I learned about the letter W in this order.
It’s my daily routine to check out the funnies on pop-politics. I get my dose at crooksandliars.com, a great website if you don’t want to watch television, but don’t mind highlights and watching incriminating videos. Today was no different and I saw an interesting post.
1. http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/10/13.html#a5351
That post led me to this video of a Australian spoof website called CNNN:
2. http ://www.abc.net.au/cnnnn/news/s971880.htm
I sent this link to my girlfriend. I was amazed (not really) that people can be such sheep! I wondered about the results of doing a nationwide poll where we ask people if they support invading random countries and see how much the polls differs between countries. I bet those numbers would be scary.
But then I thought that I was a hypocrit because I don’t know much about Kyrgyzstan myself. I knew it’s part of the Soviet Union (geographically after checking a map I realized that it was a bit more east then I imaged it) and other vague details which I’ve picked up in the Economist. Nothing to be proud of. So, I decided to check out Wikipedia!
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrgyzstan
I learned that “In 1924, an Arabic-based Kyrgyz alphabet was introduced, which was replaced by Latin script in 1928. In 1941 Cyrillic script was adopted”
Interesting! They changed their alphabet 3 times in 2 decades? Wow. But, I also don’t know much about Cyrillic! So I follow the link.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic
I learned that the credited inventors of Cyrillic were “two brothers from Thessaloniki, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. The glyphs in the Cyrillic alphabet are, however, mainly Byzantine Greek letters”. I refused to learn about Byzantine Greek letters and the brothers. (It’s easy to get lost in Wikipedia without self-control).
I decided, that if I am reading about Cyrillic then I should learn about my own alphabet, the Latin alphabet. I back-stepped to the Kyrgyzstan Wikipedia entry and clicked on:
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script
This had a very intersting start, but I was quickly distracted by one of the first sentences: “For a short time in Roman history, the three Claudian letters were added to the alphabet, but they were not widely received and were eventually removed.” Claudian Letters? Well, I know nothing about Claudian letters, so I find my way to:
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudian_letters
This was interesting. New letters. One specifically caught my attention. The half H. The article says that the half H was the same sound as the Greek Upsilon. Interesting. How does Upsilon sound like anyway? My school did not have any Greek Life (thank goodness), so I don’t know the sounds of many greek letters. I also have to admit my acient history teachings in junior high school was pretty shotty.
Anyway, the article says its “a vowel sound between U and I (y)”, and right before I begin to try and pronouce it it gives me an example: its the sound “in Latin words such as Ol*y*mpicus”. Ah! But I still want to know about Upsilon, so I go to:
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsilon
There I was quickly attracted to a link to the letter W. Currently a loaded letter, but still interesting in other ways none the less. I decided to read about it and it was quite intersting. The letter was invented “by Anglo-Saxon writers, and was originally a doubled V”. But i’ll let you read about dubya on your own.
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W