Prior to the creation of the Coptic alphabet in 300 AD, the Egyptian language was written in three
non-alphabetic scripts: Hieroglyphic,
Hieratic and Demotic. Each of these used
a combination of pictographic/ideographic symbols and phonetic symbols, but it
is important to recognize that they were three distinct scripts. Hieroglyphic and Hieratic writing developed
concurrently and independently of one another.
They were closely related, though the exact nature of their relationship
is unknown. There is little evidence to
suggest that one descended from the other, but it is probable that they were
mutually influential. Hieratic was the
more cursive of the two. Both scripts
were used from roughly 3200 BC until 400 AD.
Generally, Hieroglyphics were used for monumental inscriptions and
decorative texts, and Hieratic was used for administrative texts which placed
more importance in content than appearance, which were written by hand, and
which needed to be written quickly.
Demotic writing developed around 600 BC.
It was derived from Hieratic writing, but developed into a highly
cursive form so that the pictographic element of some symbols was lost. Although many single symbols were still used
to write whole words or concepts, the symbol did not necessarily visually
resemble the concept it represented. As
Demotic writing gained popularity, it began to replace Hieratic writing in the
administrative context, though Hieratic continued to be used in religious
texts. Demotic writing was used until
roughly 400 AD, when all three scripts began to fall from use in favour of the
Coptic alphabet. Note that there is
significant overlap in the dates during which the three scripts were used. None of them entirely replaced another; they
all were used concurrently in restricted domains. Jacques Kinnaer http://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_detail&uid=yhvayd2uk7
Newspapers and magazines have suggested that emojis
are a new kind of language, perhaps
akin to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Could this be true? However much such a thought might appeal to
some of us, the use of emojis is actually quite limited. They mostly function
as indicators of how we feel, or they're simply used for fun. The use of emojis, then, can be compared to
certain kinds of nonhuman animal communication, which generally has specific
purposes. This is not language in the
human sense. What of hieroglyphs? They are not a language, but a system that
evolved over time to record the ancient Egyptian language in physical form. First of all, hieroglyphs were logograms, a
sign or character that represented a word or phrase. For example, the mouth-shaped
symbol stood for the word "mouth," which was pronounced
"r" (hieroglyphs do not record vowel sounds, just as many scripts in
use today in the Middle East do not). The
use of the mouth-shaped symbol, then, represented the sound "r"—that
is, the shape acted as a phonogram, a symbol representing a vocal sound. Another example is the wave-shaped logogram, which represented the word
"water" and was pronounced "n." But the wave-shaped logogram could also be a
phonogram to spell the word for "for" because it was pronounced as
"n." Once hieroglyphs became a
way to spell sounds, they could be combined to spell larger words. Thus the combination spelled
"rn," the ancient Egyptian word for "name." This process may seem cumbersome, but
hieroglyphs allowed ancient Egyptians to compose numerous kinds of texts: literary and mythological tales, histories and
chronicles, religious hymns, scientific treatises and legal and medical texts,
poems and songs, personal letters and biographies, even graffiti. They wrote about anything that was important
to them, just like we English speakers leverage the Roman alphabet today. And that is why emojis are not a new language—or
anything like hieroglyphs. Joseph F.
Eska http://www.vtmag.vt.edu/sum16/question.html
In information technology, a glyph (pronounced GLIHF ; from a Greek word
meaning carving) is a graphic symbol that provides the appearance or form for
a character. A glyph can be an alphabetic or numeric font or some other
symbol that pictures an encoded character.
The following is from a document written as background for the Unicode character
set standard. An ideal characterization
of characters and glyphs and their relationship may be stated as follows: A character conveys distinctions in meaning
or sounds. A character has no intrinsic
appearance. A glyph conveys distinctions
in form. A glyph has no intrinsic
meaning. One or more characters may be
depicted by one or more glyph representations (instances of an abstract glyph)
in a possibly context dependent fashion.
In the Unicode standard,
a character is stated to be an abstract entity and not a glyph (some visual
representation of a character). posted
by Margaret Rouse http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/glyph
Parnassus
on Wheels is
a 1917 novel written by Christopher Morley and published by Doubleday, Page
& Company. The title refers to the Mount Parnassus of Greek mythology; it was the home of the Muses. Parnassus on Wheels is
Morley's first novel, about a fictional traveling book-selling business. The first of two novels to be written from a
woman's perspective, as well as the prequel to a later novel (The Haunted Bookshop), Parnassus
on Wheels was inspired by the novel The Friendly Road by
David Grayson (pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker), and starts with an open letter to Grayson, taking
him to task for not concerning himself (except in passing) with his sister's
opinion of and reaction to his adventure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parnassus_on_Wheels
Borrow from a public library or read
online at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5311
The Haunted Bookshop is a 1919 novel by journalist,
poet and novelist Christopher Morley (1890-1957). He was one of the founders of The Baker
Street Irregulars. It is very much a
post World War I novel, a direct reaction to the war. Which in a way is odd because it's also a
feather light comedy. It's also the
sequel to an earlier novel, Parnassus on Wheels. Much of this new novel (and I would guess
much of the earlier one) appeared in The Bookman, a magazine
devoted to bookselling concerns. http://rrhorton.blogspot.com/2014/07/old-bestsellers-haunted-bookshop-by.html
Borrow from a public library or read online at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/172
Why should I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google? The 23 answers
include #1: Google tracks you. We don’t.
