The Inferno

It is 5.50 on July 29th, 2010 in sunny Vancouver. We’re seeing sunny weather and the heliolaters are everywhere. The skytrain (Vancouver’s version of the subway metro that rides in the sky on pillars) pulls into New Westminster, arguably one of the more crime-ridden junctions in this fair city (which isn’t saying much, the most we see is the occasional stabbing at Metrotown. I doubt most of the people on the train have ever seen a dead body in their lives).

The doors slide open and we hear voices from the platform. Two men, A and B are standing in front of the doors. A is reaching for a large gym bag, B is holding onto it. Both men are large and muscular. B is a good half-foot taller than A.

A: That’s my bag, can you show me a receipt for it? Where did you get it?

B: What do you mean, it’s your bag, it’s mine? I have to get on this train.

A: I’m serious man, you took it, that’s my bag. I can’t let you leave with it.

B: No way, dude. It’s mine, I have to get on this train.

A: I can’t let you do that, you stole my bag. Where did you get it?

B enters the train. A follows him.

A: Listen, it’s my bag. Let’s stay here until the police come, I’m calling them right now.

B: Okay, take it, it’s yours.

A stops the doors from sliding shut, grabs the bag and the hand that’s clutching its straps. B lets go of the bag but his hand is now in the iron grip of A’s right hand.

B: Let me go. (Moves agitatedly. Starts to bluster. Raises his right arm menacingly).

A: Hey, there’s no reason for that. Calm down. Step off the train and onto the platform, let’s wait for the cops to arrive.

B: (Lowers arm) Here, you can have it, the train’s leaving, I gotta go.

Side note: In Vancouver, the trains can actually be stopped by the simple expedient of holding their doors open. The doors are relatively weak and a wedged ankle is enough to stop them, without hurting the ankle. This can and often does happen ad nauseam, while we all wait for some yobo ’s friends to arrive, as he holds the doors open. Recently, alarms have been installed that alert the control station that a door is being held open. The control station then sends some transit cops or real cops, whoever’s closer, to the scene (the trains have no drivers and run on on some exorbitant software). Since the control station is far away and the chances of a cop being near are fairly low, the wait can be tedious and lengthy indeed.

A: Let’s get off the train. (Seizes the bag and B’s hand and leaves the train)

B is done talking, but complies with his body language showing a great deal of remonstrance.

As B exits, we see the left side of his head. Under his ear and on his lateral nape, are, I kid you not, the twin lightning bolts of the Schutzstaffel. A real SS tattoo. It is in red with a black outline. It is NOT the KISS logo with the KI eroded from years of scrubbing. This is the real deal, a genuine neo-nazi getting busted for petty theft on urban transport. Let this mannequin, which has more brains than the subject it represents, show you the location of the aforementioned tattoo.

As I reach for my cameraphone to snap a pic of this twerp, he walks out and the doors shut with a maligned sigh of relief. Everyone in the compartment saw the tattoo at precisely the same moment. An old lady beside me who looks like Margaret Atwood out for a jog turns to me and says “Fucking white trash. New West is full of them”. I am more amazed by her swearing than by the racist neandarthal we all just saw. We are all also impressed by how the theft victim handled the situation. Despite being physically smaller, he took control and dominated the other man and essentially ordered him off the train. It seems unlikely that the former gaolbird would stick around on the platform and wait for the cops to arrive, preferring to flee instead. In any case, the situation is now ab oculis.

The train starts with its usual whine, the hot summer air is shut off, the air-conditioning resumes and we continue over the river.

As for our poor missing link, what does his tattoo tell us about him? I’ll let Cracked.com do the honours:

Here’s an excellent post I found on the tubes that sums up how political and religious issues can create two different languages out of one:

What is the difference between Hindi and Urdu?
At the level of the colloquial language that is spoken spontaneously or is heard in Bollywood movies, Hindi and Urdu are virtually the identical language. Thus,

gãv meñ voh lajavab hai.
[There is no one like him in the village.]

They are, however, written in two different scripts, Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script and Hindi in the Devanagari script of Sanskrit.

In the literary or “chaste” dialect, Urdu uses many more Persian & Arabic words and grammatical forms than Hindi, whose literary dialect is more Sanskritised. But it is false to suppose Hindi lacks Persian & Arabic loanwords and Urdu lacks etymologically Sanskrit words. Both languages share a common lexicon that includes native (Indian), Arabic, Persian, and English loanwords.

