flwyd: (fun characters)
In case you'd run out of weird facts about Mormons, here's one I didn't know: they invented Deseret, their own phonetic alphabet for English. The name Deseret comes from the word for "honeybee"[1] in the Book of Mormon and was the name of the proposed and de facto Mormon state that covers the present day locations of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City, and Grand Junction.

Anyway, here's an attempt at my name in Deseret. There's a good chance your browser won't display it properly[2], but the font is part of MacOS X's default set.
๐“๐‘‰๐ฏ๐‘‚๐ฌ๐‘‰ ๐๐ป๐ฌ๐‘Œ

See also the Shavian alphabet (named for George Bernard Shaw), with long/short and voiced/unvoiced pairs as translations of a single glyph. My Shavian name is
ยท๐‘‘๐‘ฎ๐‘ง๐‘๐‘น ยท๐‘•๐‘‘๐‘ด๐‘ฏ


[1] In Mormonism, honeybees are used as a model of a proper society. Lots of people busy as a bee, all in service of the central hive. Not knowing this association, I was excited about the prospect of a vibrant local honey industry when I visited the beehive state a few years ago. It turns out that the state is not covered in apiaries.

[2] To test your browser's display of most Indo-European scripts, try this page. Deseret and Shavian are not included, but non-Latin scripts are organized into alphabets with some phonetic hints.
flwyd: (fun characters)
If I ever wonder why I don't get around to reading my books, it's because my nights go something like this:

"I should finish my tea and then read a book in my hammock."
"Huh, iTunes has the wrong art for Depeche Mode - 101."
"Wikipedia's article 101 is about the year, not a disambiguation."
"Wow, that's a lot of random facts about the number 101."
"What the hell is a strobogrammatic prime? Wow, who creates a word for a property of a number which depends on both base and script?"
"Ooh, what do Devanagari digits look like?"
"Huh. I guess I can't infer that the line at the top implies the language is Hindi. Distinguishing it from Nepali is like distinguishing English from Spanish."
"But I might be able to infer Gujarati by the lack of a line."
"There's a special writing system for indigenous Canadian languages? That's cool, the rotation of the consonant indicates the vowel."
"I didn't realize these weren't technically alphabets. All those crazy curly-cue languages are abugidas."
"... and Arabic, Hebrew, and other vowel-free writing systems are abjads (or perhaps "bjds" if you're using an abjad)."
"OMG. The list of writing systems has a map of scripts. Typogeography! Goetypography! I might cream my pants if I was wearing any."
"In the obscurity department, a script used only by women. With graphemes chosen so they'd work well in embroidery."
"Tengwar characters have phonetic features embedded, unlike most alphabets where there's no indication that 'f' and 'v' are pronounced similarly. It can therefore be used to write more than just imaginary languages. If you want a badge of obscurity and utter linguistic geekery, you can write Esperanto in Tengwar."
"[livejournal.com profile] kakos should make a shirt of Jabberwocky in Lojban."
"Let's not get into MovementWriting, but somehow I doubt DanceWriting can adequately transcribe the way I dance."
"Well, at least I have an adequate LJ icon to indicate how I spent my evening."
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