CHRISTIAN MUSLIM DIALOGUE

H.M. Baagil, M.D

May

99

"By dropping the letter

"I"

you will find the word

Allah

IN THE NAME OF ALLAH MOST GRACIOUS MOST MERCIFUL

.

MOHAMMED

PEACE BE UPON HIM

THE BIBLE

Scofield Reference

HOSEA

C2:16

"And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord that thou shalt call me Ishi and shalt call me no more Baali"

AND IT SHALL BE AT THAT DAY SAITH THE LORD THAT THOU SHALT CALL

ME

ISHI

RISHI IS 9 9 IS RISHI

I RISHI RISHI I

IRISH

IRI

I

THE

ALPHABET

UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY OF THE ALPHABET FROM A TO Z

David Sacks 2003

Page 173 (number omitted)

INDEFATIGABLE

I

"Imagine the I as a pillar, supporting its substantial share of English in writing and print. Now count the I's in the preceding sentence (12 to 16 words) and you'll see what I mean - and what I can do, and how busy I may be, no, not me, I'm referring to I... Ah, skip it.

One of our five main vowel letters, I is by some counts the fourth-most-often used letter in English print, below E, T, and A. (Other counts put it sixth, below O and N also; all three letters hover in the same range.) I's strong showing is due partly to its place in the verb "is" and in the "-ing" ending of English participles and gerunds. Also, the I shows up frequently in combinations with other vowels, especially E. /Page 174/ The prononunciation of I and E together is notoriously varied as in the words: varied, sieve, dried, friend, rein, receive, height. By itself, I has two main English sounds, short and long, as in "tin mine."

While short I is pronounced much the same from language to language, our English long I is a maverick: Long I means something different in English from what it means in any other European tongue. Spanish, German, or Czech, for instance, wound pronounce long I as rhyming with "sea" (as in Spanish si), not with "sigh." While such languages may contain the vowel sound of "sigh," they don't spell it as "I" but usually as "EI" combined. Example: German drei (pronounced "dry"), meaining "three."

The "ee" pronunciation of long I is the original and proper one, dating back to the ancient European tongues of Greek, Etruscan, and Latin. English stands apart, due to the mysterious vowel-pronunciation shift in England during the 1400s and 1500s A.D. Prior to then, the medieval English long I was evidently pronounced closer to "ee." The word "life," typically spelled as lif, would have sounded like "leaf." Likewise, the medieval English name for I-derived from Old French and imitative of the vowel's long sound-was more like "ee" than "eye." In modern French, the name is still pronounced "ee."

This continental "ee"-for-I has snuck into modern English in words borrowed mainly from Italian or French since the Middle Ages; pizza, piano, clique, liaison, to name a few; also ski (Norwegian) and Fiona (Gaelic). Among I's other variant sounds are the interesting effects in front of R. In words like "fir" and "nadir," the short I reduces to an indistinct vowel sound, a schwa: yet long I before R will stretch dramatically to almost two vowel sounds: "hire" and "fire" rhyme with "liar." In certain positions before another noun-million, union-the I may take the consonantal sound "y," about which more will be said in the next chapter.

