Friday words #268

By | May 14, 2021

My grandson is learning to read. After he’d learned the basic sounds for the letters, he advanced to reading combinations like C-A-T and H-O-P, F-R-E-D and K-R-I-S, and to his delight, F-A-R-T.

Our alphabet has 6 vowels and 20 consonants, and the premise is that the letters represent all the sounds we can make in English.[1] As you can tell, the words that the grandboy is learning consist of simple consonant + vowel combinations. (He has not yet made the leap into the “yeah, but …” stage of learning how our spelling system really works, haha.)

For those of us used to the Latin-based alphabet, the idea of the writing system representing all the sounds—the vowels and the consonants—seems natural, if not essential. As I recently learned, however, there are other approaches to an alphabet-like writing system. One of these is called an abjad: a phonetically based writing system that represents consonants but not vowels.

Two abjads are those for Arabic and Hebrew. In those systems, words are written as clusters of consonants, and the vowels are either implied or might be indicated in some secondary way, such as with diacriticals. The word abjad comes from the names in Arabic of the first few letters in the set, which is to say, the word abjad is formed in the same way as the word alphabet, whose name is based on the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. (As Aaron Ralby points out, it’s technically incorrect to refer an abjad as an alphabet.)

I learned the term abjad from an article in the Guardian (UK) by the linguist Lynne Murphy. She was writing about the name Abrdn, which was a recent rebranding by the company Standard Life Aberdeen. The new name got a lot of commentary, including that the name could be misread. But Murphy observed that we can often read and pronounce words where the vowels have been left out, everything from Hrvy and Tumblr to Ltd and FTSE.

I can see where in some cases, writing English using an abjad instead of our alphabet could result in misreadings. But hey, we can misread English just fine using our existing alphabet already, right?

Update: My son pointed me to information about the Adlam script, which is named for the first four characters of that particular writing system. (This was covered in a cool video about the many scripts that have been invented for West African languages.)

Ok, origins. Today’s investigation was inspired by a meeting I was in where people were telling jokes. This one came up:

Did you know that in the Canary Islands there are no canaries? Same with the Virgin Islands. There are no canaries there either.

This is an interesting joke in how it plays with listener expectations/conversational implicature. But it also made me wonder where the word virgin came from.

I thought it probably came from Latin, and this is correct. In fact, it’s a pretty direct line: in Norman French it was virgine, which came from Latin virginem, a grammatical variant of the word virgo. Which meant the same thing as in English today.

So that part wasn’t terribly interesting. I looked a little further into the Latin etymology. It’s not certain, but it looks like the Latin virgo comes from a word virga that means “young shoot.”  The word virga in turn goes back to a root that refers to a branch or rod, with related words for “wisp” and “twig.” According to Douglas Harper, the Greeks had a word talis for an unmarried girl that is cognate with the Latin word talea, also meaning “rod, stick,” which we see in tally. The common senses seem to be around something that’s young and growing. I suppose this is not a very surprising etymology, though it is still an interesting one.

While I was investigating, I read about the origins of the name of Virginia, the state, and the Virgin Islands. It’s possible that Virginia was named for Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen,” but it might also have been an adaptation of an indigenous word. The origin of the name Virgin Islands surprised me a little; the set of islands was named by Columbus for Santa Úrsula y las Once Mil Vírgenes (“Saint Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins”). This alludes to a legend about a martyr who has a church in her honor in Cologne, and who might have had 11,000 traveling companions, or 11, or none. The legend is not endorsed now by ecclesiastical authorities, but apparently it was inspiring enough to Columbus that he named landmarks for it.

nd tht’s t fr tdy

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[1] The fact that linguists invented the International Phonetic Alphabet suggests that our alphabet is an imperfect tool for capturing all the sounds in our language. [^]