#and the danish letters å æ ø which i'm not sure i should count because i always guess wrong initially and have to try nearby
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coquelicoq · 25 days ago
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I just saw the post on the alt codes you memorized and got so excited bc you are the first other person I heard of who also memorized alt codes! For me, it’s bc I started learning Old Babylonian and there is no keyboard with all the diacritics I needed to transcribe them, so I decided it would be the easiest to make myself an additional vocabulary deck to learn the alt codes (that I needed to create my Babylonian vocabulary deck). How have you memorized your alt codes?
omg that is awesome. i have so many questions for you. what are the babylonian alt codes??? or did you add them yourself? (can you add new alt codes? seems like you should be able to, since it's possible to add keyboard shortcuts, and alt codes are really just a type of keyboard shortcut.) i can see that cuneiform signs are in unicode but i can't find any alt code lists that include them. or are you transliterating babylonian into the latin alphabet with diacritics?
another question did you memorize codes for every single one because holy shit there's like hundreds of cuneiform signs according to wikipedia???? that's wild. i can see why you would need flash cards! me i only know probably fewer than 20 total and i just learned them over the course of several years as they became necessary. it's very hard to write a french sentence without é è à and ç, so i'm sure i learned those first, plus ù which is in one very common word that means something totally different if you leave off the accent (où/ou), then probably i had to learn ê â ô and î. but actually you can get pretty far avoiding the other accented letters in french, so i might have been in college before i learned the rest of them lol. somewhere in there i learned the spanish accented letters, but those are mostly right next to each other and there aren't very many of them, so that was easy. i never learned the capitalized accented letters because it's acceptable in french to leave accents off in uppercase (except the cédille, which i know is somewhere in the 120s so i can get there eventually if necessary). initially i look up the number but then over time it gets encoded into muscle memory as i keep using the letter organically in sentences.
most importantly though: how is the old babylonian is it fun it sounds fun
#let's see i'm going to actually count now#é è à ç ù: 5 extremely necessary french accented letters can't leave home without 'em#ê â ô î: 4 french accented letters that are very handy to have around#û ï: not that important for a beginner. ë: kind of optional?? also not common or important for a beginner. for a total of 3#œ: completely optional and kind of just showing off. didn't learn that until a year or two ago. that's 1 additional#ü: technically not optional but i thought it was dumb so i never learned it???? lol. i had to look up the code just now#because it is not in the 150s with the rest of the u's. it's alt+129...idk why#it is the second accented letter in the alt codes (after Ç and before é)#so not counting ü or Ç that's 13 french letters. then we have the spanish letters á í ó ú ñ Ñ. 6 of those#and the danish letters å æ ø which i'm not sure i should count because i always guess wrong initially and have to try nearby#numbers until i get it lol. but sure let's say 3 of those#for 22 total. which i learned over the course of like 20 years#asks#not anon#diacritics#typography#french#what i should do next is learn the guillemets «». ooh and ¿#maybe the degree sign º. that would come in handy from time to time#and i guess the accented capitals 😩#they're all right next to each other if you go up to the 0190s and 0200s. that's not that bad#thank youuuuu for coming to tell me this it is delightful information. memorizers of alt codes unite!!!#this is like when i found the one other person in the world using the same flip phone that i was using in the 2010s#when that kind of flip phone was extremely old and buggy. we would talk about the idiosyncrasies like which words always#got corrected to other very specific and incorrect words and what would happen if someone tried to send us a link#or a text with a character added to unicode after 2007 <3#we bonded over how our phones always turned 'boob' into 'bomb' and how unfortunate that was in our textual correspondence#with people who did not have that problem
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