But probably I's most distinctive feature is visual: the starkness /Page 175/ of its, shape. It is the skinniest and simplest of our letters. Traditionally, capital I has been essential to type designers, as the start­ing~point for the creation of a typeface. The designer's I supplies the typeface's basic straight line, to be incorporated into most other letters: A, B, N; etc. As none less than German master artist Albrecht Diirer wrote, in, a1535 treatise on letter design: "Almost all the other letters are formed after this letter, although always something has to be added to it or taken away."
The I being all straight, some, designers recognize a second essential type-design letter-that one that's all curved, O. "Given an O-and an I of any alphabet, we can make a very good guess at the forms of the other letters," the famous British designer Edward Johnston observes in his book Writing and, Illuminating, and Lettering (1906).
Lowercase i is the alphabet's smallest letter. In legibility, this creates a potential shortcoming. (pardon the pun),.that has affected, i's fortunes through the centuries. For example, tbe medieval i originally had no dot but acquired one because the letter as a hatless stroke was hard to distinguish on a crowded page of handwriting. By about A.D. l000 the custom,had arisen of perhaps topping the minuscule letter with a slanted mark, at the writer's discretion: i. With the spread of printing in thdate 1400s, the stroke was generally reduced to an economical dot in many typefaces, although the stroke still shows up today in cursive-print wedding invitations and similar. The i's dot, meanwhile, has.become proverbial for any small detail, in our expression "dot the i's and cross the t's."
Another way in which medieval writers solved the "i-legibility" problem was to substitute a minuscule letter y, as it was easier to read.Thus, "his" might be spelled as "hys," for example. This ex­pedient-led to the increased popularity of letter Y and to its rise as a challenger to I in medieval and Renaissance English spellings (about which, more in.Chapter Y).
Uppercase I, too, can be a headache, at least for modern graphic /Page 176 / designers. For instance, at the New YorkCity-based magazine Vanity Fair in the mid-1980s, editors were requested not to allow the text of their finalized articles to begin with any word opening with the letter I. The reason: An opening letter in the magazine would normally be rendered as a drop capital, and a capital I in the sans­serif fonts favored at Vanity Fair would look like: l. That shape, stuck in the upper left margin of a text page, was-not easily recog­nizable as a letter of the alphabet but,seemed rather, to be a design ornament. Hence the editorial embargo against a starting I.
More recently, the letter has turned some of its shortfalls into gains. Today little i, meaning "computer connection," has joined e, X, and a handful of other letters-as a brand mark of the digital revolution. In 1998 Apple Computer introduced :its sleek iMac model. The "i" signified Internet, for which the iMac was specif­ically designed, but the real message was in the styling-the way the i stood, stuck-against the M,announcing some. special feature within a superb organic. composition. The name sent the message of "high; tech-and groovy" - and iMitation began inmediately. Today brand names 1ike iVil1age, iHome, iTime; iPower, iPlane, and dozens more all promise to harness the power of computer search or remote control for your convemence.

Unlike.most letter shapes through history; I's shape, from its earliest stages, grew less distinctive, not more so. In around 1000 B.C.,
the tenth sign of the Phoenician alphabet was' called yod. Like all Phoenician letters, it was a consonant whose sound was demonstrated in the opening sound,of its name: "y" in this case. The name yod meant "arm and hand" in ancient Semitic speech, and the letter's shape, a bit like a Z With crossbar, did suggest a jointed elbow-wrist-hand extension:
By about the mid-900s B.c., Phoenician yod had been copied into the newly created Hebrew alphabet, for the writing of that / Page177 / language.

A jot of a yod. Like our I to which it is related, the Hebrew letter yod is the smallest in that alphabet.

Today the tenth Hebrew letter is still called yod and takes the sound "y." But.the letter shape has changed considerably, shrinking to a mere pen stoke-so that yod, for its part, is the smallest of today's Hebrew letters.
When the Greeks took their turn copying the Phoenician letters, around 800 B.C., they reassigned a handful of Phoenician letters to 'be the vowel letters needed for the writing of Greek. Presumably because yod's "y" sound naturally suggested the vowel sound i," the Greeks made yod their I vowel. The Greek lettei's sound was "i" short and "ee"long.
Having no tie to a Phoenician word for "arm and hand," the Greeks altered the name to iota more Greek-sounding although otherwise meaningless in Greek. They soon straightened the letter's shape to an austere vertical stroke, probably in order to distinguish iota from their S letter, sigma, which was a zigzag.
Greek letters of the day had only one shape no minuscule versus majuscule. But the iota stroke was simple enough, to suggest a metaphor, and eventually the word iota took on a second meaning in Greek-anyt:hing small in size or, particularly, the least element in a bigger group. Our familiar'phrase "not one iota" comes from Greek, specifically from the biblical book of Matthew(5:18), written in Greek in the 1st century A.D. In the King James Bible of 1611, the word iota is translated as "jot." Our word "jot" derives from Greek iota, with the same metaphorical meaning.
Meanwhile, in ancient Italy the Greek alphabet was copied by the Etruscans (700 B.C.) and the Etruscan one was copied and / Page 178 / adapted by the Romans (600 B.C.). The I-stroke entered the Roman alphabet as the ninth letter, where it remains for us today. The Romans called it something like "ee" and employed it as both short "i" and long "ee." After Rome's fall (A.D. 500), this Roman I passed into the alphabets of new European tongues like French, Spanish, and, eventually, English.
"I" meaning "me" emerged in English starting around 1150, from an Old English pronoun ic, related to the modern German pronoun ich(meaning "I"). This English.pronoun "I"-gradually shifting in pronunciation from "ee" to our long-I sound-could be written as "i," "y," or "Y." With the spread. of printing in the 1500s, it settled down as "I."

