Diacritics

Modern historians assert that the earliest manuscripts of the Qurʾān were written in an Arabic scriptio defectiva, devoid of orthographic aids such as consonantal diacritics and vowel markers. In fact, the earliest extant manuscripts—those in the Ḥijāzī script, dated to the first/seventh century—do exhibit consonantal diacritics, though only sporadically and insufficiently to create a completely unambiguous text. Previous studies have provided inconclusive results regarding the uses of these spare diacritics and have suggested that scribes may have purposefully excluded them from Qurʾān manuscripts in order to allow different readings of the text to coexist in the same text. Focusing on the few diacritics that do appear in early manuscripts, this paper situates early Qurʾān manuscripts within the context of other Arabic documents of the first/seventh century that exhibit similarly infrequent diacritics. Shared patterns in the usages of diacritics indicate that early Qurʾān manuscripts were produced by scribes relying upon very similar orthographic traditions to those that produced Arabic papyri and inscriptions of the first/seventh century.

Informal electronic communication respect consistently the principles of conciseness, clarity, simplicity. Therefore, the
orthography of this sort of communication is simplified: there is no semicolon or dashes, the period and comma are used for marking the short pause or where they are necessary, while the end of the text is always marked, but often with some alternative signal: ellipsis, emoticon, onomatopoeia... The question mark and the exclamation mark are used only when the question or emotion are emphasized, and the quotation marks are for citation or emphasis. The colon is almost limited to the announcement of direct speech. The other punctuation marks are used as usual, like the parentheses and slash, or almost disappear, like the hyphen, or have the specific usage, like the asterisk. Further, the new signs appear, such as, beside emoticons, the signs @ or #. The uppercase letters are used to emphasize in a broad terms, so it is possible to highlight the whole text, or one specific word, or initial letter, or any letter (usually incorrect on purpose) in the word. The diacritical signs usually miss, only for the comprehensibility the letter [đ] is written as [dj], and [dž] as [dz]. The use of English is common as the specific style, and sometimes instead of [l] may be written [w]. Even simplified, the language of informal internet communication fulfill its function – perfectly deliver the
message. Consequently it may be the good indicator of more and less important orthographic rules for everyday communication, and certainly hide the future changes in the orthography.

... States”: a destabilization that extends to “the system of interpretation, the axiomatic, logic, rhetoric, concepts ... media have remained steadily active in this field, and the literature on 9/11 as a US ... 10 Even Al Qaeda, in quest of media attention as the fifth anniversary neared, released ...

The aim of this dissertation is to make an analysis of the typographic characteristics of Brazilian indigenous languages as they appear on the printed page, with a specific focus on the orthographies established with the use of the Latin script for these originally unwritten languages. Some of these orthographies employ accented letters that are rare in most of the fonts for the Latin script, while others make use of glyphs that are not encoded in Unicode. The absence of these special characters in most digital fonts result in many typographic inconsistencies which could be avoided with the use of appropriate technology.
The analysis focuses on the publications found during the research for this dissertation. These are mostly educational primers and literary books in native languages and, sometimes, bilingual editions containing texts in Portuguese. It was a particular challenge to find printed material showing text paragraphs in native languages other than this type of educational material as the widespread development of publications typeset entirely in these languages is a relatively recent phenomenon.

To most people Svetlana Boym was known as a writer: a prolific writer of books marked by originality, insight, and irreverence for intellectual pieties, no matter how fashionable. The media artist side of her presented in this section was chronologically last of her artistic personas. A whole string of these bifurcated the bios at the end of Boym’s monographs. This essay is a tribute to Boym's creativity in the visual arts and its relationship to her life and writing.

... Ibn Habib cast al-Andalus as dangerous because of its positioning in the hinterlands, while the writer of the Akhbar majmu 'a described it ... developed since its treat ment by historians such as Bishko, Robert I. Burns, and Angus MacKay.13 David Abulafia and Nora Berend show ...

