Well, my understanding was that it was developed by Phoenician workers
living probably at Sinai. Would have to check what version is currently
accepted.
O.K.
On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 3:05 AM, Steve Cameron <stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
**Actually, the alphabet existed before the Phoenicians:
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/alphabet.html
"The original alphabet was developed by a Semitic people living in or
near Egypt.* They based it on the idea developed by the Egyptians, but
used their own specific symbols. It was quickly adopted by their neighbors
and relatives to the east and north, the Canaanites, the Hebrews, and the
Phoenicians. The Phoenicians spread their alphabet to other people of the
Near East and Asia Minor, as well as to the Arabs, the Greeks, and the
Etruscans, and as far west as present day Spain.
* Until recently, it was believed that these people lived in the Sinai
desert and began using their alphabet in the 1700's bc. In 1998,
archeologist John Darnell discovered rock carvings in southern Egypt's
"Valley of Horrors" that push back the origin of the alphabet to the 1900's
bc or even earlier. Details suggest that the inventors were Semitic people
working in Egypt, who thereafter passed the idea on to their relatives
further east."
TC,
/Steve Cameron, NJ
On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Here one should give credit to the Phoenicians, who invented the first
alphabet. (From which the Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets are all
descended.) Syllabaries such as the Egyptian and the Babylonian gradually
went out of fashion or got reformed after that.
O.K.
On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 10:40 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I see a bit of confusion here. The syllables in the definition of haikuare, indeed, syllables. The syllables may be represented in three ways,
kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana (cursive syllabary) and katakana
(block syllabary). Kanji may be pronounced in more than one way. Thus, for
example, the kanji 大 can be pronounced either "dai" or "ou" depending on
the context in which it occurs.>
My post overlooked this important category "syllabary", moving instead
between the simplistic contrast between alphabetic writing, where we may
know how to pronounce a "word" without knowing its meaning, and
ideogrammatic writing, where we may not be able to infer how a word sounds
from how it is 'pictured'. But then, as they teach at Oxford, Chinese
itself started as English spoken in England until one day many centuries
ago someone began whispering it to someone else.
D
On Sunday, 5 April 2015, 1:50, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I see a bit of confusion here. The syllables in the definition of haiku
are, indeed, syllables. The syllables may be represented in three ways,
kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana (cursive syllabary) and katakana
(block syllabary). Kanji may be pronounced in more than one way. Thus, for
example, the kanji 大 can be pronounced either "dai" or "ou" depending on
the context in which it occurs.
This is, for those who care to know, an artifact of the long history of
interaction between China and Japan. Written Japanese began with efforts to
use Chinese characters to write Japanese, but Japanese and Chinese are very
different languages. Japanese is highly inflected while Chinese is not
inflected at all. The syllabaries were created to add inflections to words
whose base meaning was, at least partially, captured by the choice of
Chinese character(s). Which brings us to another problem, the pronunciation
of Chinese terms imported into Japanese varied over time and depending on
the part of China from which they were imported. Chinese is, properly
speaking, a family of languages and those spoken in the south of China can
be as different from those spoken in the north as Portuguese and Romanian.
Cheers,
John
Sent from my iPad
On 2015/04/05, at 0:26, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Characters are not "ideograms" of anything.The phonemes are the same anywhere and everywhere>
This was the received opinion in the West until "Bob Dylan at Budokan"
was issued.
Dnl
On Saturday, 4 April 2015, 8:48, Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Characters are not “ideograms” of anything.
The phonemes are the same anywhere and everywhere
*From:* lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [
mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>] *On
Behalf Of *Donal McEvoy
*Sent:* 04 April 2015 09:30
*To:* lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [lit-ideas] Re: whatever
>Allow me to suspect that the mirror in the Japanesey thing--people
have lectured me on how the American version of haiku misses what is
essential about the form-- became deep because the shallow one simply had
too many syllables.>
Is Japanese not ideogrammatic rather than alphabetic? If so, do
ideograms have syllables?
"There was an old man of Waiku
Who thought he would write a haiku
But found out he meant a limerick"
Dnl
On Saturday, 4 April 2015, 7:20, David Ritchie <
profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Allow me to suspect that the mirror in the Japanesey thing--people
have lectured me on how the American version of haiku misses what is
essential about the form-- became deep because the shallow one simply had
too many syllables. I enjoyed the encounter poem's vividness: the picture
in my mind has lots of detail not mentioned. I do like ponies, so I may be
predisposed. Question for the assembled multitude: do dry swans bow
differently from wet ones? Why? Discuss on the back of a postcard...
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregong
A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.
-- Hitomaro
And this by James Wright:
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I do truly like these two -- among hundreds and hundreds hundreds of
other. They add up to nothing. That's OK, I hate algebra.
