Ian Knot :: "useless" letters

[pne]

I realised this morning that I appear to have made a habit of the Ian Knot—not only do I start tying it automatically when I want to tie my shoelaces, but I don't even have to think of the finger movements specifically any more.

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I remember a while back reading about alphabets used for various languages spoken in the former Soviet Union; they often contained letters which the table said were used only for writing loanwords from Russian.

I thought that was rather quaint... but recently, I've thought about the situation in German, and I think it has a couple of them, too. (And while typing this up, I realised that Latin was in a similar situation, with three letters—C K Q—for one sound, though Latin ended up splitting them up for different uses.)

Specifically, I couldn't think of any "native" German words with the letters X and Y in them; English, on the other hand, used those letters for native words as well (wax, by) while German goesn't (Wachs, bei).

Also, C is arguably a "loan-word-only" letter in German; in native words, it occurs only in the combinations ck ch sch.

Which probably explains why C X Y are used in German Grade 2 Braille for letter combinations (en mm el), since the letters themselves aren't common (and if you want to represent them, you have to "escape" them with a dot-6). (Q is also used, for "ll", since while Q occurs in native German words, it's not that common.)

Comments

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

I have tied that knot in my laces since I was in the military in the mid-70's.

Its automatic.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

"Specifically, I couldn't think of any "native" German words with the letters X"

How about "Hexe" or "Nixe"?

Another letter that is rare in native German words is probably "c", except in digraphs and trigraphs.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

Hah! When coffeechica was visiting, Amie's shoelaces came untied, and I thought to myself, "I should tie these the usual way, because she's probably learning to tie shoes now".

But I had no idea how. Not only do I always use the Ian knot on my own shoes, I can't even remember the old way!

(So I did an Ian knot and Carrie and Jason went "Wait, what did you just do?")

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

I still get confused by Z standing for "as" and X standing for "it" in English braille.