When expressing the elevated thoughts of science, philosophy, art and politics, the Muslims of India naturally always drew from the wealth of Arabic and Persian literary words, whereas the Hindus turned toward Sanskrit. This accounts for the differences between Hindi and Urdu (in vocabulary but almost never in grammar), but these are differences which exist primarily at the elite level and in abstract vocabulary. For example:

Pakistani siyasat meñ voh lajavab hai. (Urdu)

Pakistani rajniti meñ voh lajavab hai. (Hindi)

[There is no one like him in Pakistani politics.]

It’s a good rule of thumb that whenever Urdu and Hindi words differ, it is becaue the one is using an Arabic or Persian word while the other a Sanskrit loanword.

Because the political vocabulary tends to be different between the languages, Pakistanis and Indians ordinarily don’t understand each other’s country’s official radio and television broadcasts — depite the fact that they understand each other’s movies perfectly well!

What are the origins of Hindi and Urdu?
Urdu and Hindi are both descended from Sanskrit (or the vulgar Indo-Aryan tongue of which Sanskrit was an idealisation), just as French and Spanish are both descended from Vulgar Latin.

Their common origins cannot be emphasised enough, because people in India and Pakistan stuff their heads with a great deal of mythological rubbish about the origins of Hindi and Urdu. For example, it’s frequently asserted that while Hindi is descended from Sanskrit, Urdu is a kind of pidgin mongrel of Persian, Arabic and Indian elements.

Well, Urdu is also descended from Sanskrit, and Hindi is also a pidgin mongrel of Persian, Arabic and Indian elements — because they are the same language.

During the thousand years of Central Asian invasions of northern India, the Muslim conquerors introduced into the language of Delhi (often called Kari Boli) a enormous number of loanwords from Arabic, Persian and Turkish. The result was Hindustani — a grammatically Indian language descended from Sanskrit with a large Sansrkitic vocabulary, but Persian and Arabic words perhaps numbering 30% to 40% of the spoken language.

What is the political status of Hindi and Urdu?
Hindi is the official language of the Indian Union (although it also recognises 15 or 16 other regional languages as official).

Still, it is the native language of only about a third of all Indians. Those who don’t grow up speaking Hindi must learn it at school. Very little Hindi is spoken in the south of India, where dominant languages are completely unrelated to those of the north.

Urdu is the official language of Pakistan. It is also the official language of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir and one of the two official languages of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

Like Hindi, Urdu is not the native language of most Pakistanis. For only about 10% of Pakistanis, primarily those living in Karachi and other cities of Sindh province, speak it as their mother tongue. The remaining Pakistanis grow up speaking Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi, Pashto, Kashmiri or other languages and must learn Urdu at school.

In fact, India has about ten times the number of native speakers of Urdu as Pakistan.

But this situation is changing because the Pakistani state has so thoroughly suffused the country with Urdu. Many of today’s young Pakistanis for whose parents Urdu is not the mother tongue, have grown up speaking Urdu as though it was.

For political reasons, the Indian and the Pakistani governments have tried to widen the gulf between Hindi and Urdu by emphasising the literary standards at schools. Although these efforts are undermined by the influence of Bollywood films and the common history of Urdu and Hindi, nonetheless it’s likely that as literacy rates rise in both India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu will drift apart.

Here is a small example of how the Pakistani state contributes to this drifting apart.

In standard Urdu, the Arabic spelling of Arabic loanwords is faithfully preserved, even if the original pronunciation is not preserved. For example the final H (choti he) of the Arabic loanword qissah (story) is silent and is pronounced as though it were simply qissaa:

However, increasingly in Pakistani Urdu, even native words (i.e., Indic words of Sanskrit origin) which never had Arabic spelling are being Arabised. Thus, the indigenous Indic word ghantaa

is often spelt ghantah

– with a “choti he” at the end, as though it were an Arabic word, and even if the “choti he” is not sounded. The original native orthography can be gleaned in the Hindi spelling:

Just a long A at the end, no H.

Of course, the attempts to increase Arabisation and Persianisation in Urdu mirror the Pakistani attempt to move further toward the Islamic countries and away from “Indianness”. After all, without this, what would a Pakistani be but an Indian Muslim, who is himself just a converted Hindu?

