The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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thevietguy
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The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by thevietguy »

I have discovered the secret of the Latin alphabet and the alphabet for all human beings in general. This is not a lie or a hoax. Please experiment it for yourself. I invite all the human brothers and sisters to take a look [link removed by admin] . Sincerly yours, DO KS .
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by sangi39 »

thevietguy wrote: 12 Sep 2019 19:16 I have discovered the secret of the Latin alphabet and the alphabet for all human beings in general. This is not a lie or a hoax. Please experiment it for yourself. I invite all the human brothers and sisters to take a look [link removed by admin] . Sincerly yours, DO KS .
Would you care to provide an English translation? I'd imagine that the majority of users here don't speak much in the way of Vietnamese (I know, of course, that a fair chunk of the board don't speak English natively, but the vast majority of them seem to be proficient in it enough that it's a good default language to ask for a translation into).

Despite that, "I have discovered the secret of the Latin alphabet and the alphabet for all human beings in general" summed up in what looks like 10 A5 pages seems highly doubtful. It doesn't look like you've looked at the history of the Latin alphabet, and the presentation of the Græco-Annamese, by Ian James, suggests you're tied heavily to Vietnamese rather than looking at the Latin alphabet more broadly.
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by qwed117 »

sangi39 wrote: 12 Sep 2019 20:09
thevietguy wrote: 12 Sep 2019 19:16 I have discovered the secret of the Latin alphabet and the alphabet for all human beings in general. This is not a lie or a hoax. Please experiment it for yourself. I invite all the human brothers and sisters to take a look [link removed by admin] . Sincerly yours, DO KS .
Would you care to provide an English translation? I'd imagine that the majority of users here don't speak much in the way of Vietnamese (I know, of course, that a fair chunk of the board don't speak English natively, but the vast majority of them seem to be proficient in it enough that it's a good default language to ask for a translation into).

Despite that, "I have discovered the secret of the Latin alphabet and the alphabet for all human beings in general" summed up in what looks like 10 A5 pages seems highly doubtful. It doesn't look like you've looked at the history of the Latin alphabet, and the presentation of the Græco-Annamese, by Ian James, suggests you're tied heavily to Vietnamese rather than looking at the Latin alphabet more broadly.
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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Translating it into English is also what I am thinking about and is trying to work on too. Please experiment on the consonant alphabet first for it does not require having to look up Vietnamese. God bless everyone.
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by sangi39 »

thevietguy wrote: 12 Sep 2019 20:22 Translating it into English is also what I am thinking about and is trying to work on too. Please experiment on the consonant alphabet first for it does not require having to look up Vietnamese. God bless everyone.
Experiment... in what manner?

As far as I know, most of what we know about the history of the Latin alphabet comes down to a mixture of function, medium, tool, language structure, style, etc.

Without knowing what experiments you've done and how you've come to your conclusions, and what other data you've looked at, I can't comment on what you actually have to say.
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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First let take a look at the consonant alphabet and ask a question, for example, why t combine with h becomes th ? or why n combine with g becomes ng ? what knowledges in linguistics science can help us here ? or can we use articulatory phonetics here ?
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by sangi39 »

thevietguy wrote: 12 Sep 2019 22:12 First let take a look at the consonant alphabet and ask a question, for example, why t combine with h becomes th ? or why n combine with g becomes ng ? what knowledges in linguistics science can help us here ? or can we use articulatory phonetics here ?
The use of <th> for the dental fricative /θ/ has a somewhat complex history. From what I can remember, it's a combination of cultural influence, the limitations of technology, and differences between the sounds of French and Latin.

a) Old English tended to use <þ> (or its runic equivalent) for /θ/

b) The French spoken by the incoming Normans, and later varieties of French, didn't have this phoneme, but did make use of <th> in words of Greek origin, following the convention in Latin of representing the Ancient Greek aspirated stops /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ as <ph th ch> (which seems reasonable, given that /p/ followed by and /h/ does sound a fair bit like /pʰ/, for example). By the time of late Koine Greek and Byzantine Greek, these had shifted to /f θ x/, so the "learned" pronunciation of these words in French probably involved the fricative sounds.

c) The printing press was largely imported from Europe, including the typesets, and I think the moulds for making them. Early on this would have meant doing the best early printers could have done using what was available, but also using existing standards. This meant that <þ> (as well as other letters like <ð>, <ȝ>, and <ƿ>) began to fall out of use in favour of digraphs which used letter-blocks within the existing sets. This is also why "ye olde shoppe" involves a <y>, which is actually an attempt as printing a rough equivalent to <þ>, such that the <y> there was actually pronounced as if it were <þ> (the same goes from <z> in certain instances, e.g. "Menzies", where the <z> is an attempt at printing <ȝ>, representing /j/, formally a /g/, in that particular word, hence why Menzies Campbell pronounces his name /ˈmɪŋɪs/ (the /j/ dropping out before the high front vowel).

