Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire.
"I've been in few famous last stands, lad, and they're butcher shops. That's what Blouse's leading you into, mark my words. What'll you lot do then? We've had a few scuffles, but that's not war. Think you'll be man enough to stand, when the metal meets the meat?"
"You did, sarge", said Polly." You said you were in few last stands."
"Yeah, lad. But I was holding the metal"
Sergeant Major Jackrum 10th Light Foot Infantery Regiment "Inns-and-Out"
Send it to Martin Windrow? :P
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Cyrilic is great: that's the only thing I did not forget from five years learning russian (well, 30 years ago)
Just too many threads on terrorism... Throwing a "ж" or a "ч" starts the alphabetic war? My bet on the Thai one. I wonder why we keep starting threads for every terrorist act in western europe: motivations are the same, reactions are the same, blood is blood, and orphans, orphans.
SFTS has started a spree of alphabetic brutality: that's most refreshing and I'd love it to keep us happy until the next (true) slaughter. No motivations, no blood, no orphans. Just plain conflict on an abstract matter*.
Thinking about it another way would kick it out of the backroom anyway.
*damn, just like wars of religion, but without tears normally.
"Les Cons ça ose tout, c'est même à ça qu'on les reconnait"
Kentoc'h Mervel Eget Bezañ Saotret - Death feels better than stain, motto of the Breton People. Emgann!
Last edited by Philippus Flavius Homovallumus; 04-20-2017 at 20:12.
"If it wears trousers generally I don't pay attention."
[IMG]https://img197.imageshack.us/img197/4917/logoromans23pd.jpg[/IMG]
Waiiit a second...If they weren't inferior, they would have developed Cyrillic alphabet.
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
They developed Glagolitic alphabet, on which Cyrillic is based.
Greeks are slightly better than the rest of you barbarians.
Chinese doesn't use alphabet. The latter is a haphazard number of symbols representing sounds (or combinations of sounds). Chinese characters represent words.
Generally, seeing the ardour of the discussion in this thread I would assume that Cyrillic alphabet is a literal attack on British democracy.
It depends on how the alphabet is arranged. There is a (probably apocryphal) story about British bombers dropping leaflets on Germany during the early stages of WWII. An absent-minded bombardier forget to undo the strings of one package before shoving it out of the door, and another crew member admonished him, "Careful, you might hurt somebody like that."
Traditionally, alphabet has no systematic arrangement. There is no reason why A is followed by B and the latter by C and so on. An attempt to turn it into reasonable system was made by Tolkien when he created Tengwar.
http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/tengwar.htm
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Like in the example I gave. If you bundle 5 lbs of leaflets written in the Cyrillic alphabet, tie it all up with a bit of string, and chuck the bundle out of an airplane at 10,000 ft, to land on the Houses of Commons, it can be construed as a direct attack on British democracy.
There is the Shavian Alphabet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
Effectively it is to give each sound its own letter within the English language. Though someone decided on those shapes to represent the letters, on the basis that it could be done with a single written stroke.
Last edited by Beskar; 04-21-2017 at 14:27.
Days since the Apocalypse began
"We are living in space-age times but there's too many of us thinking with stone-age minds" | How to spot a Humanist
"Men of Quality do not fear Equality." | "Belief doesn't change facts. Facts, if you are reasonable, should change your beliefs."
"The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken
"The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken
Maybe he was channeling his inner Varus.
"The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken
Not all characters are complex, there are simple ones, unanalyzable. But even in the two-component hieroglyphs the phonetic element doesn't represent a sound or a combination of sounds, but rather shows the way the whole symbol is pronounced. Moreover, the number of characters (several dozens thousands) is definitely greater than alphabetical systems include (several dozens). So in no way Chinese script can be counted among alphabetic ones.
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