9 December 2020

Now up to 6 language alphabets

Acquired a passing acquaintance with Farsi letters. To be sure, I still cannot get the right pronunciation for “ghein” or “qaf” (identical pronunciations, I am told). And I know only isolated letters. But it was good enough to read a signboard inside the local Bezoria restaurant yesterday. (Needless to say, normally I would have no idea what the word meant but the context was helpful in understanding the word “shawarma”).

So, here are the six language alphabets that I have learnt arranged reverse chronologically of when I learnt them.

Thinking of learning Thai letters next. They almost look like notes on a music sheet (another thing I cannot read, of course).

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6 December 2020

The isolated Farsi alphabets

Have now learnt all the Farsi alphabets and how to write them. To be sure, when I say “writing”, I mean as the letters would be written by themselves. When actually written in cursive handwriting, the shapes can differ depending on whether they are the first letter, somewhere in the middle or the last letter in a word. I have not learnt those. I need more practice still. (If I can rattle off and write backwards – meaning last letter to first letter, I feel I have memorized well enough).

The two letters in red have the same pronunciation but I cannot pronounce them. See a funny suggestion from Anand here.

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5 December 2020

Farsi alphabet lessons

Took the motorbike to Ballground for a ride and coffee. While there, had a call with my good friend Anand’s wife Firouzeh (who is from Tehran, Iran) to fine tune the proper pronunciation of the Farsi alphabets. I think I am within striking range for most of them. Other than the two alphabets “ghain” and “qaf”. They are pronounced identically – and I can’t get it.

In Bengali and Hindi, we have a letter for “gh”. There is no single English letter for it but it is pronounced like “gh”ost. I asked Anand (who knows Bengali and Hindi pronunciations) if he could gauge how close the pronunciations were.

He said something to the effect of if Sharmila were to strangle me and I were to try pronouncing “kh” (the second letter in Bengali/Hindi), then I might come close. On second thoughts, I will give it a pass…

21 November 2020

Trying out an ambigram of my name

As I mentioned last night, I learnt about “ambigram”s while reading a book by Alex Bellos. For our purpose, we can say an ambigram is a calligraphic writing such that when you hold the paper upside down, you get the same writing!

That is quite an achievement! I looked up the internet and found some free ambigram generators. I am trying to learn how to write an ambigram of my own name.

It does get your mind to think in a different way when you are practicing every stroke. Basically, you have to think how that stroke will look when you hold it upside down and is it going to build up the other letter you need to build up. (The letter that is as far from the end as is the one you are writing from the beginning). So while writing my first “R”, I have to do it in a way that if I turn it upside down, it should look like the last letter “y” and I have to draw the exact opposite of how I wrote “R” in the end to write “y”.

You will see that after half an hour of trying, my output is still amateurish. You can even spot the mistake I made in the last letter. I also realized that I need to get a thicker nib from the calligraphic pen set than I did this morning.

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20 November 2020

Scripts of five different languages

After storm Zeta and learning the Greek alphabet, I had this crazy idea – albeit not too crazy as far as my ideas go – what if I tried to learn the script of another language?

I remembered, while in Mongolia, I had great difficulty reading their language. So, figured maybe I should try some language with a Cyrillic script. Settled down on Russian. The language has 33 letters and 10 vowels. Eventually got the hang of the upper case and lower case. The pronunciation was a different thing though. There are lots of sounds that are not there in English language (some are there in my mother tongue Bengali). A lot of the letters look like English but have nothing to do with the corresponding English letter. I am still struggling with the difference in pronunciation of “Й” and “ы”. All in all, was interesting to pick this up. I am going to keep trying to identify the letters in words and pronounce them thru the end of this year.

So, with English, Bengali and Hindi (based on Devnagari script), that makes it 5 different scripts for me. (I am not counting German and Spanish since they are too close to English).

Thinking of picking up one more. Tamil has a very different script. At one time, I had taught myself the script (back in 1985). Maybe I will brush that one up…

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15 November 2020

Life of Pi

I was reading up on Pi (the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle) – in a book by Alex Bellos – and realized how little I knew about this number and how fascinating it is.

For one, all my life, I never realized that Pi can be expressed by this simple formula. Frankly, my first instinct looking at the series was that it does not converge – let alone add up to exactly one fourth Pi !

Ramanujan – who I had heard a lot about when I was growing up in India apparently created a famous formula for Pi – which I did not know either. I was aware of the Ramanujan numbers but not of his work on Pi. The remarkable part of the formula is that right at the outset if you put n=0, it gives an accurate value of Pi to the sixth decimal place! If you put n=1, it will add another eight digits of accuracy to the value of Pi and so on!!

Fairly scary looking formula though:

Modern computers have calculated Pi to – hold your breath – 2.7 trillion places!! To put this in perspective, if we used just 39 places, we can calculate the circumference of the circle that can circumscribe the whole known universe to the accuracy of less than an atom of Hydrogen!!!

And yet, no patterns of repetition (of any set of numbers – two-digited, three-digited…. million-digited …. and so on) has ever been found in that sequence. Thus we know one thing – Pi is NOT a rational number.

Another interesting data and I will let you go… If you start narrating the digits of Pi, you will not encounter a zero in the first 10 digits… or 20 digits… or even in 30 digits. (It comes as the 32nd digit – and yet, the first 200 billion digits in Pi have been studied for distribution – all of them occur in very similar numbers!!)

14 November 2020

Two interesting charts on Covid

This is data on Covid spread in India. Fascinating data.
1. 70% of Covid patients did not spread the virus to ANYBODY. On the other hand, 10% of Covid patients caused 60% of the spread of virus.

2. The second one is even more fascinating. It is the young adults who are spreading the virus most (I assume that is because they tend to be more social and gather in groups?). And people tend to spread to other people of similar age as their own (I assume because people tend to congregate with folks of similar age group)

(Source: The Economist)

30 October 2020

The other aftermath of Zeta

The other day, the weather forecasters warned us that Storm Zeta will be going thru where we live. Which got me thinking how many storms have we had this year? US storm naming has an interesting pattern. Every year we start with the letter A (first storm is named starting with A – it was Arthur this year) and then go thru B, C … The names alternate between male names and female names. The starting name alternates between male and female every year. Did you know you can submit your own names to NOAA?

Back to the count. There are no names with Q, U, X, Y, Z any year. So, there are 21 names every year. What happens when we have more storms like we did this year? Turns out, we give up all pretensions to innovation and go straight for Greek Alphabets – Alpha, Beta etc etc.

Back to Storm Zeta. The Greek letter (upper case) for Zeta is “Z”. This is where my confusion started… Did we have 45 storms this year? (21 English names and then 24 letters in the Greek Alphabet).

It was Sunjay Talele who reminded me that “Z” is only the sixth letter in Greek Alphabet. Which, in turn reminded me that, once upon a time (my ninth grade to be precise), I had found all the Greek letters enumerated in a page in the back of the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary my dad had bought for me. I had even learnt them by rote.

I figured, 40 years later, might as well learn once more the letters and how to write them in lower case and upper case. After four days, I can now write all the letters backwards (omega to alpha) and can ace all the quizzes on Greek Alphabets – at least the ones I could find on the internet.

Will see how much recall I have a week from now…

The confusing letters for me included eta (“H”), zeta and xi (cannot write the letters in English script). And I always get confused with “o”. Tend to think of it as omega rather than omicron.