Friday, April 15, 2005
Arabic
Someone was telling me that in Arabic the period, or “full stop”, is not used so texts flow on an on with no break, and he mentioned that the “Book of Certitude”, which I have read, is connected from beginning to end with “ands”, which led me to speculate that maybe it is possible to see all the ideas related to a certain point or argument as a continuous whole, and I wondered whether the same thing might somehow work in English, because we do link sentences and ideas together in different ways, using, for example a semicolon (though they don’t use those in Arabic, or commas either for that matter, and probably not parentheses), or words like “and”, “or”, “because”, and “which”, and then I thought I’d like to try it, and have been composing in my mind this sentence, which if it seems to flow to you might indicate that I might be good at Arabic, and that the next step would be to learn to write from right to left, which I know you can do on the computer somehow, and then leave out certain vowels; cbrA rprp gntrw eb tsmla dlw I nht dnA
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2 comments:
.tou vl ot slwv hchw dcd ouy wh rdnw em dm ti dna flsym ti yrt ot hd I hcm os cbrA ni gntrw hslgnE ry dvl I
one thing that feels odd about commenting on a blog is that it is a little like interrupting a person who is talking to a large group of people. one expects to be acknowledged. if one is NOT, one feels a little rejected and lonely and if one IS, then the flow of the narrative is adversely affected and the crowd must listen to the individual responses, which is made even more difficult in the case of a blog in that one would have to go back and read the comments after one had already heard the answer if one wanted to become informed of the context of the response.
anyhow forgive my reflection out loud on my novice participation in this new form of communication.
tc
Dear tc,
I think you would be good at Arabic too.
I'm not sure of how the vowels work in Arabic, but in Persian, there is an A (aah), and U (oo) and an I (ee). Other vowels sounds don't have letters. The complication is when a vowel begins a word, and there are special ways to do that, which I'm not sure if I remember correctly.
About responses to comments, it was my intention to comment back, like this, but I was a bit busy last week, and didn't get to it.
I also sometimes think that I'd like to make an entry about something in the comments, but, again, have not done that more than once or twice.
I read somewhere that blogs are like living things that you have to nurture, and I'm beginning to see that it is the case. It's great that blogs talk back to you, though, they're better than plants in that sense.
xox
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