Friday, January 2, 2015

Sun, Son, Sin, ...E

A common theme of this blog recently has been language and how the vowels in words are interchangeable. For example, my name, Neil, can be spelt Neal, it sounds identical to the word kneel, people often spell it as Niel. It's all the same really. The important parts are the consonants N and L - as long as we know there's a vowel between them we can get by okay.

For example, I've recently been thinking about the words sun and son. The link between Jesus being the Son of God and early Christians/Pagans worshipping the Sun is commonly observed. I was wondering if the word sin could likewise be linked in with these two. Jesus, of course, was the embodiment of our sins. This would bring to mind words like sign and singe and all sorts, and we could go on forever.

Incidentally, there was a Semitic moon god called Sin. So we have Sun and Sin (Moon).

A lot of early written languages only had symbols for the consonants and didn't notate the vowel sounds. I've been wondering how legible the English language would be if this was the case. As an experiment I'm going to try this out. I'll remove four of our five vowels and leave just one to stand as a marker for where a vowel sound should be.

E thenk E'll remeve E.

The ferst lene ef thes bleg weeld new reed;

E cemmen theme ef thes bleg recently hes been lengeege end hew the vewels en werds ere enterchengeeble.

E bet wecky, bet net cempletely ellegeble. E freer ese ef the censenents weeld meybe meke thengs e lettle better. Fer exemple, 'weeld' weeld be better as wed.

E'm seyeng thes, bet ebveeesly E knew whet E'm tryeng te wrete, te enyene reedeng thes et, ne deebt, jest leeks mentel :p

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