This is great. A solid explanation by a knowledgeable linguist. Do you see the craziness of this? Two distinct orthographies used to denote the same sounds, except one is Indic and one is Arabic. One is written left-to-right and the other is written right-to-left. This isn’t happening just with the two warring nuclear powers, but with other breakaway regions as well.

To drive the point home, it’s as if we started using the Greek alphabet to denote English words, not Greek.

This is an English sentence

Θις ἰς ἀν Εγγλις σεντηνσε.

Alright, so I cheated and used Greek, a language with enough similar characters to let you still grasp the meaning, with enough guesswork. Now think of it in Javanese or Hebrew. You get the idea. Of all the possible consequences of Radcliffe’s penstrokes.

Post taken from here.

Recently, I upgraded from Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx. After upgrading, my system wouldn’t boot up. I have a root mountpoint and four secondary partitions. The root partition is mounted by UUID, but the others are specified by dev name (/dev/sda1), instead of by UUID. I guess that should have been a hint in itself, but it didn’t strike me what the problem was.

I fired up my trusty Knoppix cd and ran fsck on all my ext3 drives. Getting a “bad superblock error”  on the root device of the form:

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

, I found the next superblock with:

dumpe2fs /dev/sdc1 | grep superblock

Using the new superblock enabled me to get my root mountpoint up and running. I rebooted into Ubuntu and this time it was able to mount the root drive, but the secondary partitions still wouldn’t mount. Running dumpe2fs told me that they weren’t valid ext3 drives, which was bizarre, since Knoppix had just checked them 30 minutes before.

And then it struck me, the new kernel had reordered my drives. It was mounting dev/sdc1 as ext3, but dev/sdc was actually dev/sda and therefore failing, since not all the drives were ext3.

After upgrading to Lucid, my mappings changed in this fashion:

/dev/sdc -> /dev/sda

/dev/sdd -> /dev/sdb

/dev/sda -> /dev/sdc

/dev/sdb -> /dev/sdd

Maybe I should stick to UUIDs to avoid this problem in the future. Hope this helps someone.

The Last.fm playlist is supposedly what’s played around the Last.fm HQ in London, UK. This week they must have had a metal intern or something. Look at the regular sort of music they listen to, the Top Tracks, the artists in the library  and then look at this week’s top artists.

If Last.fm lasts a thousand years, men will still say “This was their finest hour”.

“You know you want to dance with me, come on”

Normally, such words uttered by an attractive female on a dance floor in a pub would be enough to make you want to join her. Except that, in this case, the lady in question was a little lacking in pulchritudinous charms. She was around 65, missing a few teeth and wiggling a saggy derriere. Despite all this, she was one of the most attractive women in the bar.

The evening started off with us waiting outside the Funky Winker Bean, a bar at the T-intersection of Hastings and Abbott, probably the dirtiest spot in the entire country. As we waited for our friend, who for some inexplicable reason had chosen to celebrate her birthday there, some yahoo driving by hurled an empty beer bottle at us that smashed into a million pieces on the street. As we watched the shards of glass ricochet off the sidewalk, we wondered what we were doing there. We went inside and I noticed that I actually knew a fair number of people there. Not the drug-addled regulars, but the crowd that was gathering to see four local metal bands. There was nothing to suggest that our mild-mannered fan was a fan of the heavier forms of metal, so we were even more perplexed as to the choice of the venue.

We stood outside, waiting for her and her friends, and when they got there, they realized that it probably wasn’t the best place to go to, both in terms of the music and the crowd inside. We stood around, waiting for even more people to join us, and then in a burst of inspiration decided to go to the Grand Union Hotel across the street. The plan was to pre-drink there, then head to 560, a snazzy new club that had opened downtown, with a transvestite doorman (person?) playing the role of Janus.

As we entered the Grand Union Hotel, we saw that the interior wasn’t as bad as the exterior would suggest. It was bad, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t the reeking cesspool of Third-World-ian proportions that we expected. The lights were bright, the barman grim but polite and the booze cheap. We settled down for some serious imbibing, after all, the beer was very cheap, $1 or $.150 for the  “better” kinds. There was a two-man band that played country music for all the Downtown Eastside folk who loved country. We heard some Johnny Cash and some other bands I don’t really know, since country isn’t really my thing. After a few drinks, we realized this place actually had a tiny dance floor and there were peolpe dancing. As we stared at them, wondering how far gone you had to be, to dance in a place like this, the lady from the first paragraph beckoned at me and Elliot, another of the birthday girls’ friends. I stayed put, but after some protracted exhortations on her part, complete with blown kisses and simulated hugs, he went over to dance with her. His last words were “What’s the harm, what can possibly go wrong, she looks harmless.” Luckily for him, those last words didn’t end up being his famous last ones.

