Posted on April 25th, 2011by Michelle
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.Another day, another amusing language-related story from NewsBiscuit. This one is about the government removing the letters ‘m’ and ‘n’ from the alphabet due to cuts.
The real cleverness is in the writing of the article though – it contains no ‘m’s or ‘n’s:
David Caero ade the shock aouceet i the house of coos today that the alphabet would shrik to just twety four letters with iediate effect, sayig that “Labour left us owig billios ad billios of pouds ad tough decisios have to be ade”.
Ed Illibad was the first of the Labour P’s to code the ove as cyical ad uecesary, sayig that agai the goveret had got it wrog cuttig too quickly ad to deeply affectig the poorest ad ost vulerable i society. Ick Clegg supported the coalitio lie o this issue sayig, “I kow i proised ot to reduce the uber of letters before the electio but I had y figers crossed” leadig to shouts of Resig! Resig! from the labour beches.
Surprisingly it’s still fairly easy to read these paragraphs. It reminds me of the internet meme saying a researcher at Cambridge University had found that you can still read words where the letters are jumbled up, as long as the first and last letters are correct. More on the science (and truth) behind that here
I take it for granted that most of the content I want to view on the web will be in my native language, English, and I merely have to type the website’s name into my browser to navigate to the site.
For speakers of languages with non-Latin based writing systems (including Arabic, Cyrillic and Chinese), this is not the case. To navigate to websites, they need to type in characters such as the ones you see here. And for those unfamiliar with Latin letters, this proves a hindrance to accessing content.
Last month, however, the internet regulator Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved the use of different alphabets, ending the dominance of Latin alphabets such as English.
It’s been hailed as a big move which can increase accessibility to the web, especially among those unfamiliar with Latin letters:
The impact will vary by location, with more remote countries seeing the biggest expansion. Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president, called the step “a historic move toward the internationalisation of the internet … We just made the internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.” (Source: FT.com)
With the first official international web addresses expected in 2010, you could perhaps be logging on to 语言-博物院.com soon!
Posted on November 3rd, 2009by Michelle
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Recently I tried to use the spelling alphabet (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie) when I needed to spell something here in Spain (haven’t completely grasped the Spanish alphabet yet). To my surprise, I found out it is not as universal as I thought.
In fact, there are different countries have their own spelling alphabets, as this site (although old) shows. Spain’s spelling alphabet begins Antonio, Barcelona, Carmen, for example.
The alphabet I was using is known as the NATO phonetic alphabet, or the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet. It’s been adopted by many military and civilian organisations around the world, including the Federal Aviation Administration and International Telecommunication Union, which I suppose is why I assumed people would know it here. It’s also been used for art, and a comment on language.
Looking at the various alphabets, it seems that most are based on names, particularly of people. The names appear specific to each country (Désirè for example), which would not be useful for an international alphabet. I particularly like the older English alphabets, which include gems such as Xantippe (British A), Monkey, Nuts (British Royal Air Force from 1924-1942) and Xerxes (British Royal Navy – 1917).
Do you know a spelling alphabet? What words are used?