Persian-Hebrew texts are written in Hebrew orthography. Their records go back to the period before The Essential Books about Drugs’ Nature, the first Persian text in Arabic orthography by Abu Mansour Mowaffaq Herawi which was inscribed by Assadi Tousi in 447 A.H. Therefore, it seems very important to scrutinize such texts for the study of Persian language. One of the most important samples of Persian-Hebrew texts is the translations of Torah, especially the translations of Pentateuch in to Persian written in Hebrew orthography. The oldest dated Persian-Hebrew translation of the Pentateuch is a version known as PL in British Museum. This version had been inscribed on 15 March 1319 A.H. The main translator of this text was Abi Saeed and its scribe, Yousef Bin Musa. This text has many unique lexical and orthographic features. The author of present essay propounds a brief introduction about its general features such as the manner of its diacritics, its colophon, the place of its inscription, the name of its scriber and translator and adjourns more careful analysis about its lexical and linguistic features for other essays.

... not unlike Woolf's own androgynous Shakespeare, expresses femininity, while his sister is looking at language from her "foreign land." Thus, if we judge by Kristeva's evaluation, reading Woolf ... What is at stake is the art of translation, the detour of the library. ... By Virginia Woolf. Ed. ...

... [but that which] gives to the production of the ghost or of the ideological ... Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 329-38. _____ . Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Ed. and commentary John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham UP, 1997. _____ . ...

This research employed entropy based algorithm to identify stopwords candidate for Yoruba Language texts. Two sets of corpus of 756,039 Yoruba words were used; the diacritized and its undiacritized versions. All words whose entropy is greater than 0.6 but not a noun was considered as a stopword. A stopwords list of 256 words was drawn from the diacritized texts while a stopword list of 189 words was drawn from the undiacritized texts. For the diacritized texts, the removal of the stopwords reduced the full text by 65.91%. The full text of the undiacritized texts was also reduced by 67.46% when the stopwords were removed. Only 69.1 % of the stopwords have corresponding words in English stoplist. This suggests that existing English stoplist will not work optimally and could not be adopted for Yoruba language.

This study employs a conjunctive, interdisciplinary approach to investigate the principles governing Maya hieroglyphic writing of the Classic Period (ca. A.D. 250-900). Linguistic, epigraphic, and ethnohistoric data are considered in the light of comparative data from other writing systems. Maya writing is found to be composed entirely of logographs, syllabic signs, and auxiliary signs (diacritical markers). The system did not contain semantic signs (i.e., so-called determinatives, ideographs, or taxon/radical signs), unlike several otherwise broadly similar logophonetic scripts of the Old World (e.g., Egyptian hieroglyphic, Akkadian cuneiform, Mycenaean Linear B, and Chinese). Mayan logographs are always CVC or CVCVC in shape. Syllabic signs are canonically CV, evolving via acrophony from logographs throughout the life of the script. A diacritical marker distinguished signs physically-duplicated for aesthetic reasons from signs written only once but duplicated in pronunciation. In time, appearance of the diacritical marker alternated with sign elision and underspelling of obligatory consonants, motivated primarily by aesthetic concerns. I conclude that accurate representation of speech was often compromised for the production of beautiful texts. Decipherers must therefore take caution in positing equivalencies between discrete spellings of contextually identical lexemes.

IMAGINES SPIRITUS (ASPER ET LENI). A Meridian voice that sounds from within the aspiration-space of rendered colours

        Atemwende 
        Zenith Boil
Exhalations of the Earth
        A Saving Grace
Subject to Aspiration
        Transcripts
A Diacritical Eye
        Spiritus
The Meridian Voice
        Gegenworten
An Imaginary Present Tense that Attends to Twinkling
        Meteorology