After drinking some more swill, a couple of the folks went out to talk on their cellphones, away from the racket. While out there, they were approached by an undercover cop who asked them what they were doing there, since they looked like they had healthy, prosperous bodies, which definitely stand out around Pigeon Park. They answered, with all the naivete of college girls, “Oh nothing Officer, we’re just pre-drinking here”. The cop’s reply: “If I were you, I’d get the fuck out of here right now. With every passing second, the likelihood of you getting stabbed with a needle or a knife grows larger”. Having uttered these prophetic words, our gloomy seer stalked off into the night mentally swinging his billy club, no doubt steeling himself against the zombie-like lurchings at every street corner.

The girls ran back in, marshalled the troops and tried to convince us we had to leave and pronto! But the guys were drunk and saw no harm in lingering, after all, the beer was cheap, they were dancing and there was no imminent danger. The atmosphere inside was definitely not one of danger. I mean, the place was no Ritz, but it felt like any small town in BC or Alberta, or even Canada, for that matter. The only difference was the large amount of junkies in the bar, any of whom could potentially erupt into deadly violence, according to the undercover cop. It’s definitely a possibility that the cop was just out to panic us, or was a pessimistic fellow. Regardless, we made plans to leave and soon left for 560.

And that is how we spent a few hours drinking in the meanest part of Vancouver surrounded by junkies, prostitutes, pimps, burglars, cops, drug dealers, predatory scum and homeless people.

Pretty sweet, wot?

I hate what America has become

Date: 2009-10-28, 9:58PM PDT

There are so many reasons that frankly, it’s hard to pick a place to start:

First of all…..when 28% of you brain dead fucking morons give a blithering IDIOT like Sarah Palin positive approval ratings and think she ought to run for president in 2012, it really makes me sick to know I am lumbered with that many mouth-breathing Cro-Magnons I unfortunately have to consider as my fellow countrymen….trust me…..I don’t. You motherfuckers are beyond help.

And before you go thinking this is a “liberal” based rant…..that brings me to one more item on an ever-lengthening list.

This “Liberal” versus “Conservative” paradigm that so many of you simple dunces buy into…..as BOTH parties sell you out to the multinational corporations, banks and special interests that actually run Washington D.C.)…..you do this STUPID dance every day, blithely detatched from the reality that YOU YOURSELF are helping to DIVIDE AND CONQUER the nation, as you myopically beat your little Hannity/Olberman drum of FUTILE self -righteous indignation. PATHETIC.

THIS is a nation of PUSSIES AND FUCKING COWARDS. If this nation had any BALLS WHATSOEVER, there would be a trail of DEAD MEN SWINGING FROM THE ENDS OF ROPES leading from AIG, thru WALL STREET, the not-so “Federal” reserve, the 9/11 commission, and right through every other set-up con-job you people just buy into like a bunch of CATTLE BEING LED TO SLAUGHTER.

It’s not that Americans don’t give a fuck…..every misled, misdirected group that goes out and crusades for the “Grand Cause” they think is responsible for the decimation of this ONCE great nation proves that…..the problem IS that the problem ISN’T illegal aliens (i.e. Minutemen) or Democrats in Washington (i.e. Teabaggers) or conservative policies (i.e. Code Pink)…….the problem is …… AMERICANS THEMSELVES.

AMERICANS have sat on THEIR ASSES while Washington and the Pentagon have BANKRUPTED THE TREASURY and sent our sons and daughters into MEAT GRINDERS in Iraq and Afghanistan for WMD’s and connections to 9/11 that did NOT EXIST and even AFTER the overwhelming evidence that the intel was “swept all up” (doctored, falsified, unreliable) you STUPID SHEEP keep buying into the BRAIN DEAD notion that somehow, these wars are for the FREEDOM of America.

You’re an IDIOT. They’re wars for EMPIRE.

Your son’s and daughter’s BLOOD is being used as OIL to grease an evil, out of control WAR MACHINE….Your money and financial security is being DEVOURED by Wall St. and the Federal Reserve, with collusion from YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES, and your standard of living is slowly eroding into a two-class system as the middle class is being FORCED INTO EXTINCTION……

……and you do NOTHING to stop ANY of it.

