An alphabet is a standardized set of written letters that represent particular spoken sounds in a language. Specifically, letters correspond to phonemes, the categories of sounds that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographic systems assign symbols to spoken words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, strange loops, artificial intelligence, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
E, or e, is the fifth letter and the second vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is e ; plural es, Es or E's.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields.
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided. Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.
Oulipo is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to describe another language, often called the object language. Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object language by the use of italics, quotation marks, or writing on a separate line. The structure of sentences and phrases in a metalanguage can be described by a metasyntax. For example, to say that the word "noun" can be used as a noun in a sentence, one could write "noun" is a <noun>.
An ambigram is a calligraphic composition of glyphs that can yield different meanings depending on the orientation of observation. Most ambigrams are visual palindromes that rely on some kind of symmetry, and they can often be interpreted as visual puns.
Ernest Vincent Wright was an American writer known for his book Gadsby, a 50,000-word novel which, except for the introduction and a note at the end, did not use the letter "e".
A Void, translated from the original French La Disparition, is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without using the letter e, following Oulipo constraints. Perec would go on to write with the inverse constraint in Les Revenentes, with only the vowel “e” present in the work. Ian Monk would later translate Les Revenents into English under the title The Exeter Text.
A univocalic is a type of antilipogrammatic constrained writing that uses only consonants and a single vowel, in English "A", "E", "I", "O", or "U", and no others.
A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.
Letter frequency is the number of times letters of the alphabet appear on average in written language. Letter frequency analysis dates back to the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi, who formally developed the method to break ciphers. Letter frequency analysis gained importance in Europe with the development of movable type in 1450 AD, where one must estimate the amount of type required for each letterform. Linguists use letter frequency analysis as a rudimentary technique for language identification, where it is particularly effective as an indication of whether an unknown writing system is alphabetic, syllabic, or ideographic.
The type–token distinction is the difference between naming a class (type) of objects and naming the individual instances (tokens) of that class. Since each type may be exemplified by multiple tokens, there are generally more tokens than types of an object. For example, the sentence "A rose is a rose is a rose" contains three word types: three word tokens of the type a, three word tokens of the type rose and two word tokens of the type is. The distinction is important in disciplines such as logic, linguistics, metalogic, typography and computer programming.
Logology is the field of recreational linguistics, an activity that encompasses a wide variety of word games and wordplay. The term is analogous to the term "recreational mathematics".
Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics is a quarterly magazine on recreational linguistics, logology and word play. It was established by Dmitri Borgmann in 1968 at the behest of Martin Gardner. Howard Bergerson took over as editor-in-chief for 1969, but stepped down when Greenwood Periodicals dropped the publication. A. Ross Eckler Jr., a statistician at Bell Labs, became editor until 2006, when he was succeeded by Jeremiah Farrell.
Stuart Barnes is an Australian poet.
