Fauxnetics - Fiji to France

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The world should be sketched out by engineers and scientists but shaded and coloured by artists and linguists.

Of course being one of the former means I get frustrated when I see a framework having being made up by creatives leaving my “square headed” brain to overheat. This is never more the case than when learning a language; the rules taught are never actual rules unless your mind can access that esoteric rationale that only polyglots have access to.

Being over-analytical I mentally try to explore those synapses linking all the obscure rules to somehow relieve my mind. Imagine that scene from A Beautiful Mind where the protagonist is madly mapping the positions of pigeons. (Here’s to hoping that my uni mates will someday, far in the future, give me their bic pens in recognition)

So for my first example we will begin with the V vs B debarcle of the Spanophones. To the Spanyard’s ear the two sounds are identical and they cannot detect even a hint of the difference yet they push on to have both in their alphabet. Causing much confusion during my first Spanish lesson. But to give Spanish it’s credit, its phonetics are at least inline with its spelling, with 25 phonemes vs 27 letters. Now bring in the Cyrillic alphabet. What letter makes a vvvv sound? The letter that looks like a B! Coincidence I think not. I think that it is clear that some dastardly Russian scribe infiltrated the Spanish courts to play havoc with their pronunciation.

Europe got its own back on Russia when the Germans popularised the Hamburger, knowing full well that without a H in the Cyrillic alphabet the Russians would struggle. But the cunning Russians had a plan, they would simply use the next letter in the alphabet, G, and the Gamborga was born. The Slavs didn’t like to keep things simple, so a capital ‘T’ lowercase partner is the curvy ‘m’, not to be confused with the ‘M’ whose lower case sidekick is just as angular.

The battle for confusing alphabets raged on with the invention of the typewriter, it was then decided that letters would be made to look entirely different to their handwritten form. Little G was replaced with a pair of spectacles on its side: g, whilst little A was given a little quiff to make it look hip in front of all the indefinite nouns: a.

In many countries where the colonial power brought or imposed written text the current place names (in the Latin alphabet) are basically phonetic, on occasion the hired linguist would munch a word or two by accident (causing some white rhinos to be left in the system) but typically they pretty accurately mapped stuff out. Here in Fiji, the British officers bored with the drudgery of day-to-day life, decided that to spice up their lives they would systematically mash up the transliteration. On a darts board they switched the numbers for letters. The linguist would then drink 5 pints of grog, select a sound he had heard, throw the dart at the board and represent the sound with the letter it landed on. So Cuvu is pronounced Duvu, Beqa is pronounced Benga, Kadavu is pronounced Candavu. When it was time for ‘n’ he clearly just missed the board entirely and decided to not bother writing it into the words at all. Actually it was a disagreement between the Catholics, Methodists and Lutherans about how to write the bible in Pacific languages but that is less amusing and therefore less true.

Such tom foolery in Pacific phonetics becomes relatively sane when one heads to the thin air of the Himalayan Plateau, where Tibetan monks decided that written language need not resemble the spoken language in anyway making a distinct divide between the literate and illiterate. To the point where if you want to read you have to learn a different way to say the written words with a different grammar. Is that just another language? And when I said ‘decided’ it was more that they decided not to change how to write as the spoken language evolved, perhaps a side effect of being completely at one with time and space.

In English there are 36 phonemes (sounds) and 26 letters, a shortfall that an engineer would fix by just adding the extra 18 glyphs but sadly instead the result is the vast array of pronunciation rules for the same letters. Many Latin based languages make up the extra phonemes with those weird accent thingies which make two similarly looking letters sound entirely different. A Hungarian invented the smilie long before it was popularised by the happy looking ü to accompany u, ú, ű. Whilst other countries dangle their accents around their alphabets like christmas tree decorations: ç, ž, ķ, å

A picture may paint a thousand words in Europe, but a word is made of a thousand pictures in China. Here 35 phonemes (x4 to include tones) are represented by a stonking 106,230 characters (7000 normal ones though). Each contain an average of 8 strokes. Mao decided enough was enough and mashed together the 26 Latin letters and made pinyin, to the great relief of those learning Chinese today. The Vietnamese, Turks and others also went down a similar route for varying political reasons.

Art and culture has illustrated the Picasso-esque twisted beauty that is language long before anyone had learnt to draw. But now in this modern age of technology the engineers have to build logical framework that supports all this abstract form. They even build computers to speak to other computers to help them formulate language because they simply cannot do it with human logic. They formalise as best they can, and it is cited as the 2^nd leading cause of depression amongst coders only surpassed by the relentless guilt of enormous wealth when really all they want is play Call of Duty in their bedrooms. Their efforts mean we can type in any language and the as a by-product following word…









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