You ignorant FOOLS who send shotgun Emails to all your friends warning of “death panels” and other such HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY PROPAGANDA, yes, you friggin’ GOMERS actually think the Health Insurance Industry has your best interests in mind, and it’s “dat mean ol’ gubmint” that wants to penalize you by providing your family health care that isn’t profit-based.

MEDICARE only got passed because it effectively REMOVED the highest-risk group to the insurance providers (the elderly) from the ‘pool’ of prospective insurees, thereby minimizing their financial exposure. It’s completely lost on most people that catastrophic illness is the main reason for personal bankruptcy….and that 75% of those who had to file HAD health insurance.

And this is the ’status quo’ many of you are defending. You are BEYOND dense.

America has lost it’s HONOR, as well as it’s collective senses. I don’t wish upon America any malice or catastrophe…..trust me, this is happening with assistance and collusion from the top down, not from some Arab in a cave. I just want to leave peacefully and live in a place that doesn’t have leaders that hope for a “catastrophic and catalyzing event” to promote a war agenda that takes pride in kicking the shit out of unarmed peasants living in the dirt….then blames them for retaliating. Can’t wait to see this dysfunctional madhouse in my rear view mirror.

When you abide by a system of government that you FULLY EXPECT will side AGAINST YOU and WITH corporate lobbyists (MANY of whom represent interests that are not even from the USA) who BRIBE THEM WITH BALES OF CASH….and are working 24/7 to maximize their profits and minimize their potential competition in the marketplace…..all at the expense of you and your family….and don’t lift a FINGER to do ANYTHING TO CHANGE IT……you fucking DESERVE WHAT’S COMING. What might that be…..?

Think Germany and the treaty of Versailles…..when a wheelbarrow full of Deutschmarks is what it took to buy a MEAL.

WHEN the dollar collapses…..not IF, WHEN…..THAT’S when you’ll really begin to see the true definition of FASCISM. The unity of government and corporations to economically and militarily control it’s people. History WILL repeat itself….but if you’re like so many of the morons in the USA who think they’re so smart but don’t know SHIT…..it will all be NEW TO YOU. Good luck…..you’ll need it.

This is the most ARROGANT nation in EXISTANCE, second only to ISRAEL….and since ALL of our politicians are falling over backwards to kiss Israel’s ASS on a daily basis, fully knowing that exposing any inconvenient TRUTH about them equals political SUICIDE….that and the mass media in America that feeds it’s daily ration of BULLSHIT is controlled by individuals biased towards them as well….ANYONE who thinks they know what is going on because they read TIME magazine and watch CNN, FOX news OR MSNBC…..you are DELUSIONAL.

One nation under God….? What a JOKE.

MONEY is God here pal….even people who are reading this who hate the words I typed KNOW this is true. What does it say in your bible about the love of money? The root of all evil, no?

How DARE this nation question human rights abuses of other nations after Abu Ghraib and countless other bombing and torture campaigns, where it was stated it is passable to crush the testicles of young boys in front of their fathers to extract information.

How DARE this nation deign to be the world’s nuclear police when WE are the only nation to ever USE NUKES.

MOST of you actually consider Palestinians as TERRORISTS, when it is THEY who have been occupied, imprisoned behind 25 foot high concrete walls and denied basic human decency by APARTHEID ISRAEL. Those of you who get your info from American media REMAIN IGNORANT OF THE TRUTH.

You’re probably wondering if I’m some Arab, or other person hostile to “America’s Freedoms” lol…. Yeah, you’re really free here…….

Free to go BANKRUPT if you get sick, even if you HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE.

Free to vote on DIEBOLD voting machines that can flip elections and leave no paper trail.

Free to watch your life savings DWINDLE AND EVAPORATE into the pockets of the ROBBER BARONS you PATRONIZE.

Free to watch your JOB get shipped to CHINA….and then you fucking FOOLS buy the goods PRODUCED FORM THOSE JOBS at Wal Mart, further REWARDING AND ENCOURAGING businesses to CONTINUE this pattern. I have never bought a fucking THING from Wal-Mart, and if you have…..you are a simple, stupid FUCKSTICK.

You’re free to be video monitored, photographed by the millisecond at traffic light traps, electronically surveiled, searched with no warrant, shaken down and partially disrobed at airports, free to be told how much shampoo you are allowed to carry in your luggage, free to buy processed foods that give you cancer, genetically altered vegetables that contain neat things like INSECT DNA, free to pay more than ANY OTHER COUNTRY ON THE PLANET for pharmeceuticals, free to be the pharmaceutical company’s guinea pig for drugs that have potentially catastrophic side effects, free to have PUBLIC POLICY DICTATED TO YOU by government ‘officials’ that have dual citizenship with ISRAEL, free to have ANY MEANINGFUL TRUTH WITHHELD FROM YOU by the mass media……

…..and free to be one of the ONE OUT OF EVERY HUNDRED AMERICANS living in PRISON.

Land of the free, home of the brave??

More like land of the SHEEP and home of the SLAVE.

Today I learned that there are snipers atop buildings in the downtown core, in case any “terrorists” attack or there isn’t enough cheering when $country wins $medal. Click to enlarge the pics.

Anybody know what kind of sniper rifle that is?

EDIT – The comments have taught me that the two guns aren’t “sniper” rifles. In my ignorance of all things firearms-related, I assumed they were so. Thanks, Reddit.

Should have let them all drown, Alan. Down to the bottom of Davy Jones’ locker where the fish could pick them clean for millennia. And by extension, let them starve. In the hundreds of thousands. The things you could have exacted for a modicum of respect.

This is interesting. I’d never heard of this before, but it warrants some analysis.

Look at where we sit. more individualistic AND more secular-rational than the good ol’ US. Japan and Sweden are at the top, who would have thought? I wonder how old this is, it shows Eastern and Western Germany. It also misspells Czech as “Chech”. Look how close Poland is to India, it’s not too hard to believe, I guess. How is Turkey more traditional than India or Poland? Kemal must be turning over in his grave.

Also, Uruguay’s secular enough to belong to “Catholic Europe”. I guess they broke out of Latin America after all. Let me know your thoughts.

One of the most fascinating topics is linguistics and I consider myself an armchair linguist. Several forms of consonant shift exist, and can be seen throughout the varied family of Indo-European languages, which are spoken by a majority of humans today. Let me illustrate with some examples:

b/v alternation

Seen in words like probe/prove. Even in names like Elizabeth/Elizaveta and so on. Also heard in other people’s diction. For example, whenever an accented Spanish-speaking person says “Vancouver”, most Canadians will undoubtedly hear it as “Bancouver”. This is because the sounds we make that are responsible for ‘b’ and ‘v’ are very similar, and only the slightest movement of the lips differentiates between ‘b’ and ‘v’.

t/d

t and d are both dentals, i.e., they are sounds made with your teeth. Don’t ask a toothless person to utter them, because without teeth they sound like ‘pf’. As words with t and d migrate, they alternate to give us lots of words. This is visible even within a single language, as people hear and mishear and transcribe slightly different variations of the same word. Consider Willingdon/Willington.

d/th

This applies to the soft d seen in many European languages, but which is missing in English. The closest an English-speaker can come to making this sound is the  ‘th’ sound in ‘thee’ or ‘there’. Which is why it’s no surprise that these consonants undergo an orthographic transformation to end up as th. Witness deist/theist or danke/thank.

f/v

This one is huge. One massive culprit is German, where the v is pronounced as f, which is not shocking, since v and f result from almost the same anatomical movements. Textbook example: vier/four.

b/p

Similarly, b and p are both labials, i.e., they are both sounds produced with the lips.  Over time, as words migrate between languages, the b’s and p’s alternate and give us variants. Token example: bop/pop.

v/w

This gives most non-native speakers more grief than it’s worth. Some people simply can’t pronounce the v, and pronounce everything as if it’s a w. An example of this being present not due an inability of the speakers is German, where their sounds are swapped. In any case, w is a fairly recent letter and as such, deserves little respect.

j/y/i

This can be seen in the hordes of Norwegians who pronounce Java as Yava, and the tons of languages where j is pronounced as y. Well, j itself is the newest addition to the English language and simply supplants i. An example: major/mayor. This one needs no further examples.

k/g

This applies to the hard g, not the soft g. Best example: gnos/know. Again, this is because both sounds are velars, produced by the roof of the mouth.

m/n

Both sounds being nasal in nature, it is easy to mix them up, especially since most people don’t articulate well these days. Witness the confusion when you meet someone who either talks too fast or mumbles with incoherent diction. In fact, I bet it’s sounds like these that gave rise to the whole Alpha, Bravo, Charlie code, to prevent any confusion. This one is a bit more involved and involves a rule called ‘assimilation’, where a consonant is changed to become more like the surrounding one. Consider the word ‘imbibe’. it comes about from in + bibere, which means ‘to drink’ in Latin. Since we have an n + b, the n is assimilated and becomes an m. The same holds for impossible, imbue and so on. This is a complex topic and one I’ll discuss later.

r/d

This can be seen in some Slavic tongues, where the name Mary becomes Madia, for example. A very thick, rhotacizing effect can change an r into a d, if sufficiently ‘hard’ enough.

These can also be daisy-chained, giving us quite the sequence of alternations. Consider p->b->v->f. Thus, where we had a word with p, we end up with one that now starts with f. Best example: pater/father. The link is more convoluted, probably looking more like pater-> pader-> vader-> fader-> father.

There are many many more which I haven’t covered. After all, this was just the primer. Since the primary vehicle of consonant shift up until now has been spoken or written speech, with spoken speech being the overwhelming majority, it is now time to consider the new kid on the block: typed speech.

Written speech was limited in the damage it could cause, since it was usually proofread and corrected by legions of editors, only too happy to wield the red pen like the sword of Tamerlane. Alas, typed speech on the internet suffers no such restrictions. Let us ignore non-English, non-standard keyboard layouts for now. Since the majority of English communication on the internet occurs via the humble 104- key keyboard, we can focus on this particular specimen.

Here are a list of common mistakes people have made when writing me emails or in instant messaging. I’ve described them in terms of the same notation above.

b/v

m/n

k/l

g/h

w/e

r/t

s/d

c/v

u/i

c/x

We notice right away that b/v and m/n already exist. Typing mistakes can only make them stronger. We can also discard the ones with vowel/consonant pairings, since on being read aloud, it is likely that they will be dismissed as being improbable. This leads us to discard w/e.

We’re left with k/l. at this point, we have to decide if such jumps are possible. k is a hard velar sound, while l is a soft liquid sound. Try saying a word with k in it after substituting l for k. Let us consider cake -> cale -> lale. Or kiss -> liss. How about kilometre -> lilometre? That just sounds silly, as does lale. But kiss -> liss might work. It seems that a soft word like liss, composed of a liquid sound like l and sibilants like s might actually do a better job, onomatopoeically speaking. So perhaps we need to amend the rules. k- > l, iff l precedes sibilants? How about the other way around, l-> k? Liter -> kiter or lion – > kion. Seems doubtful, but you have to understand it’s very hard for us to do this. Most of us are too far entrenched in English to think of these as anything beyond laughable. But to someone who is unaware that lion sounds right since it derives from leo and so on, why, kion for a big yellow cat might make perfect sense.

G -> h could succeed on a very slender stem of probability, but even I must admit it’s unlikely. Many words have a ‘gh’ combination in them, and simply deleting one or the other might still leave the meaning unchanged. The biggest obstacle here is the fact that h is an aspirant, a sound made by breathing out air, something g is most definitely not.

R -> t probably has the biggest chance of succeeding. Since r/d occurs already, and so does d/t, we can easily get r-> d.

C -> v also has a moderately good chance of succeeding, simply because they’re so similar. The labial v might be a little hard to overcome, however.

U -> i is probable as well, since throughout history vowels have been shuffled around. We’re focusing on consonant shift here, so we’ll leave this advanced topic for later.

Finally c -> x awaits. We need to remember that the letter x is simply shorthand for ‘ks’ or ‘cs’, with a hard ‘c’ of course. Words that are spelled ax can just as easily be spelled acs or aks. However, does this mean that c -> x is probable? Consider ax -> ac, or mix -> mic. All that’s missing is the final s, which could be forgiven, if and only if the non-s word wasn’t an already-extant word. Ac would work for this reason, but mic wouldn’t. How about the other way around? Spic -> spix or nick -> nix? The addition of the s leaves the original word’s meaning almost unaltered, except for imposing a plural definition. This is something that might be coped with, especially given the current decline of plural usage ubiquitous today.

One must remember that I’m an armchair linguist and this is merely my hobby, but it should be exceedingly interesting to see which of these, if any ever come to pass. After all, languages are living things and only imbeciles seek to control them. The most we can do is marvel at their beauty and see which way their inky wonders flow.