So, basically <th> was chosen because at some point Latin speakers used it to represent a sound in Greek, i.e. /tʰ/, a sound which eventually become /θ/, which made it appropriate for Norman French speakers to use in representing the Old English sound/θ/, since they were now using that particular digraph to represent that sound in another language anyway (Greek). This eventually replaced the native Old English <þ> thanks to a combination of cultural influence (the elites weren't using it as much), and technological limitations (it wasn't easy to get a hold of for printing, and probably more expensive).



As for why <ng> represents /ŋ/? Well, it also represents /ŋg/ and English just doesn't distinguish between the two, at least in writing, and /ŋg/ is basically "tonguey nasal" (/n/ <n> being a decent choice), followed by /g/ <g>. Where /ŋ/ stands alone, it just makes sense to represent it the same way (and thanks to the joys of English dialects, it's not entirely clear whether a word should have /ŋ/ or /ŋg/ anyway in some instances, so distinguishing between the two becomes confusing in a different way).
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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Doesn't Norman French have /θ/, represented as <d>?
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by sangi39 »

qwed117 wrote: 13 Sep 2019 00:48 Doesn't Norman French have /θ/, represented as <d>?
Now that's a question. I know Old French did, and it was sometimes written as <d>, <dh>, or <th>, but I was under the impression it had dropped out by the time of the Norman Conquest. Then again, I don't know whether it held on longer in Old Norman or not. Either way, good catch! [:)]
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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sangi39 wrote: 13 Sep 2019 00:57
qwed117 wrote: 13 Sep 2019 00:48 Doesn't Norman French have /θ/, represented as <d>?
Now that's a question. I know Old French did, and it was sometimes written as <d>, <dh>, or <th>, but I was under the impression it had dropped out by the time of the Norman Conquest. Then again, I don't know whether it held on longer in Old Norman or not. Either way, good catch! [:)]
Well, I know at least one loan word survived with /θ/, but all the sources I can find say that it used <d> until the development of an independent <th>: <feid>, modern day faith (or ffydd if you're into that)
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by Zekoslav »

This Wiktionary page has some relevant details about Old French dental fricatives. Having read some Early Old French texts, I can affirm that [θ] was usually written as <d> since it was, as Wiktionary says, an allophone of /ð/, which was written as <d> (/d/ was also written as <d> and for whatever reason scribes didn't bother trying to distinguish them). Since the orthography was partially influenced by that of Latin, [θ] appearing in third person singular endings, which derives from Latin /t/, could be written as <t>, unless the word's Latin etymon was no longer recognisable: for example, [aθ] 'have-3.sg.pres' is usually written as <ad> and not <at> since it doesn't resemble Latin <habet> anymore.
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by sangi39 »

Zekoslav wrote: 13 Sep 2019 12:34 This Wiktionary page has some relevant details about Old French dental fricatives. Having read some Early Old French texts, I can affirm that [θ] was usually written as <d> since it was, as Wiktionary says, an allophone of /ð/, which was written as <d> (/d/ was also written as <d> and for whatever reason scribes didn't bother trying to distinguish them). Since the orthography was partially influenced by that of Latin, [θ] appearing in third person singular endings, which derives from Latin /t/, could be written as <t>, unless the word's Latin etymon was no longer recognisable: for example, [aθ] 'have-3.sg.pres' is usually written as <ad> and not <at> since it doesn't resemble Latin <habet> anymore.
I think this seems to be one of the major issues with dealing with this sort of time period, especially in French and English. [ð]~[θ] Appear to have dropped out of French by around the time of the Norman invasion of English (the suggestion that "faith" might actually be "fay"+"-th" doesn't seem wholly unreasonably, at least at the surface level".

Could it be that where <th> was used in Greek loans in Old French or Norman French, it was more an etymological/learned spelling, and that due to the phonology of Old English <th> won out over the more "French" <d> at the time of the Norman Conquest?

It also seems the French influence was rather gradual, so it could also be that "faith" was indeed borrowed into English with the dental fricative, but like a century later the sound was non-existent.
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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Zekoslav wrote: 13 Sep 2019 12:34Since the orthography was partially influenced by that of Latin, [θ] appearing in third person singular endings, which derives from Latin /t/, could be written as <t>, unless the word's Latin etymon was no longer recognisable: for example, [aθ] 'have-3.sg.pres' is usually written as <ad> and not <at> since it doesn't resemble Latin <habet> anymore.
I thought that it was thought that 3rd person singular -t was /t/, based off its survival with inverted 3rd person pronouns (aimet il > modern aime-t-il [ɛmtil])? And then it dropped from verbal conjugation without going through a [θ] stage. But maybe I'm wrong about that, since then you'd need to explain why the descendant of habet is spelled "ad" so often.

By the way, the spelling "at" is occasionally attested. From folio 11v of the Oxford manuscript of the Song of Roland (see the second line from the bottom):
  • tenez mespee meillur nenat nuls hom.
    normalized: tenez m'espée, meillur n'en at nuls hom.
    'Hold my sword, for no man has a better one.'
Although in this case it's possible that the monk just had no idea how to interpret "n'en ad" in terms of separate words. It is true that this manuscript only has "at" in "n'en at" (4 attestations) vs. most attestations of the verb as "ad" (over 300 attestations).

