Circle Of Useless Knowledge

les Joies de la maternité - poil au nez - par Elise Gravel et Caroline Allard ˆˆˆ en vente ici ˆˆˆ

I have the tiniest of little concerns about my little one’s “Whyyyyy?” phase. For one, at three months old already he’s so curious that he forces his eyes open, in order not to miss anything, even while in REM phase of sleep (creeeepy). Secondly, and most of all, because his mom never actually graduated from her own “Whyyyy?” phase.

If my mother had replied other things than “Because.”, it might have helped. But she didn’t have pads and pods in contact with wikipedia at all times. I now finally have the means to quench the many whys (whies?) of my childhood.

One of the questions I exasperated grown ups with a a child is why do letters have the shape the do. Why, instead of a triangle with two legs, wouldn’t we draw stars for ‘A’s. I wanted to do stars. All this time, unbeknownst to me, I’ve been drawing cattle.

Yes. Oxen.

The Lebanese decided this. You may recall a character in Astérix called Ekonomikrisis, a Phoenician? Well, his ancestor, Overdraftnotis, on a sunny mediterranean morning a thousand years before Jesus would be born, decided to inventory the things his fleet swayed on the sea from Byblos to Tripoli. He had Chineese tea, Greek squid, Babylonian Baklava, Gaul magic potion, Berber clementines,… and he thought “Holy Orisis, there are limits to drawing everything! And none of my clients draw the same way, too! I’m NOT gonna learn a thousand of pictograms for each port I cast anchor in, especially since we, the phoenicians, have had a phonetic alphabet for, like, a thousand years: everyone should just use phoenician and that’s it that’s all.” And actually, from then on, everyone did.

Surprisingly, the idea of a phonetic writing system, everyone had had it before, and they all thought it was a bad idea. The Chinese and the Egyptians, for instance, had characters in their writing that were purely phonetic, but the scribes and academia of the period percieved with great disdain a system so simple that any blogger on maternity leave could use it to write such futilites. The Phoenicians, however, were not above anything as long as they could bargain a better deal, hence, their simple writing spread in great vogue around the Mediterranean. Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic all descend from Phoenician. Soon even those barbaric Etruscans had their version, adapted to the sounds of their own tongue. It helped them document the foundation of Rome, the evil plans of world domination, and the recipe for linguine al vongole.

The shape of our Roman letters, then, comes from a prototype of Phoenician that was in use already as far back as 4000 years ago, called proto-siniatic and later proto-canaanite. And what they are is very simple; the art director of the project simply told it’s stone engraving team “I need to represent the sound ‘Aaaa’. What starts with A? Oxen of course! (He called those ʾalp and his great-grand-children would say ʼāleph. And B is for house. (bēth).”

Doesn’t it remind you of anything? The letters are Phoenician alphabet blocks! The ones with an A on a face and an apple on another, a blue B and a yellow beach ball, ect… Except there’s no letter. The picture is the letter.

So of course, now you want to know the pictures in your name. I knew it. Your quests are so impossibly futile!

Here you go:

alphabet romain »»»	étrusque »»»	phénicien »»»	protocananéen »»»	égyptien »»»	sens original
A					ox ʼāleph
B					house, cottage bēth
C					either camel or throwstick gīmel
D					fish or door dāleth
E					hurray! (or maybe window) hē
F					F is a derivative of wāw like V, so hook or mace
G					G is a variant of the latin C, so camel or throwstick
H					wall, fence ḥēth
I					arm and hand yōdh
J					J is a variant of I, so arm and hand
K					hand (palm) kaph
L					goad (a stick to lead cattle) lāmedh
M					water mēm
N					serpent nun
O					eye ʼayin
P					maybe mouth, or maybe curve, bend pē
Q					might be monkey, or the eye of a needle (I vote for monkey) qōph
R					head rēš
S					tooth, or sun (the Uraeus) šin
T					mark, signature tāw
U					a variant of V, so hook or mace
V					hook, or mace wāw
W					W est littéralement un double V, donc 2 crochets ou 2 gourdins
X					possibly fish, or pillar sāmekh
Y					Y is borrowed to the Greeks (upsilon), which is also derived from phoenician wāw: hook or mace
Z					weapon, or maybe handcuffs zayin

Water, ox, head, arm and hand, hurray! My satisfaction is complete.

