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Joined: Jan 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
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Won't anyone correct my error is saying Hebrew is written in boustrophedon? I remember
seeing an article in Scientific American many years ago about Linear B or one of those
predecessors of Attic Greek, but can't remember correct name.
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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What I do is type the first line in normally
retcarahc sa enil dnoces eht epyt neht dna
left-arrow character left-arrow, etc.
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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
yes, the old dot matrix printer did that
retcarahc elohw a detelpmoc daeh tnirp eht ecnis
and move as it printed, it printed one line
enil txen eht dna tfel ot thgir
left to right.
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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 7,210
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2002
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ah, I'll have to try that. it makes sense! dluow taht tpircselppA elttil a nees evah I erehwemos turn a sentence backwards automatically. hmmm, I aedi yek worra ehT. ti dnif dluoc I fi ees dluohs works pretty well, though. 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Oct 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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you might also experiment with text as an image
egami rorrim ro esrevni na sah erawtfos egami tsom ecnis
feature.. each line has to be a text box, and i suspect that you couldn't post them here.
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Joined: Jan 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
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After writing from right to left, try pronouncing from left to right.
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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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freedomscientific.com, will let you download a trial version of JAWS, there assistive software for the blind.
it has a speach synthisizer built in, and will 'read'and articulte text... so you can have a professional reader read it!
the demo even lets you change the voice, from male to female, with several variations (Rocco, with an english accent is quite nice.) and yes, you can have US english (zee) or UK english (zed) (or sked ule vs shed ule for schedule)
the demo only works for a half hour at a time, it resets everytime you turn your computer on or off..
its is Windows driven, but they might have a Mac OS version too..
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Joined: Jun 2002
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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you can set your mac to read all text. you don't need any additional software. it's built in.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833 |
Back to the original post hi Bean! - I was surprised and dismayed, when I travelled in Australia, to discover that the apostrophe is nearly extinct there. Every time something was named for someone, there was no apostrophe to indicate the possessive; eg, Ayers Rock should really be Ayer's Rock, since it's named (by whities, anyway) for some feller whose last name was Ayer. (Similarly, his house in Adelaide is called Ayers House.)
Actually Ayers Rock *should* be Uluru - and increasingly, it is.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,819 |
Perhaps the apostrophe shortage down under is related to the famous period shortage about which Steve Martin wrote so eloquently in The New Yorker some while back...
Times Roman Font Announces Shortage of Periods
by Steve Martin
Representatives of the popular Times Roman font recently announced a shortage of periods and have offered substitutes - such as inverted commas, exclamation marks, and semicolons - until the crisis is overcome by people such as yourself, who through creative management of surplus punctuation can perhaps allay the constant demand for periods, whose heavy usage in the last ten years (not only in English but in virtually every language in the world) is creating a burden on writers everywhere, thus generating a litany of comments, among them: "What the hell am I supposed to do without my periods? How am I going to write? Isn't this a terrible disaster? Are they crazy? Won't this just lead to misuse of other, less interesting punctuation???"
"Most vulnerable are writers who work in short, choppy sentences," said a spokesperson for Times Roman, who continued, "We are trying to remedy the situation and have suggested alternatives, like umlauts, since we have plenty of umlauts - and, in fact, have more umlauts than we could possibly use in a lifetime! Don't forget, umlauts can really spice up a page with their delicate symmetry - resting often midway in a word, letters spilling on either side - and not only indicate the pronunciation of a word but also contribute to a writer's greater glory because they're fancy, not to mention that they even look like periods, indeed, are indistinguishable from periods, and will lead casual readers to believe that the article actually contains periods!"
Bobby Brainard, a writer living in an isolated cabin in Montana - who is, in fact, the only writer living in an isolated cabin in Montana who is not insane - is facing a dilemma typical of writers across the nation: "I have a sentence that has just got to be stopped; it is currently sixteen pages long and is edging out the front door and is now so lumbering I'm starting to worry that one period alone won't be enough - that I'll need at least two to finally kill it off - and if that doesn't work, I've ordered an elephant gun from Jessie's, and if I don't get some periods fast I'm going to have to use ..." The magazine International Hebrew has offered this emergency statement: "We currently have an oversupply of backwards periods and will be happy to send some to Mister Brainard or anyone else facing a crisis!" .period backwards the in slip you while moment a for way other the look to sentence the getting is trick only The
The general concern of writers is summed up by this brief telegram:
Period shortage mustn't continue stop
Stop-stoppage must come to full stop stop
We must resolve it and stop the stop-stoppage stop
Yours truly,
Tom Stoppard
Needless to say, there has been an increasing pressure on the ellipsis...
"I assure you," said the spokesperson, "I assure you the ellipsis is not - repeat, is not - just three periods strung together, and, although certain writers have plundered the ellipsis for its dots, such dots are deeply inelegant and ineffective when used to stop a sentence! An ellipsis point is too weak to stop a modern sentence, which would require at least two ellipsis points, leaving the third dot to stand alone pointlessly - and, indeed, two periods at the end of a sentence would look like a typo, comprende? And why is Times Roman so important? Why can't writers employ some of our other, lesser-used fonts, such as Goofy Deluxe, Namby Pamby Extra Narrow, or Gone Fishin'?"
In fact, there is movement toward alternate punctuation; consider the New Punctuation and Suicide Cult in Southern Texas, whose credo is "Why not try some new and different kinds of punctuation and then kill ourselves?" Notice how these knotty epigrams from Shakespeare are easily unravelled:
Every cloud engenders not a storm :)
Horatio, I am dead :(
Remembering the Albertus Extra Bold asterisk embargo of several years back, one hopes the crisis is solved quickly, because a life of exclamation marks, no matter how superficially exciting, is no life at all! There are, of course, many other fonts one could use if the crisis continues, but, frankly, which would you rather be faced with - Namby Pamby Extra Narrow or the bosomy sexuality of Times Roman? The shortage itself may be a useful one, provided it's over quickly, for it has made at least this author appreciate and value his one spare period, and it is with great respect that I use it now.
[from The New Yorker, probably in 1997]
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