https://www.quora.com/Why-should-I-use-DuckDuckGo-instead-of-Google
"In this little corner of paradise, a
discouraging word could not be heard over the breeze rattling cottonwood
leaves, the river roaring happily as you please and from time to time rolling a
small boulder on the submerged pathway."
"Of all the large cats, the cougar is the only one that purrs like
the kitty nestled in your lap." The
Widow's Revenge, #14 in the Charlie Moon series of novels by James D. Doss
James
D. Doss (1939-2012)
was a noted American mystery novel author. He was the creator of the popular
fictional Ute detective/rancher Charlie Moon, of whom he wrote
17 mystery novels. James
"Danny" Doss was born and raised in Kentucky and died in Los Alamos,
New Mexico. He was also an electrical
engineer who worked on particle accelerators and biomedical technology for
the University of
California's Los
Alamos National Laboratory, while
writing his novels. After retirement
from Los Alamos National Laboratory, he continued to write his popular novels
while living in Taos, New Mexico and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
See bibliography and link to an interview with Doss at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Doss
March 3,
2018 Last week The
Economist considered
the new South African president’s in-tray, advertising our advice on the cover
with the words “Who Cyril Ramaphosa should fire”. Shouldn’t that be “Whom Cyril Ramaphosa
should fire”? . On its face, our editors
agreed, the grammar was clear. It should
be whom. Who is used for subjects, whom for objects, including direct
objects such as that of the verb to fire. “He fires him”, not “He fires he”. Thus, “He fires whom”. The issue is
not as simple as that. Whom is
one of the few remaining vestiges of case in English. At the time of “Beowulf”, the great
monster-slaying Anglo-Saxon epic, English nouns, pronouns and adjectives, plus
words like the, all had an
ending showing case. Four different
cases in Old English tell you whether a word is a subject, direct object,
indirect object or possessor. In English
today just six words still show a distinction between subject and object:
I, he, she, we, they and who.
For the first five, making the case-distinction is mandatory nearly all
of the time. You cannot say “I love she
and she loves I”. Admittedly, some
people say “between you and I”. (It
should be between you and me,
because both you and me are objects of the preposition.) The case, as it were, is getting stronger
against whom. Except in the most formal language—think
courtrooms and prayers—this little word may not survive. For whom, the bell tolls.
For arguably the most
famous physicist on Earth, Stephen
Hawking—who died March 14, 2018 in Cambridge at 76 years old—was wrong a
lot. He thought, for a while, that black holes destroyed information, which physics says
is a no-no. He thought Cygnus X-1, an emitter of X-rays over 6,000 light years
away, wouldn’t turn out to be a black hole. (It did.) He thought no one would ever find the Higgs
boson, the particle indirectly responsible for the existence of mass in the
universe. (Researchers at CERN found it in 2012.) But Hawking was right a lot, too. He and the physicist Roger Penrose described singularities, mind-bending physical concepts where
relativity and quantum mechanics collapse inward on each other—as at the heart
of a black hole. It’s the sort of place
that no human will ever see first-hand; the event horizon of a black hole
smears matter across time and space like cosmic paste. But Hawking’s mind was singular enough to see
it, or at least imagine it.
His calculations helped show that as the
young universe expanded and grew through inflation, fluctuations at the quantum
scale—the smallest possible gradation of matter—became the galaxies we see
around us. No human will ever visit
another galaxy, and the quantum realm barely waves at us in our technology, but
Hawking envisioned them both. And he
calculated that black holes could sometimes explode, an image that would vex
even the best visual effects wizard. More than that, he could explain it to the rest of us. Hawking was the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics
at Cambridge until his retirement in 2009, the same position held by Isaac
Newton, Charles Babbage, and Paul Dirac. But he was also a pre-eminent popularizer of
some of the most brain-twisting concepts science has to offer. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time has
sold more than 10 million copies. Adam
Rogers https://www.wired.com/story/stephen-hawking-a-physicist-transcending-space-and-time-passes-away-at-76/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1857
March 14, 2018 On this date in 1794, Eli Whitney was granted a patent for the cotton gin.
On this date in 1885, The Mikado, a light opera by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, received its first public
performance in London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14
Word of the Day
Pi Day proper
noun March 14th, an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi).
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