"I" meaning "me"

emerged in English starting around 1150,

I) Phoenician yod, whose name meant "arm and hand" (800 B. c.). Like all Phoenician ktters, yod was a consonant; it took the y" sound, demonstrated at the start of its name. (2) The early Greek iota-this example from an inscription of about 740, B.C. - loosely imitated the yods shape. The Greeks had copied iota from the Phoenician letter but had reassigned it to be the vowel I (3) By about 725 B.C., iota's shape had become an austere line. The Greeks straightened it perhaps to avoid confusion with their zigzag letter sigma. (4) Serifs have never looked better than on this Roman capital I from Trajans Inscription of A.D. 113. In marble-carved inscriptions, the Romans gave weight and dignity to the letter shape. The Romans also narrowed the letters shape in the middle, to avoid the illusion of bulging created by a perfectly straight vertical bar. (5) An inked letter in the Carolingian minuscule style, from a manuscript of the 900s. The shape makes reference to the Roman capital but also looks ahead somewhat to our lowercase i. (6) A dotted minuscule i from a handwritten Latin prayer book from Italy, early I500s. The scribes accent like jot would later be finalized as the printers dot.

Page 177

"Having no tie to a Plioenician word for "arm and hand," the Greeks altered the name to iota more Greek-sounding although otherwise meaningless in Greek. They soon straightened the letter's shape to an austere vertical stroke, probably in order to distinguish iota from their S letter, sigma, which was a zigzag.
Greek letters of the day had only one shape no minuscule versus majuscule. But the iota stroke was simple enough, to suggest a metaphor, and eventually the word iota took on a second meaning in Greek-anyt:hing small in size or, particularly, the least element in a bigger group. Our familiar'phrase "not one iota" comes from Greek, specifically from the biblical book of Matthew(5:18), written in Greek in the 1st century A.D. In the King James Bible of 1611, the word iota is translated as "jot." Our word "jot" derives from Greek iota, with the same metaphorical meaning."

THE ELEMENTS OF THE GODDESS

Caitlin Matthews 1989

Page38

"This ennead of aspects is endlessly adaptable for it is made up of nine, the most adjustable and yet essentially unchanging number. However one chooses to add up multiples of nine, for example 54, 72, 108, they always add up to nine"

1 22 333 4444 55555 666666 7777777 88888888 999999999

999999999 88888888 7777777 666666 55555 4444 333 22 1

CHRISTIAN MUSLIM DIALOGUE

H.M. Baagil, M.D

May

99

Page 3

C. If all three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are claiming to emanate from one and the same creator, why do they differ?

All Prophets from Adam to Muhammad [PBUH] were sent with the same message: that is, the total submission of mankind to Allah. This submission in Arabic is called Islam; Islam means also Peace, peace between the Creator and His creatures."

CITY OF REVELATION

John Michell

1972

Page 7

"There were formerly two other letters, representing numbers 90 and 900, but they became obsolete in literature, retained only as numerical symbols."

NINETYSIXSIXTYNINENINESIXTYSIXNINETY

FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Graham Hancock

1995

Page 258

"Likewise when one finds numbers like 108, or 9 x 13 reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus' dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla, it is not accident . . ."

Page 490

Library angels

The missing piece of the puzzle

"The novelist Arthur Koestler, who had a great interest in synchronicity, coined the term 'library angel' to describe the unknown agency responsible for the lucky breaks researchers sometimes get which lead / Page 491/ to exactly the right information being placed in their hands at exactly the right moment"

IS HE MALE

MALE IS HE

PEACE BE UPON HIM

CHRISTIAN MUSLIM DIALOGUE

H.M. Baagil

May

99

Page 12

II Samuel 8:9-10
"When Toi king of Hamath heard that David had smitten all the host of Hadadezer, Then Toi sent Joram his son unto king David, to salute him, and to bless him, because he had fought against Hadadezer, and had smitten him; for Hadadezer had wars with And Joram with him vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and vessels of brass."

THE BIBLE

Scofield Reference

JEREMIAH

C 36 V 13

Page 814

"And when he was in the gate of Benjamin, a captain of the ward was there,whose name was Irijah, the son of Shelemiah, the son of Hananiah: and he took Jeremiah the prophet, saying, Thou fallest away to the Chaldeans"

IRI

I = 9 9 = I

R = I I = R

I = 9 9 = I

I R I J A H H A J I R I

9 9 9 1 1 8 8 1 1 9 9 9

CHRONICLES

C 7 V 7

The sons of Issachar.