The Book Game Thingy

So instead of doing the fifth line from the twenty third page of one book, I'm doing multiple books to see how they look together a la The Yak Shaver.

Here's what I got:

I lingered in that tenement, keeping my ears alert to conversations, drifting off to other rooms. That girl was drained. We had to dash back for fear of the filth splashing on our platties, but splussshhhh and glolp she went, down and lovely. "I have more than this, more than you can see: talent, perhaps, and humor of a sort, and I'm a lady and I have pride and affection and delicacy and a certain clear view of life that might make a man satisfied and productive and happy; there's more than you think when you look at me." The face in the motor car will then be known. I concentrated on running away, waiting for the right moment. This pattern of presentation may have certain advantages, and the personality in the wings remains the dominant reality. "Subject and object and the nature of reality," Andrew had said. A couple of the privates in my platoon actually couldn't take it anymore and started breaking down in tears on the first day. For that day we all must labour, though we die before it break; cows and horses, geese and turkeys, all must toil for freedom's sake. I thought we were gentlemen.


In order:

Fade - Robert Cormier
Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg
City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem - M. Kamel Hussein
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
My War: Killing Time in Iraq - Colby Buzzell
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard

(my apologies to my fiancee for putting the books back in the wrong places. I'm sure there is some order to that shelf, I just can't figure out what it is.)

A-B-C

I'm working on my final assignment for my Aztec class and I had to write an Aztec word I heard pronounced in a lecture. It is pronounced "Shou-co-ot" but it is spelled Xiuhcoatl.

This has bothered me for a really long time: if you're translating a language that does not use the Latin alphabet into Latin writing, why would there be silent letters? Why wouldn't it be spelled out phonetically?

If the language were already written in our alphabet there would be reasons for silent letters (pronunciation changes over time, etc.) but if you're taking a completely foreign language and writing it in your own alphabet why not sound it out?

This was a real problem for me when I studied Tibet because their language is written in the Latin alphabet in such a way that what you see has absolutely nothing to do with how it is pronounced. To read it fluently you need to learn a very complicated set of rules that tell you which combinations of letters say what.

It's not even like we're trying to come up with symbols for sounds that we don't have in our language.

What gives?