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... Liam ... Midlothian ... Cthonic ... Rhiannon ...
Certain strange symbols just captivate me, and have for years. They carry an extraordinary feel, a mysterious attraction, an exotic air --- but I can't quite figure out why.
Is it some particular groupings of letters (e.g., "IA") that they often seem to share? But "diary", "crucial", "mathematician", etc. don't move me, or at least not much.
Is it the way some words look on the page, like they should spell something backwards? But they don't, usually, and the special words catch my attention as much when heard as when read.
Is it a particular linguistic history? But I don't (consciously) know their background.
What is the source of these words' magic?
H.P. Lovecraft knew one criterium: their archetypical intrinsic unpronouncability. Tolien knew another: mixing for the (English) reader exotic phonemes and word melody (Finnish - Old Norse - Arabic for instance). -- BL
(I remember hearing, years ago, of somebody's theory that all language could be analyzed based on letter patterns using a particular 4 x 7 matrix derived from ancient Arabic or some such occult source. Sounded nutty at the time, especially in its claimed application to free-text information retrieval and relevance-ranking. On the other hand, N-grams do sometimes seem to offer an information-theoretic way to cluster related terms ... and hashing is a well-known and productive approach to some kinds of data manipulation ....)
TopicPoetry - TopicLanguage - Datetag20011202
Sometimes, new information can be discerned from old data simply by applying a new structure -- any structure! 'Course, there's no way of knowing in advance if this new information is in any way useful or relevant... :)
When in doubt, just XOR together all the characters in an arbitrary result string and discard the first byte. :))
-- [[BoLeuf]]
One of my weird friend Barry's "Laws" is:
(correlates: BarryLawsAndPrecepts, FactorAndFactotum, TwoButNotThree, ...)