Archive of September 2008
A thought on Yiddish’s interest
So, I’ve been studying Yiddish for nearly a year at this point, and it continues to hold my interest; that fact itself is something of a novelty. It’s an interesting language.
And one of its many interesting features is its orthography. Like many, but certainly not all, other languages, Yiddish went through a relatively vigorous process of standardization and tumult; like perhaps not quite so many that process has been very well-documented, and is still discussed with great… interest by a very good portion of its speakers and writers.
One of the aspects of the orthography which interests me at the moment is its treatment of what is known as loshn-koydesh, the portion of the vocabulary which derives from Aramaic and Hebrew. Hebrew, as you may know, is an abjad, which doesn’t under normal circumstances write out any of its vowels. Yiddish is not. Germanic languages not being particularly suited to that sort of shortcut, it has developed pretty stable letters for all of the vowels—except when it comes to writing any word that was borrowed into the language from the Hebrew or Aramaic, like toyre, ganef, oylem, et cetera.
So what we end up with is very interesting: it’s almost like there are two parallel orthographies in any given Yiddish text. One is highly phonemic, totally explicit, and very European, and one is totally semitic, rather oblique, and derives straight from a language that has no genealogical relationship to Yiddish, but nevertheless informs it and filters through in just about every context. And depending on the origin of the word in question, you use the same alphabet to write it in two utterly different ways, according to two different sets of rules.
Have you ever heard of such a thing, lazyweb? I guess the eastern scripts, Japanese in particular, have a similar thing going. Kanji for the bulk of the words, and then Kana for anything you need to spell out. Almost a reverse situation. Any more?
The Game That Doesn’t Die
I’ve experienced a major upswing in roguelike activity lately. Turn based strategy games are really the only ones that ever held my attention, and of those the most enduring love affair was always with ADOM and its brethren. I pretty much haven’t consistently played ADOM since 2001 or 2002, when I got my first laptop, and thus lost the numpad. That smaller keyboard has actually had a pretty dampening effect on my roguelike activity since then. You can write new keyboard cfgs for ADOM, but doing all that swapping always was a project I had just too little time for. Some day, I’m sure.
But my interest has, ever since that point, periodically swelled back, and I’ve periodically gone around the web to see what other roguelikes there are to find. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that in the last 7 years web searching technology has also gotten much more effective. Now there’s roguelike wikis, roguelike blogs… and surprisingly, a very active roguelike community.
So I’ve found a couple new ones and I’ve been enjoying the heck out of them. The best two are Incursion and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The former is based pretty deeply on the D20 Dungeons and Dragons system, and so it has a lot of the same monsters and classes and stuff. It isn’t chock-full of crazy creatures and items and flavor text, but the really thorough, well-thought out nature of the system makes up for it. Crawl is kind of the opposite; it has far fewer weird actions and isn’t really concerned with the ability to, you know, dip a knife in a potion and then put the knife in a trap and automatically have a monster trigger it and get stabbed or whatever, and only three attributes (ST, INT, DEX), but it’s got a really good, low-barrier, combat-centric system worked out, and a really satisfying array of stuff, like crazy gods and classes and species. A little more Diablo/Gauntlet-y, I guess.
But in both cases, what’s probably the one reason that I’ve actually been playing them is that they natively support rogue-style navigation keys (HJKL), which means you can play them on a laptop. And as a vim-man, it’s an easy step for me. One of these days I’m going to stick my toes back in the Angband pool and see how it feels.
