En Beğenilen David Sacks Gönderileri
En Beğenilen David Sacks kitaplarını, en beğenilen David Sacks sözleri ve alıntılarını, en beğenilen David Sacks yazarlarını, en beğenilen David Sacks yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.Kindred in sound and in lineage: the Hebrew letter qof and the Arabic qaf . While not similar in shape, they both derive from the ancient Phoenician Q letter. Both these modern Semitic Q letters are distinct from the K letters of their respective alphabets, as send ing the tongue to a different part of the roof of the mouth. In Arabic, for example, qalb means “heart” while kalb , pronounced slightly differently, means “dog.”
Originally the keyboard was designed to slow the typist down. Letter-wise, our familiar keyboard is basically unchanged from the earliest specimens of the 1870s, exemplified in the 1874 Remington manual typewriter, the first commercially successful one. This keyboard deliberately forces the typist’s fingers to stretch to find the likely letter combinations of English. The purpose in 1874 was to help prevent jamming.
The Q key is safely distant from the key of Q’s constant companion—the letter U. In English, we almost never write Q without writing U next to it; thus, Q is a left-hand key while U is a right-hand one. And although technology has since banished the jamming problem, the keyboard design is too deeply entrenched ever to change.
Choosing a handful of Phoenician letters whose consonantal sounds were unneeded for Greek, the Greeks reassigned these to be vowels. One letter affected was he, which now became the Greek E vowel.
At first, the Greek letter stood for both long and short E. Later the letter would be specialized as short E only, and another Greek letter, named eta, would be developed for long E. Eventually, the old short-E letter would receive the Greek name e psilon (or epsilon ), “naked E.”
The emergence of Romance languages invited the use of Z for the sounds “ts” or “tz,” common in Old French and Italian. Z spread modestly through medieval French-language spelling circles, both in France and in Norman England; in both countries, Z’s sound slurred eventually to our “z.” Z’s rival for this sound was the letter S—a rivalry still seen in such alternative spellings as British “analyse” and American “analyze.” By 1600, S was the clear winner and Z was rare in printed English.
Evidence shows that by the late Roman Empire (A.D. 300), Roman Y was being pronounced the same as Roman I. This overlap prompted a new name for Roman Y: i graeca (pronounced “ee grye-ca”), meaning “Greek I.” Today the name survives in the French and Spanish names for Y: i grec and i griega.
Surprisingly, the Roman numeral L, meaning 50, does not abbreviate a word (the Latin for 50 was quinquaginta ) but rather is thought to commemorate a primitive Roman symbol, a numeral, that became standardized as the letter L shape. The same holds true for the puzzling Roman V for 5, X for 10, and D for 500, none of which stands for a Latin word. However, M for 1,000 did abbreviate the Latin word mille, while C for 100 evidently began as an abstract symbol that over time became “attracted” to the appropriate letter shape for abbreviating the Latin centum.