Sangi39 also failed to mention that <t> is another attested spelling for unvoiced final /ð/ [θ], seen in descendants of Latin /d/, e.g. mercēdem > mercit [mertsiθ] (attested in the Oxford manuscript).
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by Zekoslav »

Ser wrote: 15 Sep 2019 03:20
Zekoslav wrote: 13 Sep 2019 12:34Since the orthography was partially influenced by that of Latin, [θ] appearing in third person singular endings, which derives from Latin /t/, could be written as <t>, unless the word's Latin etymon was no longer recognisable: for example, [aθ] 'have-3.sg.pres' is usually written as <ad> and not <at> since it doesn't resemble Latin <habet> anymore.
I thought that it was thought that 3rd person singular -t was /t/, based off its survival with inverted 3rd person pronouns (aimet il > modern aime-t-il [ɛmtil])? And then it dropped from verbal conjugation without going through a [θ] stage. But maybe I'm wrong about that, since then you'd need to explain why the descendant of habet is spelled "ad" so often.

By the way, the spelling "at" is occasionally attested. From folio 11v of the Oxford manuscript of the Song of Roland (see the second line from the bottom):
  • tenez mespee meillur nenat nuls hom.
    normalized: tenez m'espée, meillur n'en at nuls hom.
    'Hold my sword, for no man has a better one.'
Although in this case it's possible that the monk just had no idea how to interpret "n'en ad" in terms of separate words. It is true that this manuscript only has "at" in "n'en at" (4 attestations) vs. most attestations of the verb as "ad" (over 300 attestations).

Sangi39 also failed to mention that <t> is another attested spelling for unvoiced final /ð/ [θ], seen in descendants of Latin /d/, e.g. mercēdem > mercit [mertsiθ] (attested in the Oxford manuscript).
The story of 3rd person singular ending is rather complex. In short, it's presence in aime - aime-t-il /ɛm/ - /ɛmtil/ is analogical, by analogy to vient - vient-il /vjɛ̃/ - /vjɛ̃til/. Around the year 1100 final <t> disappears if it was preceded by a vowel and is preserved if it was preceded by a consonant in the period immediately following the Gallo-Romance apocope. Since the disappearing final <t> is occasionally spelled <d> it is assumed it represented [θ], and that the non-disappearing final <t> represented [t].

This can lead to some weird situations like final <t> disappearing in <fut> but not in <dut>... the first derives from Latin *fut and was and is preceded by a vowel, the second derives from Latin dēbuit and although it is preceded by a vowel in mature Old French, it was preceded by a consonant (most likely [w]) in early Old French. So during the 12th century one can find works which consistently have <fu> but <dut>, and in the 13th century and later final <t> is slowly reintroduced to give <fut> once again...
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by sangi39 »

thevietguy wrote: 12 Sep 2019 22:12 First let take a look at the consonant alphabet and ask a question, for example, why t combine with h becomes th ? or why n combine with g becomes ng ? what knowledges in linguistics science can help us here ? or can we use articulatory phonetics here ?
Suspecting all of the above goes some way to explain why <th> came to be used /θ/ in English and languages that also have /θ/ whose written forms were heavily influenced by English.

I'm rather hoping for a reply back, otherwise this thread has very quickly become a discussion of the finer points of Old French phonology and orthography instead of the secrets of the alphabet [:P]
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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oh btw, I asked a Vietnamese friend about the website, and he said it looks like a crackpot
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

Post by eldin raigmore »

[link removed by admin] is every bit as coherent and convincing as the time-cube guy. If anyone remembers that.
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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I'd prefer to hear more from thevietguy, especially regarding this claim:

"In Nature there are 19 consonants and more than 50 vowels"

...made over on Quora (where it would seem they've been posting a link to their site a lot since last Friday).
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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sangi39 wrote: 17 Sep 2019 19:11 I'd prefer to hear more from thevietguy, especially regarding this claim:

"In Nature there are 19 consonants and more than 50 vowels"

...made over on Quora (where it would seem they've been posting a link to their site a lot since last Friday).
Arabic has 28 consonants in my. Biblical Hebrew had at least 22, depending on what reconstruction you're using. So apparently, Semitic languages are not "in nature".
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Re: The alphabet has a secret and has been found

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Shemtov wrote: 18 Sep 2019 21:59
sangi39 wrote: 17 Sep 2019 19:11 I'd prefer to hear more from thevietguy, especially regarding this claim:

"In Nature there are 19 consonants and more than 50 vowels"

...made over on Quora (where it would seem they've been posting a link to their site a lot since last Friday).
Arabic has 28 consonants in my. Biblical Hebrew had at least 22, depending on what reconstruction you're using. So apparently, Semitic languages are not "in nature".
That's not to mention languages like !Xoo or Ubykh, hence the question. 50 vowels, I think, is pushing the limits on what a language might have in its inventory (I've seen it argued that some dialects of English, assuming diphthongs and triphthongs are counted as well, as upwards of 40 vowels), but 19 consonants seems downright tiny.
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