Any flaws in this Egyptian are my own errors. I am not an Egyptologist, just a big fan of both Egypt and languages. Besides, the point is mostly to be funny, not teach you Egyptian grammar. (And yes, ꜥnn is a valid imperative, but it’s funnier this way.) Medjay. What’s this then? rmṯw wpj=tj m rn … Read more
This is the fifth in a series of posts. The story so far: In the beginning … In the end … Entropy Goodness This is a slightly difficult post for a technical reason. In Egyptian thought, mentioning someone or something, saying or writing their name, is a way of giving them life. And I’m gonna … Read more
This is the fourth in a series. The story so far: In the beginning … In the end … Entropy Before we talk about the bad guys, let’s talk a bit about the force they oppose: ma’at1. Ma’at An old catchphrase attributed to Superman is “truth, justice, and the American way.” Well, ma’at can be … Read more
This is the third post in a series. The story so far: In the beginning … In the end … Thermodynamics was, for me, one of the most obnoxious parts of the physics curriculum. I hated it. Partly because it’s mathematically very different from a lot of other physics (and no, I don’t want to … Read more
This is the second (but not the last, despite the name) post in a planned series in which I will discuss Ancient Egyptian cosmology and my own musings about the nature of reality, good and evil, and other big questions. For the story so far: “In the beginning …“ Okay, so the myths work for … Read more
This post is the first (appropriately) in a planned series in which I will discuss Ancient Egyptian cosmology and my own musings about the nature of reality, good and evil, and other big questions. Ancient Egyptian notions of the creation of the cosmos are surprisingly physics-friendly, especially that of the city of Khemenu (aka Hermopolis), … Read more
Korean was originally written using Chinese characters, much like Japanese was, because both Korea and Japan looked at China as the big refined center of culture and civilization in the world. But Chinese is a terrible script for Korean, arguably worse than it is for Japanese, because Korean loves to form words with tons of prefixes … Read more
Okay. “Gangnam” was easy: two syllables. Why is “Style” written as three syllables? There’s two linguistic reasons for this: clusters, and diphthongs. Bear with me. Clusters I told you that Korean doesn’t like consonant clusters in syllables. One at the beginning and one at the end at most. So the “ST” at the beginning of … Read more
All right. In the previous post we talked about how syllable blocks fit together in Hangul. Now we’re ready to break down the song’s title into its individual jamo. Remember that a jamo is a Korean “letter”, and that in Hangul you pack the jamo into blocks of two or three symbols to make syllables. “gang” Let’s … Read more
My friends know I love languages and linguistics. Today I wanted to share with you one of the most amazingly elegant and beautiful writing systems in the world: Hangul (also spelled hangeul in English, but properly spelled 한글 in the system itself), the system used for writing Korean. In order to approach this — and I hope … Read more