<![CDATA[Colored letters revisited in other languages.]]>Someone asked me what a bunch of letters, I think in the Russian alphabet, would look like to me synaesthetically. My answer was that at first they would look like the colors of the letters that most resembled them in English (although some of them, I noticed that even if the Russian letter was, say, similar to a standard English numeral, I often interpreted it as a rotated and/or flipped letter instead of a numeral. No idea why). And then, if I ever learned the actual pronunciations, it’s a good bet that they would, if analogous to pronunciation I knew in my usual alphabet, grow to resemble the colors of those letters, and even the ones that were not the usual, would gain pronunciations of their own.

And, I know I have a lot of people’s mail to answer, but I’ve been among other things pretty absorbed in documenting how I now see Arabic letters. I took Arabic for a year in college, and while I remember almost none of the words (I remember some long strings of words, but reciting the Quran is not exactly conversational), I retained the alphabet just fine. So this is a foreign language whose alphabet I’ve already learned, which has correlations to the colors of letters in English now, as well as some of its own colors for sounds that can’t be easily approximated by English sounds.

So I’m going to warn you that what’s up ahead in this post is very long, very graphic-intensive, and not necessarily all that blind-accessible (I try to do descriptions, but don’t always succeed well). Also, please note that I was wearing tinted glasses and using as dark a monitor setting as possible when I made my last letters, so I just remade them again and they’ll look a bit different than before. (I still have copies of the old ones but they look all wrong.)

I’m now going to try to post this and hope it came out right.

Edited to add: You can hear the sounds of the Arabic alphabet here:

(corrected because I’d accidentally posted one of them twice)

Or, if you like it musical, here:

Or, if you like it musical with cute little kids singing it:

Anyway, on to the synaesthetic stuff.

Here are the English letters:

the letter A in blue
the letter B in orange
the letter C in red
the letter D in brown
the letter E in green
the letter F in dark yellow
the letter G in purple
the letter H in orange
the letter I in white
the letter J in blue
the letter K in blue
the letter L in transparent
the letter M in red
the letter N in orange
the letter O in black
the letter P in green
the letter Q in pink
the letter R in purple
the letter S in red
the letter T in brown
the letter U in yellow
the letter V in light purple
the letter W in pink
the letter X in purple
the letter Y in yellow
the letter Z in brown

Then the Arabic letters:

the letter alif in blue

The letter alif is blue. It works a lot like A in English.

the letter baa in orange

The letter baa is orange. Like B in English.

the letter taa in brown

The letter taa is brown. Like T in English.

the letter thaa in brown

The letter thaa is brown. Like a hard TH (as in baTH) in English.

the letter jiim in blue

The letter jiim is light blue. Like J in English.

the letter Hhaa in orange

The letter ?aa is orange. It doesn’t have an English equivalent. It’s usually transliterated as ?. It’s similar to an H sound, but not the same as usual in English.

the letter khaa in brown

The letter khaa is brown. It doesn’t (except in certain accents) have an English equivalent, it’s sort of like the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’ in Scottish.

the letter daal in brown

The letter daal is brown. Like D in English.

the letter dhaal in brown

The letter dhaal is brown. Like a soft TH in English (as in ‘cloTHing’).

the letter raa in purple

The letter raa is purple. Like an R in Spanish.

the letter zaa in brown

The letter zaa is brown. Like a Z in English.

the letter siin in red

The letter siin is red. Like S in English.

the letter shiin in red

The letter shiin is red. Like SH in English.

the letter Saad in red

The letter Saad (also ?aad, represented usually as ?) is red. It has no English equivalent. It’s similar to an S, but not the same thing.

the letter Daad in red-brown

The letter Daad (also ?aad, represented usually as ?) is red-brown. It has no English equivalent. It’s similar to a D, but not the same thing.

the letter Taa in brown

The letter Taa (also ?aa, represented usually as ?) is brown. It has no English equivalent. It’s similar to a T, but not the same thing.

the letter Dhaa in brown

The letter Dhaa (also ?aa, represented usually as ?) is brown. It has no English equivalent, and not even a whole lot of easy analogies in English sounds. It’s like a cross between a soft TH and a V, sort of.

the letter ayn in light blue

The letter ?ayn is light blue. It’s usually represented as ?. It’s a glottal stop, and while we make those noises in English, they’re not written down. (They’re sort of the noise you’d make if you said “bottom” but didn’t pronounce the “tt” part, the part where the “tt” would be is the noise this letter makes.)

the letter ghayn in light purple

The letter ghayn is light purple. It makes the same sound as a French R.

the letter faa in dark yellow

The letter faa is dark yellow. Like F in English.

the letter qaaf in red

The letter qaaf is red. I think the sound would normally be represented by K, but it’s not the same sound as a usual K.

the letter kaaf in blue

The letter kaaf is blue. Like K in English.

the letter laam in transparent

The letter laam is transparent. Like L in English.

the letter meem in red

The letter meem is red. Like M in English.

the letter noon in orange

The letter noon is orange. Like N in English.

the letter waw in pink

The letter waw is pink. Like W in English (also makes an “oo” sound as a vowel).

the letter haa in orange

The letter haa is orange. Like H in English.

the letter yaa in yellow

The letter y is yellow. Like y in English (also makes an “ee” sound as a vowel).

And… now that I’ve got all that out of the way, here are the letters as grouped by color.

red letters

The letters in various shades of red are C, M, Q, S, W, thaa, khaa, siin, sheen, ?aad, ?aad, qaaf, meem, and waw.

orange letters

The letters in various shades of orange (including red-orange and orange-yellow) are B, D, H, N, T, Z, baa, taa, daal, dhaal, zaa, ?aa, noon, ?aa, ?aa, and haa.

yellow letters

The letters in yellow are F, U, Y, faa, and yaa.

green letters

The letters in green are E and P.

blue letters

The letters in blue are A, J, K, alif, jiim, `ayn, and kaaf.

purple letters

The letters in purple are G, R, V, X, ghayn, and raa.

colorless letters

The letters without a color are I, L, O, and laam. L and laam are also transparent.

If you’ve read this far, congratulations. 😛

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