Learning my Alef, Beta, Ge's.

I recall, as a child, I wanted so badly to read and write. I even scribbled lines of gibberish on paper and passed them under the locked bathroom door to my mother, fully believing my thoughts had been preserved on that paper for her to read. Though I disliked writing out individual letters ad nauseum on oddly lined note pads each day in school, I knew each wobbly stroke of my fat pencil would bring me closer to being able to read.

I didn't learn another alphabet until college when, through the Hellenic alphabet soup of Greek societies on campus, I found myself able to name most of the Greek letters. As I completed my degree in Spanish I took a couple of linguistics courses and was also exposed to the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA). It has been a few years since those linguistics courses, but language still remains a large part of my thought process. As I take my current geology courses in the pursuit of a geology degree, I find an understanding of languages helps me in learning the multiplicity of new terms. As most terms are rooted in Latin and Greek, I find I can identify most Latin roots by relating them to a Spanish or Portuguese word with which I am familiar. The Greek roots, however, are more difficult for me to recognize so I want to learn Greek.

As I started working out the sounds of the letters I already recognize I found the IPA useful in associating sounds of Greek letters with those sounds familiar to me. As I worked through learning Greek pronunciation I found myself exploring a favorite website: Omniglot.com. There I became fascinated with the alphabets, abjads, abugidas and syllabaries of all the worlds languages. I decided recently to learn most of these writing systems.

The manner I have chosen is to systematically learn the graphemes that match up with a specific phoneme as listed in IPA. for example, this weeks sound is the voiceless velar plosive, or [k]. So, on a note card I have listed the related symbols used to represent [k]. Next I will move on to variations on [k], then to the sound [g]. In time I will work my way through the more than 100 sounds of human speech.

My reason for doing so is inspired by a story a professor of mine shared with me. This professor once spent a year doing research in Egypt. While there, his wife learned to read Arabic, but he understood more of the language, and did not learn to read as well as she. So, each morning she would read from the newspaper as they sipped coffee, and he would then translate what she didn't understand.

I would like to be able to read most any word I see regardless of the language, thus enabling me to figure out its meaning or at least be able to ask someone a word's meaning. Eventually I would also like to express myself in writing in those languages, and maybe, just maybe, find someone with whom I can share reading a foreign newspaper over breakfast.