TIL that the word "honk" was invented for geese, not for cars. It's cars that sound like geese and not the other way around. https://glossographia.com/2010/06/07/honk-if-you-love-etymology/

#Etymology #Honk #Goose #Geese #Onomatopoeia #English

#TIL That Chaucer & Shakespeare were into the whole 6-7 thing.

"A similar phrase, "to set the world on six and seven", is used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde. It dates from the mid-1380s and seems from its context to mean "to hazard the world" or "to risk one's life".[2] William Shakespeare uses a similar phrase in Richard II (around 1595), "But time will not permit: all is uneven, And every thing is left at six and seven"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sixes_and_sevens

#etymology #history #English

It's strange how Americans tend to say pythON and amazON, where we tend to say pythin and amazin, but they tend to say recird while we say recORD (for the noun, I mean. The pronunciation of rhe verb is different again).

This stuff is so interesting to me. How different words are pronounced different ways in different places and how that came about.

#English #words

Hexlish Alphabet for English, Constructed Languages and Cryptography: Automatic, Structural Compression with a Phonetic Hexadecimal Alphabet

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13139469

Hexlish is a legible, sixteen-letter alphabet for writing the English language and for encoding text as legible base 16 or compressed binary. Texts composed using the alphabet are automatically compressed by exactly fifty percent when converted from Hexlish characters into binary characters. Although technically lossy, this syntactic compression enables recovery of the correct English letters via syntactic reconstruction. The implementer can predict the size of the compressed binary file and the size of the text that will result from decompression. Generally it is intuitive to recognize English alphabet analogues to Hexlish words. This makes Hexlish a legible alternative to the standard hexadecimal alphabet.

#Hexlish #Conlang #Alphabets #English #Hexadecimal #Encoding #Cryptography #Ciphers #Crypto #Encryption #Compression #Papers #Preprints #Orthography #Language #Linguistics #Writing #Glyphs #Alphabetology #Technology

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Hexlish Alphabet logo. The word HEXLISH in rainbow colors on a black background with a hexagonal dot above the letter I. Beneat the logo in yellow reads the phrase, "English Text Compression & Encoding."