Suppose again, if you’re going to, to the climactic scenes of Indiana Jones and the Remaining Crusade, which occur within the concealedden temple that contains the Holy Grail. His father having been shot via the dastardly Nazi-sympathizing immortality-seeker Walter Donovan, Indy has no selection however to retrieve the legendary cup to use its reputed healing powers. This involves going thru 3 uselessly chambers, considered one of which has a flooring covered in stones, each and every one categorised with a letter of the alphawager. The way in which thru, according to Jones père’s analysis, is the identify of God. But if Indy steps on “J” for Jehovah, it crumbles away, and he close toly plunges into the enormous pit under.
After all, true lovers could have already quoted the relevant line: “However within the Latin alphawager, Jehova starts with an I!” The ones people who first watched the film as youngsters — and, for that matter, many people who first watched it as adults — simply took that reality as given. But when we watch the RobPhrases video above, we will be able to learn the way and when that “I” turned into a “J”.
To the traditional Romans, explains host Rob Watts, those letters have been one and the similar, serving each vowel and consonant responsibility relying at the contextual content (as in “Iulius” Caesar). Either one of them date again to a “relatively extra complicated character” that appears like a foully contorted F, and which originated as a percenttogram repredespatcheding a human hand and forearm.
The letter J simplest emerged later, “when scribes needed to differentiate between those two usages.” (As we’ve noticed, it additionally introduced the descendants of the Knights Templar a solution to trick interlopers of their caverns.) Thruout the process the video, Watts covers this and other curious steps within the evolution of the alphawager we use to jot down English and plenty of other languages nowadays. Those professionalduced such features because the plural of knife and wolf being knives and wolves, the appearing tremendousfluity of Q, and — for an Englishguy like Watts, an unignorin a position subject — the transatlantic “zed”/“zee” dividing line. Examinationined shutly, the types of our letters tells a millennia-spanning story whose forged contains Egyptians, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, and others but even so. And because the experience of Indiana Jones illustrates, you never know while you’ll want its classes.
Related content:
The Evolution of the Alphawager: A Colorful Floatchart, Covering 3,800 Years, Takes You From Historical Egypt to Nowadays
How Writing Has Unfold Around the Global, from 3000 BC to This 12 months: An Animated Map
The Writing Systems of the Global Defined, from the Latin Alphawager to the Abugidas of India
How you can Write in Cuneiform, the Outdatedest Writing System within the Global: A Brief, Attractioning Introduction
The Outdatedest Recognized Sentence Written in an Alphawager Has Been Discovered on a Head-Lice Comb (Circa 1700 BC)
Based totally in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and extensivecasts on towns, language, and culture. His tasks come with the Substack newsletter Books on Towns and the e book The Statemuch less Town: a Stroll thru Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee book.
