Plenty of Nothing

Porson

The Greek handwriting of Cambridge scholar Richard Porson (1759-1808) was so eye-friendly that it became the model for the Porson typepface still in use today. Source. Via.

How to Spell CANADA

 

In Inuktitut or Cree:

ᑲᓇᑕ

In Japanese:

カナダ

In Korean:

캐나다

In Arabic:

كندا

In Armenian:

Կանադա

In Russian:

Канада

In Old English:

Cænada

In Kannada:

ಕೆನಡಾ

 

2014 Emperor's Cup, Round Four

Chiba v V-Varen. Source.

It's Round Four of the 2014 Emperor's Cup, otherwise known as the Round of 16. Of the sixteen clubs in contention, nine are from J1 and seven from J2. We're all about the underdog here at Plenty of Nothing, so let's boldly follow the J2 teams:

Game #73: Sanfrecce Hiroshima [1 - 3] Gamba Osaka

Game #74: FC Tokyo [1 - 2] Shimizu S-Pulse

Game #75: Cerezo Osaka [2 - 0] Júbilo Iwata

Game #76: Montedio Yamagata [1 - 0] Sagan Tosu

Game #77: Giravanz Kitakyushu [1 - 0] Ventforet Kofu

Game #78: V-Varen Nagasaki [1 - 2] JEF United Chiba

Game #79: Ehime FC [1 - 2] Omiya Ardija

Game #80: Thespakusatsu Gunma [0 - 1] Nagoya Grampus

V-Varen Nagasaki's name and blue and orange uniform commemorate the city's ties with the Dutch East Indies Company, and the goose on their emblem recalls Nishiyama Sōin's verse:

    Is that Dutch writing?

    Across the heavens stretch

    A line of wild geese.

1Q84 in Mongolian

The Mongolian translation of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is out. Source. Contemporary Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic script, so altogether on the book covers you have four writing systems: Cyrillic, Latin (Q), Arabic numerals and the Chinese figures for 1 and 2.

Kamo Mabuchi on the Chinese Writing System

    People also tell me, "We had no writing in this country and therefore had to use Chinese characters. From this one fact you can know everything about the relative importance of our countries." I answer, "I need not recite again how troublesome, evil, turbulent a country China is. To mention just one instance -- there is the matter of their picture-writing. There are about 38,000 characters in common use, as someone has determined. . . . Every place name and plant name has a separate character for it which has no other use but to designate that particular place or plant. Can any man, even one who devotes himself to the task earnestly, learn all that many characters? Sometimes people miswrite characters, sometimes the characters themselves change from one generation to the next. What a nuisance, a waste of effort, and a bother! In India, on the other hand, fifty letters suffice for the writing of the more than 5,000 volumes of the Buddhist scriptures. A knowledge of a mere fifty letters permits one to know and transmit innumerable words of past and present alike. This is not simply a matter of writing -- the fifty sounds are the sounds of Heaven and earth, and words conceived from them are naturally different from the Chinese characters. Whatever kind of writing we may originally have had, ever since Chinese writing was introduced we have mistakenly become enmeshed in it. Now only the old words, but not their writing are preserved. These words are not identical with the fifty Indian sounds . . . but the fifty sounds suffice to express all words without the nuisance of characters. In Holland, I understand, they use twenty-five letters. In this country there should be fifty. The appearance of letters used in all countries is in general the same, except for China where they invented their bothersome system. . . . The opinion that the characters are precious is not worth discussing further."

From A Study in the Idea of the Nation (1765), in Tsunoda, de Bary and Keene, Sources of the Japanese Tradition, Volume II, pages 13-14.

AB

From the "Macclesfield Alphabet Book", Add MS 88887 in the British Library.

Harpo Whistles

In this scene from A Day at the Races, Harpo Marx uses a combination of whistling and charades to get the point across to Chico. The whistling imitates the melody of spoken English, crossed with a canary, and is kind of like the whistling language silbo gomero found on the isle of La Gomera. In the Canary Islands!

Xu Bing

One of the heroes of typography is Xu Bing who in 1988 produced "A Book From the Sky" made up entirely of Chinese characters he invented himself, to the consternation of the Chinese authorities, who have a vested interest in controlling words and meanings.  He often uses letters of the Latin alphabet as radicals within characters. Here is his name:

And Little Bo Peep:

Alphabet Songs and Pangrams

Arabic. ثق تعش ظل هدف حكَمٌ ذو صبرٍ سخيٍ ضَغطَ أَنجز

Danish. Høj bly gom vandt fræk sexquiz på wc.

German. Falsches Üben von Xylophonmusik quält jeden größeren Zwerg.

Russian. Эх, чужак, общий съём цен шляп (юфть) – вдрызг!

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