If a stone cannot be read, in the conventional sense, what do we see on, or in, or through stones? And what can we do with them? This essay begins in media res, with reading, writing, and things -- specifically stones – and considers them as sites for a new ecology of criticism. It wonders about stones, especially the ones we fancy extravagantly, and proposes these lapidary mirrors as places to reconsider the relationship between word, image, and looking – as provocations, that is, to a new style of reading. To begin, the use of beguiling rocks as objects of consumption, poetic inspiration, and artistic manipulation by Chinese artists and literati is considered through the lens of Roger Caillois’s writings about mimicry, particularly as applied to a Lacanian vision of human subjectivity as the play of picture and screen. Considered along with its etymological cousins “stun” and “stain” in the penumbra of Lacan’s reflections, this analysis proposes fetishized stones as a literalization of the screen’s petrifying function, the behind of the looking glass which renders everything in sight an impossible imago, a storied surface, a reified other. Where such speculation reveals stone as a grave site for critically sore eyes, this essay turns to the very different possibilities of stone-human interaction traced in the touching and disarming poetics of Ouyang Xiu’s “The Stone of Ling Stream.” In this case a stone morphs from object of desire into tactile companion as its human subject reshapes his connoisseur’s drive to know and own into a haptic meditation beside the stone. The essay argues that with this gesture Ouyang Xiu not only embraces a Chinese Buddhist aesthetic and spiritual tradition --contemplation of the void or lack -- but also gropes toward a fruitful ethics of “stone blindness” as a mode of understanding. By surrendering a visual drive that extends its instrumental aggression to every animal, plant and stone in sight, the poet writes himself out of the surveillance of the world-as-text. Instead, assuming a posture of quiet attention and openness, he re-approaches being obliquely and gently from another direction. In so doing he practices an art and poetics of “being with” that not only feels for the ends of critical vision, but also invites us to drop our gazes and egos alike to listen to Heidegger’s “call of the world.”

There are certain sounds in the Greek-Cypriot dialect (henceforth GCD) that cannot be represented by characters from the Greek alphabet in its written form. Contradicting ideologies have made it impossible for Cypriots to settle on an official and common orthographic system, which has led to a rich variety of typographic conventions and many significant typographic drawbacks.

This study aims to introduce a new set of typographic characters for the representation of the palato-alveolar GCD consonants that would provide ideal reading conditions for users (Unger, 2007; Noordzij, 2005; Bringhurst, 2005), while taking into consideration their political and cultural stances and needs. The new typographic system has been tested in two rounds of action research, providing both quantitative and qualitative data. The results show that the proposed system satisfies both the design and linguistic criteria of a successful written system as proposed by Sebba (2007), namely phonological accuracy, simplicity and readability.

In her Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson Suzanne Guerlac reminds her readers that the metaphysician has indeed been the subject of many hatreds, as the Berg sonist Gilles Deleuze once noted. But from this taut philosophical study one cannot easily make out any possible grounds for enmity; nor were any expressed in the special Bergson issue of Modern Literary Notes edited by Guerlac. In this short review essay I shall voice some ofthat historic criticism, especially in regard to the social and political implications of his thought. Guerlac's study may also win its own opponents for its sharp criticisms of Deleuze's interpretations of Bergson and (in her reading) comically machinic view of life [TT176-87]. This alone makes the book worth reading; it is also exhaustively researched, and I cannot remember learning as much from the footnotes of any other book. Bergson is presented here as a great metaphysician on the nature of time and space, the philosophical father of nonlinear science, and a theorist of concrete and affective in dividuality. Rejecting implicitly Leszek Kolakowski's reading of two Bergsons, Guerlac presents him as neither a cosmologist who opposes life and matter nor an existentialist who retrieves consciousness by opposing time to space. Nor does he emerge as a system atic thinker in this study. In the last chapter Guerlac offers a dizzying defense of Bergson for providing the philosophical basis for cultural studies of the qualitative irreducibility of affectual states, the metaphysics of chaos theory, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the rudiments of an aesthetic theory of digital art and virtual reality. All of this follows from the epochal significance of Bergson's metaphysical distinc tion between time and space as carefully grounded in the most advanced physics of his time. Guerlac does not discuss in any detail Bergson's vitalist critiques of Darwinian biology in Creative Evolution, the work through which the metaphysical arsonist fired the modernist imagination in diverse, contradictory, and at times violent ways.1 Nor does she explore the occult and mystical themes that run throughout Bergson's work and informed his personal and professional associations. In fact, Guerlac writes: "An explicit appeal to the social values of mystical experi ence in this study [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion] appeared to vindicate those who had criticized Bergson all along for being simply a mystic. And yet the title of the work, and the basis for the notion of closed and open societies, derive from scientific, not mystical discourse. They refer us to an opposition between closed and open systems in Sadi Carnot's theories of thermodynamics" [TT 9]. Yet Bergson bases the opposition