Path: ...!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail
From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Morse Code Day (27 April)
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2024 15:07:52 +0100
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 Ar an t-ochtú lá is fiche de mí Aibreán, scríobh Ross Clark: 

 > Birthday of Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872), whose very useful
 > invention showed linguistic awareness by correlating (inversely) the length
 > of a code sequence with the frequency of the corresponding letter in
 > English.

Something that we don’t (didn’t) have in English but that, e.g. German did was
a widely-known mnemonic for the codes. The deleted entry on the German
Wikipedia for it is here:

https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/976551/

Each syllable with an <O> was a dash, each syllable without was a dot. I
presume anyone who went to the Bund in .de in the 80s and 90s can remember
their Morse code as a result; how well do (did) English-speakers manage it
after leaving the army? We have a tiny army here and never had National Service
so there’s no local context to evaluate.

 > The famous "What hath God wrought" (no punctuation) message was sent in 1838
 > from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol in Washington to Morse's assistant
 > Alford Vail in Baltimore (about 50km away).

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)