[Gllug] Xmodmap Help

[Nix]

On 22 Sep 2010, dylan at dylan.me.uk spake thusly:

> On Wednesday 22 Sep 2010, Krishna Birth wrote:
>> @ dylan at dylan.me.uk
>> 
>> The reason for the shape change of the k / K to ~ / ~ (viewed via UTF8) is
>> for spiritual reasons, http://Kalphabet.googlepages.com.
>
> That is just the biggest pile of claptrap I have ever seen!

Oh, I dunno, it's religion, that makes it automatically an interesting
cultural artifact. (I find it especially interesting that the *letter K*
is apparently held to have an 'intention'.

It does show a notable ignorance of history, though.

"The alphabet "K" is not only common to the english language but various
other european languages such as Latvian and Polish", er, yeah. It comes
from Phonecian kaph (unsurprisingly), which was typically drawn with the
three evil intersecting lines. The implication in that page that K
started out English and spread from there is hilariously wrong (unless
the ancient Roman and Greek civilizations were founded by time-
travelling Brits, that is). In fact, his representation of Hebrew
(misdescribed as 'Yiddish') shows Kaph (with a rather unusual
transliteration), which as the name suggestsis descended directly
from... Phonecian kaph! So one of the examples of a non-evil letter
*shows* the evil letter but fails to recognise it! Perhaps it's not evil
because all the intersecting lines have disappeared?  (I find it amusing
that "Krishna Birth" knew that the font on his readers' screens would
show the letter K with three intersecting lines, given that the very
website referenced has many examples of fonts in which it does *not*
have three intersecting lines in it at all. Nor is it the only letter
with three lines intersecting at a point: some renderings of 'H' would
satisfy this criterion too, to to mention '@'.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phoenician_alphabet.svg> shows it.
Note that K is quite recognisable. (Some of the letter assignments there
are debatable, but the K is not.)

(As an aside, my sister Katharine is apparently doomed by her very
name. I'm not sure whether to be insulted or amused.)
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug