20.8.3.14:06: WHITE RAT 6.14

? qulugh ai ? sair par ? nyair

'white rat year, six month, ten four day'

1. Today I was surprised to learn that the Sogdian script had a variant of the letter shin (U+10F45 SOGDIAN INDEPENDENT SHIN) to transcribe Chinese 所 (which had an initial *ʂ- in Middle Chinese; modern standard Mandarin s- is irregular).

2. The Sogdian letter ayin (U+10F12) is quite unlike the others in shape and has no descendant in the Old Uyghur line of scripts leading to the Mongolian and Manchu scripts. Where have I seen such a spiral character before? Khmer ៚ គោមូត្រ <gomūtra> [koːmuːt] 'cow urine' first came to mind, but it has a tail and isn't coiled enough (and in some fonts isn't coiled at all). I have seen spiral characters in other Indic scripts, but they too aren't as coined as Sogdian ayin.

3. Today I mailed my Hawaii primary election ballot which had Ilocano instructions for getting a translated version. Ilocano is the third most spoken home language in Hawaii after English and Tagalog if Pidgin is not counted. Wikipedia has an unsourced figure of 85% for Ilocanos in the Filipino population in Hawaii.

Today I learned the term Ilocandia for "the traditional homeland of the Ilocano people".

4. Today I learned that the 'Sea Peoples' are a modern classification for peoples which had Egyptian exonyms. For years I just assumed they were so mysterious that they didn't even have exonyms!