Random Chit Chat

I learned in college (I'm a Social Science, not Arts, English graduate*) that basic form of language is speaking. Writing is just a tool for scripting and recording language and it is secondary to speaking. Communication, the main and first purpose of language and what it is originally existed for, all started with speaking. I was taught that sign language is not a full fledged real language.

This could be just a view we learned at college, tho. So I wouldn't take it as absolute. Nothing is really absolute except our own words and beliefs to ourselves, I always thought.

* English is taught where I live as part of Social Science not Arts as I believe it is in the West and other English as mother tongue speaking countries. That's why it covers almost everything English, including literature (I hated that), translation, phonology, psycho-linguistics, etc. I loved that last one as it had applied science in it. We used to call it just psycho :)
 
It would seem that I did not express this idea very well. What I was trying to say was that for me, speech is secondary to written language. Speech, for me, effectively consists of "reading" a script which was prepared beforehand. It has never felt even remotely natural, and my preference is to communicate through writing or sign. As my level of anxiety or overstimulation increases, verbalization becomes increasingly difficult. As a result of this, I hover dangerously close to full-fledged selective mutism.

From what I have gathered, this is unusual, but my thoughts naturally occur as wordless concepts independent of language. Where normal people seem to have a first-person "internal monologue," I instead have an outwardly-directed monologue, which constantly attempts to put my thoughts into words specifically so I can communicate them to other people (often with a specific target in mind.) This is on a secondary level, independent of the initial thought. I will often spend long periods of time compulsively ruminating on how to best phrase a single idea. Rather than "verbal" words, this process is much closer to written English. It is from this that the aforementioned "script" originates.
 
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You view spoken language as the primary form, with writing being a derivative thereof? My viewpoint has always been the opposite— that speech is an expression of written language.

I disagree, speech came first before written. That had been documented.
 
I learned in college (I'm a Social Science, not Arts, English graduate*) that basic form of language is speaking. Writing is just a tool for scripting and recording language and it is secondary to speaking. Communication, the main and first purpose of language and what it is originally existed for, all started with speaking. I was taught that sign language is not a full fledged real language.

This could be just a view we learned at college, tho. So I wouldn't take it as absolute. Nothing is really absolute except our own words and beliefs to ourselves, I always thought.

* English is taught where I live as part of Social Science not Arts as I believe it is in the West and other English as mother tongue speaking countries. That's why it covers almost everything English, including literature (I hated that), translation, phonology, psycho-linguistics, etc. I loved that last one as it had applied science in it. We used to call it just psycho :)

This is true of interpersonal communication but the opposite is true for graphic communication.
 
Yes, the view I studied was concerning the dawn of language, how it all originally started and came to be. Looks like it believes (that view) that language started and emerged spoken. Again, it's just a view, nothing absolute.
 
Smart_Guy: I fully believe you; there is no need for examples. I had reached that conclusion off a singular observation, without any other basis. High specificity would also be a suitable explanation. There is also the fact that Arabic is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world, thus making it a relatively high priority for translator development.

By the way, apart from puns, do you enjoy other forms of wordplay? While I generally dislike puns, I have developed a system of creating needlessly complex euphemistic phrases as a means to entertain myself. For example, tonight, after hearing my father rant about Moslems, I created the euphemism The Unified Forces of Islam as a means to describe the typically-narrow US conservative view of the religion.



I know that an em represents a standard unit of length in the context of typography, but I can't remember what it's based upon.

After googling, it seems to be based upon the width of the character M. Similarly, the en is based upon the width of N. I have no idea how I never realized this.

I have found it easier to memorize the unicode for specific characters which I often use. Bringing up a character map, locating the desired character, then pasting it over takes significantly more time.

Partly correct. An em quad in typography is a square of the size of the type; in other words if the type is 16 point then the em is 16 point in width as well there is also an en quad that is 1/2 the width. Because there is also an en quad, to avoid confusion, typographers first began calling them a nutt quad and an em quad so they didn't sound so much alike. Then they began calling them a nutt quad and a mut quad which led to more confusion.
Interestingly, in a type case the em quad, since it's a perfect square has a little indentation along one Edge so that it can be placed in an orientation that is considered right side up even though there's not actually a right side up being a square.

The other spaces are based on the em quad. The 2 em and 3 em quads are 2 and 3 times the width if the em quad respectively and the 3, 4 and 5em spaces are 1/3 ,1/4 and 1/5 the width of the em quad respectively.

I say you are partly correct only because in some fonts the capital m is not a square, it can be narrower or wider than a square.

---------- Post added at 10:58 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:53 AM ----------

Yes, the view I studied was concerning the dawn of language, how it all originally started and came to be. Looks like it believes (that view) that language started and emerged spoken. Again, it's just a view, nothing absolute.

I can't believe that anyone studying language would believe that people began writing before they began speaking. It seems like people would make a noise and point at thing and then that same noise was used for that thing even when they were not pointing at it, creating a word for an object. As time went on there were more words describing more objects when it became necessary to pass it down to people that you would never see or be able to speak to, writing became necessary.
 
On a side note, when hand setting type the lead type is placed into a steel frame called a stick and is set in upside down and backwards(mirrored) so the resulting imprint on paper is right-reading. As a result you get pretty good at reading mirrored upside down type and you can read it as fast if you can read normal type and I can also hand write the same way.
DaVinci used to write one sentence forward and the sentence below it from right to left writing the words backwards to save time, but his writing was all right-reading when completed.
 
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