All your alphabets are belong to us!
Oct. 11th, 2009 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranToday, in the course of reading about the Iroha poem[1], I happened to find out the standard ordering system for Japanese kana is actually Sanskrit based. This fact sat in my brain while I did various things (including yum cha, coffee, doing my tax) until finally trickling out into the "but that would mean..." moment.
One thing that's been slowly me down in Hindi is learning the order of the Devanagari alphabet. I can read most of the letters now, but try looking up a word in the dictionary if you haven't memorized which order they come in. But, if the kana are Sanskrit based, and obviously, the Devanagari WILL be Sanskrit based, so that means... A quick check, and, yes! With some exceptions, both writing systems use roughly the same ordering. So, now I've got a faster way to look up Hindi words I don't know, plus an extra incentive to memorize the proper order of the kana.
[1] The Iroha poem is a Heian era poem which uses every kana exactly once - thus providing an alternative indigenous alphabetical order. You can still find examples where the syllables of the poem are used to order things, which is another of those little gems of information that I just love.
One thing that's been slowly me down in Hindi is learning the order of the Devanagari alphabet. I can read most of the letters now, but try looking up a word in the dictionary if you haven't memorized which order they come in. But, if the kana are Sanskrit based, and obviously, the Devanagari WILL be Sanskrit based, so that means... A quick check, and, yes! With some exceptions, both writing systems use roughly the same ordering. So, now I've got a faster way to look up Hindi words I don't know, plus an extra incentive to memorize the proper order of the kana.
[1] The Iroha poem is a Heian era poem which uses every kana exactly once - thus providing an alternative indigenous alphabetical order. You can still find examples where the syllables of the poem are used to order things, which is another of those little gems of information that I just love.
