Monday, September 13, 2010

Foreign Alphabets

My brother is not much of a talker yet the conversations he and I have generally leave me laughing.  He's a man of few words, but at least he doesn't waste his time on boring speech.  (I on the other hand, as evidence by this blog, can ramble for days.)  In a brief departure from all things literature I wanted to share a quick conversation Brother and I had*.  It has to do with the alphabet so it's every-so-slightly book related.  And it's my blog so whatever.

Brother: Alphabets are hard to learn.
Red: Like ABCD?
Brother: Like that, but in Japanese.
Red: I didn't realize they actually had an alphabet.
Brother: They have 2 alphabets in essence.  One is used for inherent Japanese words, and one used for borrowed words. Both of which are longer than our standard alphabet, and that's not even getting into the Kanji.
Red: Why are you learning the Japanese alphabet?
Brother: Cause I'm taking Japanese
Red: orly?**
Brother: It's my elective.
Red: So you decided to pick a super hard elective on top of all your engineering stuff?
Brother: Well the alphabet will be the only real challenge.
Red: So you have to learn 3 alphabets?
Brother: Pretty much.
Red: You should have taken Italian: 1 alphabet that doesn't even have all of our letters. Screw J,K,W,X,Y.
Brother: They are the outcasts of the English alphabet anyway.  I don't know how Z and Q squeeked by though.
Red: They needed "pizza". Q is suspect though.  I think it hid behind R.  They like to roll their R's so Q just hid behind it.
Brother: I think Q pulled something dirty to switch with K.
Red: Ah, totally! "Taqe that K!"

*The convo is edited a bit, not to add in any witty remarks that were thought of after the fact or to change the language, but to eliminate some of the back and forth that happened in between. I also added things like punctuation and capitalization. Brother and I are  both lazy and leave these out of IM talk but it's easier to go back and re-read the stuff when it's there.

**I use stupid internet slang with certain people.  Don't judge me.  Also notice that in IMs I use internet slang like "orly" and Brother says things like "in essence" and "inherent Japanese words" in normal conversation.  Even though I have the English degree I shouldn't be too surprised he's beating me in one of our Words Free games. I did manage to destroy him the first time but he's mounting a comeback.