Re: Language Lessons

From: "Amanda Babcock" <langs@...>

| On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 10:18:26PM -0400, Muke Tever wrote:
|
| > I have that book.  I didn't get too far in it though, as I didn't put enough
| > energy into learning the alphabet.  (The Georgian alphabet is essentially a
| > bag of curly fries spilled on the floor and trodden on.)

The Armenian alphabet is essentially mangled Greek.
The Avestan alphabet is essentially Pahlavi with a restored sense of sanity.
The Tamazight alphabet is essentially geometric figures used for love letters.
The Oriya script is essentially a succession of bald heads.  (This isn't mine;
somebody else on CONLANG said this.)
The Devanagari script is essentially a collection of snakes dangling from a
wire.
The Bengali script is essentially a collection of snakes dangling from a wire
that are better contortionists.
The Gujurati script is essentially a collection of snakes that fell from the
wire.
The Thaana (Maldivian) abjad is essentially rows of diagonal scribbles with
Arabic letters thrown in.
Arabic is essentially Aramaic written in a hurry.
Urdu is essetntially Arabic-Persian written in a hurry.
Cyrillic is essentially Greek written by a dyslexic Latin speaker.
Futhark is essentially Latin formed from carefully engineered trees.
Cursive Hebrew script is essentially Rashi script written by someone trying to
avoid imitating Jewish square script.
Hangul (Korean) is essentially Visible Speech designed to resemble Chinese.
Mongolian is essentially Aramaic doing a headstand.

(I don't know when to quit do I.)

| I like that description :)  It's a beautiful alphabet - I used it in seventh
| grade to scribble my adolescent thoughts on the tedium of school in the
| notebook I carried around.

It is a nice alphabet.  I know the modern single-case script (mxedruli); I need
to memorize the old capitals (xucuri), which are used by some writers as
"headline" or "paragraph initial" letters (and look much better than the
uniform-height mtavruli script).

The old lowercase alphabet is called nusxuri.

Now the language itself is something of a challenge.  Especially pronouncing
those intitial consonant sequences.

~DaW~


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