it. Most of the letters look nothing like their printed versions to me.

A long time ago I remember hearing the observation that Hebrew is the language chosen to make the divine revelation. This is clearly not a universalist view, as it means that there is the true religion and everything else, and the same attitude is taken towards Arabic and Sanskrit. Even so, I think it’s important to be authentic in the way one approaches spiritual matters so as not to lose touch with one’s religious community and become kind of “rootless”. Another observation regarding Hebrew script is that the hooks at the top of every letter have been interpreted as a reminder that they are being handed down from on high. Solitreo and other cursive forms of Hebrew script lack these hooks, but are used for profane purposes anyway so that may be just as well.

I believe in principle that a religious person who is literate and whose faith includes sacred texts should make an effort to read them in the original language, as far as is possible. I also think this about non-religious texts: that literature and philosophy for instance should be read in the language they were written in. I do this with German philosophy and literature. To this end I have made fairly successful attempts at learning New Testament Greek and rather less wonderful efforts to learn Biblical Hebrew. Nonetheless I see it as incumbent upon me, to the extent that I consider the Tanakh inspiring, to keep trying. I have a head start over some people through having been somewhat familiar with the script since almost as long ago as I learnt to read English. The uncanny similarities with Gàidhlig are also intriguing and helpful. Otherwise, the problem is that one is beholden to the values and beliefs embodied in translations. It’s similar to handing over ethical responsibility to particular companies: you don’t know where it’s been. Claims are often made regarding the homophobia of certain Biblical passages, for example, on both sides, and the appeal is often made to translation errors and biasses. These can to some extent be overcome by reading the said passages in Hebrew and Greek, although even there one is subject to bias that might be introduced in the way one learns those languages, and historical and social context is also so important.

Nonetheless, it’s important for a member of an Abrahamic faith to use Hebrew if they can, and I am indeed such a person, so that’s what I have to do.