It’s nothing more than a coincidence. An extraordinary coincidence.

With W3C’s statistics, someone carried a little data visualization experiment: he built a pie chart with browser shares for each month of the year, since 2002. Logically, he assigned blue to IE and orange to Firefox. He then placed the charts together in concentric circles, and obtained this exquisitely striking result:

Visualizing Historic Browser Statistics with Axiis - by Michael VanDaniker

However, on the actual data, the fox’s tail hasn’t quite yet reached as far into browser shares as it does on the the Firefox logo. It looks as though this is the plan for the near future… Such a fantastic coincidence has obviously triggerd a lot of conspiracy theories, theories about which I have but one thing to say: in the name of all web designers, Go! Firefox, Go!

Firefox FTW!

When I was six and learning to make words out of the 26 letters of the alphabet, which I barely mastered, I had a brilliant idea to improve society:

— Mom, rather than writing “house” like this, why don’t all people just draw a house, like this. Everyone would understand, and, there would be no more spelling mistakes! Life would be a thousand times easier!

— Well, you can draw shapes and animals, Marie, but how would you go about writing invisible words like “love”?

I was so impressed with my mom’s ability to ponder invisible things (I hadn’t thought of that!), that I considered her a great philosopher from then and there; and never again did I question the foundation of our language.

Destiny and her evil smirk, however, decided that 20 years later, my face would be rubbed in pictograms. On a sunny morning, I landed in Japan and was to live there for four years. As it turned out, life was not a thousand times easier.

But there were a few things to be gleaned from this cruel bath of undecipherable characters: for one, I found out the answer to what I had thought of as an aporia.

"nengajou' par Sumi-e Kazu Shimura

To solve the riddle, one must first learn to draw. If one were quite talented, and had access to other drawing tools than stone on turtle shell, they could very well have written “tiger” like above; however, the style guide that the Chinese of the 14^th century before Christ unanimously adopted is rather well encapsulated by the term stick figure. They wrote “tiger” like this:

The ultimate stick figure is one that retains all the essence of the character it so plainly represents. For instance, what we evidently notice in babies is their big head, wriggly arms, and the silver of regurgitated milk on them. To avoid any superfluous lines the scribes dropped the part about half-digested milk, and wrote baby, or child, this way:

If the stick man kneels and is cradling an invisible child in it’s arms, then the stick man is a woman. The signing of lullabies to babies in your crossed arms is apparently quite contrary to manhood, in old China that is. But, to write mother, then? Well, just like the contemporary man, the ancient Chinese couldn’t help but notice her very large breasts, which they simply added to stick woman:

Now let us take these drawings and make them cross a sea and also 3500 years of human laziness. The results obtained:

What?! You’ll exclaim. Of the girl nothing is left but a top view of her crossed arms, and the tiger… oh dear! Illegible gibberish! Yes, well, do you see a person bursting in merry laughter when you see LOL? Let’s thank the Lord almighty that the generations preceding ours weren’t as irreparably lazy as we are. At the rate we abbreviate, in fifty years all emails will be a dot from which the reader must infer meaning.

But I digress here: we were wondering how to make a graphical representation of an abstract word such as love. Firstly, let’s choose our battle: there are two words for love in Japanese: one which involves naked people in a bed, the other one being just plain simple love. I’ll go for the second type, since we’re in the presence of me when I was six.

A good way to create an ideogram is to make recipes with the pictographic ingredients you already have, mixing and morphing them to extract their very essence. To create love, all one has to do is place the woman next to her child, like this:

Before I knew anything of maternity, when I lived in Japan, I thought this was really cute.

Now I think it’s true.