Why my job satisfies my geek soul

[chanaleh]

(Typography and linguistics geek, that is.)

Today I learned that there exists a double acute accent -- unique to Hungarian, and also known as the "long umlaut".

Which is why, in this one chapter in this one book, all the special characters that I thought were marked as funny-looking o-umlauts in the manuscript, I really do have to change to o-double-acute.

I even looked it up when I was setting this chapter in the first place, to make sure it wasn't some obscure diacritic of which I should be aware. But this chapter is about battles between the Hungarians and the Ottomans... and I thought these were Turkish place names, so I looked up Turkish diacritics, and satisfied myself that they could only be umlauts. But they are actually the Hungarian names, and now I know. (And I never was conscious of a particular resemblance between Hungarian and Turkish before. But, Mezökeresztes? Temesvar? Köszeg?)

Thank goodness Bembo includes a double-acute character, which I am kerning together with the regular o. (I could perhaps have Unicoded it, but I'm not sure my version of Quark would stand for it.) This even inclines me to forgive Bembo for its painfully overenthusiastic kerning of capital letters, which I am having to kern out again on practically every page.

Comments

[sethg]

Cf. the brilliant and eccentric mathematician Pál Erdős.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Aha! I thought my first boyfriends' Erdos number was two, and it is!
(Alas I never wrote a math paper with him, only an Assassin's Guild game, so no Erdos number for me.)

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

Aw, what a doubly-cute accent.

Sorry, I'll crawl back under my rock now.

[ckd]

Yay for typographical geekitude.

I just finished reading Albert-László Barabási's Linked, which of course properly spells Erdős (we'll see if that one makes it through LJ) since Barabási is Hungarian.

Linked is a serious geekitude book, btw. I started reading it because of my interest in social networks, then it got into the use of network theory as applied to the Web and the Internet (yeah, I can dig that)...and then it moved into biological and genomic applications. (Given that I work in an environment surrounded by that stuff every day....)

[sebastian-tombs.livejournal.com]

As it turns out, Hungarian is largely derived from Mongolian, and relatively unrelated to almost anything else still in use in Europe, according to recent reading. Another source tells me that the closest established relative is Finnish.

Not quite...

[zenala.livejournal.com]

Hungarian doesn't come from Mongolian. It's related to two languages just east of the Ural mountains, and with Hungarian they're distantly related to Finnish, Estonian, and similar Finnic languages of northeast Russia.

Hungarian, Finnish, et al make up the Uralic family, which may be related to Altaic, which includes Mongolian and Turkish, among others... But this would be very distant, more distant than English and Hindi are from each other.

[zdenka]

Cool.

[hotpoint.livejournal.com]

Yep! The distinction there is between long and short vowels, and they've got seven basic vowels (a, o, u; e, i; ö, ü) and each can be marked as long (á, ó, ú; é, í; ő, ű).

Nobody else uses it, so it can be hard to find in some fonts or styles. (I find that some word processors will get the uncommon characters correct but can't italicise them, for instance.) For silly reasons I've been trying to learn a bit of Hungarian, and one of my dictionaries (the US published one, natch) uses ô for ő and û for ű, which doesn't give nearly the same visual similarity between the short and long vowels.

Hungarian and Turkish may or may not be very distantly related, and I've seen arguments both ways. I'd say if the place names sound similar, it's because the name stayed almost the same as one side conquered the other -- or that the name predates any of these cultures. I don't know where Danube/Dona/Duna/Donau might have come from, but everybody calls the river the same thing though it flows through 4 language families...

Anyway, I think it's great to work someplace that surprises you. :)

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Very cool!

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Wow that's obscure -- I'm impressed that Wikipedia has an article on it.

[wolfkitn.livejournal.com]

hi there, you don't know me -- i wandered over to your LJ from Points' LJ, and was wandering aimlessly for a few secs until i came across this post, at which point i said "whooaaahh..."

reason being, it happens that my father is hungarian, and so of course my ears (and in this case, eyes :) ) perk up any time i see a reference to that half of my ancestry. so hi! :)

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Hi! Yes, but I recognize your (user)name. And, cool! My great-grandmother was Hungarian.