Comments on: Colored letters revisited in other languages.

By: Tysyacha

Tysyacha — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:53:05 +0000

How about the Russian Y (and I only call it that because that’s the closest English equivalent?) It is called “ui” or “yery/yeru/yerih”. A vowel, it makes a sound like “uh-ee” said REALLY fast. It’s a cross between the “a” in “about” and the “y” in “body”, with a slight “i” as in “fish” thrown in for good measure. It looks like bI.

Sort of.

What color is it to you? To me it’s dark cranberry red–rich and passionate, strong.

By: Vicky

Vicky — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:13:33 +0000

Oh, and I don’t mean tafseer – I mean tajweed. I always get confused between the two.

By: Vicky

Vicky — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:12:11 +0000

I grew up in Saudi Arabia and speak good Arabic. Intriguingly, the first things I learnt (beyond hello/goodbye) were verses from the Qur’an. This wasn’t because I was taught Qur’an formally (I didn’t start lessons in tafseer, or recitation, for a while) but because I heard it – outside mosques, in the marketplaces, in people’s homes. I think I picked it up so easily because it is chanted.

By: Philip

Philip — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:40:33 +0000

The Arabic script is the second most widely used form of alphabetic writing in the world after the Roman alphabet. It probably originated some time in the fourth century AD and is descended from the Aramaic, through the Nabataean alphabet.

The Arabic alphabet contains 28 consonants of which 22 were directly derived from the Aramaic-Nabatean branch of the North Semitic alphabet, and 6 were new.

The Square Hebrew alphabet is derived from the Aramaic alphabet.

If the Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Roman alphabets have a common ancestor it would be found in an alphabet which arose in the Middle East (what is now Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria) in the second millenium BC (1,000 to 1,999 BC).

It is easy for me to think of the Roman alphabet as being the “natural” one.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:15:57 +0000

Very interesting read…..

We wish we had synaesthesia…..

Ivan

By: ballastexistenz

ballastexistenz — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:41:08 +0000

I don’t know Hebrew, but I imagine it would acquire similar colors as I learned the letters, if I did learn them. The Arabic letters are the same no matter what form they take, just as in English the letters are the same whether capital or small, printed or cursive, font differences, etc., as long as I can read them.

By: kishnevi

kishnevi — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:09:34 +0000

Curious to know if you ever looked at the Hebrew alphabet–pretty much every letter of the aleph-bet has its equivalent in the alif-baa, often with almost the same name (like aleph/alif), although not every Arabic letter has a Hebrew equivalent, and some of what in Hebrew are called the doubles (sin, shin) are found in Arabic (siin, shiin), and some are not–and I spotted at least one Hebrew double (feh, peh) of which Arabic retains only the “F” member.
Also, I understand that Arabic letters have different forms based on their location in the word (first letter, last letter, somewhere in the middle letter). (Hebrew only has five letters which have a different form for the last letter.) Do the colors stay constant no matter what the form may be?

By: Casdok

Casdok — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:48:28 +0000

Very interesting.

By: Christiane^Amorpha

Christiane^Amorpha — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:42:27 +0000

For some reason, the “ya” letter, at least from my looking at it right now (we’re not really familiar with Cyrillic) has all the same synaesthetic associations as the English R, but somehow more intensified. Mirroring a letter, for us, tends to either intensify or water down associations (i.e. b is a paler d, p is a paler q, and they both taste and feel less intense than their counterparts). Left-pointing letters seem to be more “intense” than right-pointing ones, although that may be just a coincidence.

The *sound* ya itself, though, conjures up totally different associations that have to do partly with our associations with the English y+a. I wonder if we could break that association if we were to study Russian seriously. We still haven’t done enough in-depth study of languages with non-Roman alphabets to figure out if the associations we get for those letters are mostly “bleedthrough” from our associations with the corresponding Roman letters. For instance, the katakana character “fu” in Japanese is a light pink to us, which might be carried over from our association of that colour with the Roman letter F (although it doesn’t seem to take into account the darker tones of U).

Then again, some of us get a lot more synaesthesia than others, which is a whole realm of neurological theorising in itself to be done by someone more qualified than me.

By: Ms Clark

Ms Clark — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:43:19 +0000

Do you have any idea how you would see Chinese characters? Would they get “assigned” a color according to their pronunciation or more by their shape? Maybe that’s an impossible question, but since I’m trying to memorize a few thousand characters… (and not getting very far, very fast) it’s on mind. :-)