Words

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for 'not enough coffee'
Wally (from the Dilbert comic)

My mind works in mysterious way, sometimes I remember things long after actually talking about it and then remember the details.

We talked about languages a couple of weeks ago, and tried to remember which language group polish is in. It's a satemlanguage (nope, never heard of before), with subgroups slavik->west slavik which Polish is a sub language of(like Czech and Slovak). Finnish, on the other hand, (like Hungarian) is part of the finn-ugrian language family, together with estonian (spoken in Estonia).

To continue a bit with languages, we go to China. Here, a multitude of dialects (perhaps should simply be called languages) are spoken, but everyone writes in the same way. If they would have an alphabet such as our western societies, they would have no clue regarding the writing either, and the country would probably not be able to exist in the way it does now.

Some people want to write words the way they say them. Considering the many dialects of most bigger languages, it would then become impossible to understand in one end of a country what someone has written in another end of the same country. Even in small countries such as Sweden and Denmark, there would be trouble in understanding...

(If you like the comics, I recommend subscribing to the Dilbert daily comic - it's a great way to wake up in the afternoon! :D)