Back in Moscow
This is just a three sentence placeholder to notify those who care that I'm back in Moscow and it feels good. According to my visa, I have less than 16 hours before I *must* be out of Russia, so I've been working hard on getting that ticket down to Turkey. When I get a chance I will wax poetically on what it's like to spend an entire month in Russia, the largest country in the world.
Update: I made it and am now in Antalya, on the Mediterranean Coast of Turkey. It was difficult going and I had to grease some cop palms to get here, but my exile in Russia has ended. Hopefully my updates will continue but Turkey != Russia and this damned Turkish keyboard is completely crazy.
posted by rod at 2:33 PM
5 Comments:
Wow, I can't believe you'd already been in Russia for a whole month. Time flies when you've having fun reading about it.
I like your computer programming notation. Nerd!
I have several good stories in me but it might take some time getting them onlıne because this Turkish keyboard has five or six characters in the wrong place (partıcularly the "i", extremely aggravating). It ıs so beautiful here -- I feel that I have left hell and arrived in heaven!
Hi Rod
I've been reading this book called Guns, Germs, and Steel – an absolutely riveting history of man following his first cultivation of plants and animals around 10,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent (Modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq). Anyway they talked about how speakers of the Semitic language (around Syria and Sinai) came up with the first true alphabet around 1700 BC – and this was traced back to a set of 24 characters representing only consonants in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it was well thought out including the order of the letters and making it easy to remember.
Some claim that this was the only independently created alphabet (as opposed to some languages whose writing systems were based on a syllabary) and all other alphabets were derived directly or indirectly from this one. As the alphabet was adapted to other languages letters were added and dropped … or they just reassigned a letter which originally represented a sound their language didn’t have to a different sound unique to the adapted language ... or they added symbols to existing letters like the German umlaut or the Spanish tilda. So while the Turkish and English alphabets look somewhat alike I’m guessing we co-opted different letters to serve our own languages. I’m led to believe the English added the letters j, u, and w. Are these among the letters in the “wrong” place?
Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’ve been rejunivinated by the change in scenery. Don’t forget to get some photos (or better yet video) of a whirling dervish.
Ciao
Dave
These are Turkish keyboards so I'm not exactly sure if that is related to the origins of the alphabet. Thanks Dave for the eggheaded commentary, you've been hanging out with annoying academics too long.
The problem is that the keyboard ıs only loosely based on the QWERTY format. There is this letter -- ı (not sure it will show up, but it looks like an i without the dot) where the actual i should be. So now İ catch myself using words that don't have i's so that I don't stumble so much.
It ant workng.
Post a Comment
<< Home