Diagnosed psychopaths

In my (fictitious) sister's company, all management went to a psycho-therapy training. Part of the training was a so called ppt test, which unfortunately showed that all managers without exception had psychopathic tendencies. They were therefore all dismissed and sent for urgent treatment.

The company could of course not work without management, so the shareholder's board were in a hurry to employ new managers. To speed up the process, they borrowed the ppt test to quickly identify candidates with the kind of psychological profile they considered desirable.

The Final Language

All the different languages we have in the world today are the evolutionary result of people trying to communicate as efficiently as possible with different starting points. As time goes on, people will select more and more efficient features in their languages. Of course one feature that is efficient in one language may not be efficient in another. For example, Chinese has much fewer possible syllables than English, so it is efficient to add tones to make clearer distinctions between syllables. As English has more syllables, it does not need tones.

Languages will drift around, picking up and dropping features that are efficient for different purposes: clarity, speed, variety. But sooner or later, all languages will reach the ultimate stage, where they have turned into the most efficient language possible. I call this ultimate language Magnusianian Languagistically Perfectissimotasticanianish.

You do not believe such a language will ever appear?

I challenge you. Just wait 20 000 years and see, what the world will come up with.

The Joy of Getting Well

Few things can give you such pleasure as a really annoying illness. It does not matter if it is life threatening or just a cold. The only point is that it shall be annoying. It shall cause you such grief that you can think of nothing else for one or a few days. Pain, fatigue or a runny nose. It is impossible to ignore.

Then you get well. And suddenly the world looks bright again.

If you never had been ill in the first place, it might never have looked bright. The end of your illness is what the world waited for to start looking bright.

From Hanzi to kana to konfusion

Today's language lesson comes from Asia, a continent I like as much as I like all the other continents.

The three characters you see in the column to the left above are Chinese characters - hànzì in Chinese. In Japanese they are called "kanji". The first character, 己, is today pronounced "jǐ". However, a thousand years ago or so, it was probably pronounced more like "ki" or "ke".

The second character, 止, is today pronounced "zhǐ", but back then, it was probably more of "te". The bottom character, 毛, is today pronounced "máo" - yes, like chairman 毛 of the Chinese communist party. A thousand years ago, however, he would probably be called chairman "Maw" or something like that.

That was the first column.

The Japanese, who did not have any writing system themselves 1500 years ago, decided to use the Chinese characters. They took 己 and decided to pronounce it "ko" - almost like the Chinese. However, they decided to simplify 己, and instead wrote コ. Or こ. Likewise they made two different versions of 止: ト and と to write "to". And chairman 毛 was used to write "mo" in the simplified shapes of モ and も. The variants you find in the second column are called "katakana" and the variants you find in the third column are called "hiragana".

Now, you probably guessed what the fourth column is. Yes, it is exactly the same three characters again! It is the hiragana variant written in a font inspired by the 12th century poet and calligrapher Fujiwara no Teika (藤原定家).

The font's name is Kazuraki (かづらき). If you also want to be able to write Japanese in a way so people will not be able to read it, you can buy it from Adobe.

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The above and many other ancient Chinese pronunciations can be found at Rinet. A lot of what we know about ancient Chinese pronunciation comes from the works of Karlgren.