Duolingo knows me

Spooky.

Duolingo: Mixing it up

Wouldn’t you know it, a day after I post all about Duolingo they start changing things! I’ve been working away on my lessons and it seems every time I look up I notice something new. The most obvious change is that the main page now has bolder graphics for the skill area “chips.”

It was fine before but this new design definitely makes it easier to see your progress in each skill area. As a person over 40, I have to say that bigger type and graphics is always a good thing.

There have also been changes to the web translation module. You can now see the previous sentences you’ve worked on, including your translations and the option to see other translations. This provides context at a glance, which is very convenient. It is also now possible to edit your translation after seeing other people’s answers. This is brilliant. Correcting your own work is a great way to learn.

One thing I didn’t mention in my previous post is how Duolingo mixes up the lessons and even the sentences in each lesson. You don’t progress by completing one skill and moving on to the next, like chapters in a book. After you get the basics in one skill, other skill areas open up and you are encouraged to work on them for a bit and then go back. Duolingo highlights the recommended area to work on and if you follow that path you will do a lot of bopping back and forth. This shows that the Duolingo people have really done their homework because it is precisely what the brain needs to form long-term memories and associations. The same pattern appears within each lesson. There you will be presented with a sentence to translate into English, move on to something else, and then get the previous sentence again but this time having to do the more difficult task of translating it into Spanish or listening and typing it out in Spanish. It is this element of surprise that makes the brain take notice and go to the trouble of putting that information into long-term memory. You know things are going to come up again, but you don’t know when or how, so you have to pay close attention to everything. Add to this the daily practice sessions and you have a system designed for learning success.

I can say a bit more about the social side of Duolingo now that I’ve found and followed a few people. Duolingo recommends people who are at about your level and when you follow them, your activity stream shows all of their accomplishments too. The top of the screen also shows how you rank in points and sentences translated compared to the people you follow. I think the idea is to motivate people with competition, but it doesn’t do much for me. There isn’t much emotional payoff when you are competing against total strangers whom you know nothing about and cannot interact with. I think those factors may change, though, since it appears there will be ways to connect via Twitter and Facebook, though those tools don’t seem to be fully operational yet. If it were possible to get to know people and when people I know are let into Duolingo, it might be more fun to race against them. However, I think Duolingo might get more mileage out of encouraging cooperation rather than competition. After all, part of the reason people are clamouring to get into Duolingo is because they love the idea of helping to translate the web together. Judging by all the desperate “Let me in!!” tweets directed at Duolingo, that motivation seems to be quite strong. It might be more effective to find ways for people to collaborate in their learning or translating instead of competing. I’m not sure what that would look like but I’m sure the clever people at Duolingo can figure it out!

Duolingo: First Impressions

After much begging and pleading I finally got my much coveted Duolingo invitation. In case you missed my previous post on the subject, Duolingo is a web-based application that teaches people languages by getting them to translate web pages. How this is possible will become apparent as you read on.

After playing with it for about a week my first is impression is: WOW! The user interface is absolutely flawless. Everything is clear, visually appealing, easy to navigate, and bug-free. I think the Duolingo people must be perfectionists to call this a beta. Perhaps they are not ready for a lot of traffic but the product itself looks more finished than a lot of things I’ve paid good money for.

As for the pedagogy, it is equally impressive. In the beginning you are led through a series of lessons that teach you different language skills and get you translating right away (see below—click image to enlarge).

Each lesson and translation you do earns you points and “unlocks” subsequent skill areas. You can also skip through a skill by taking a test. If you make too many mistakes you have to go back and do the lessons.

The lessons cover every aspect of language: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. They even cater to visual learners by introducing some vocabulary with pictures. However most vocabulary is presented in writing, with mouseover popups to explain each word.

Users are asked to translate from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. When translating to Spanish it provides buttons for accented characters in case your keyboard is not set up for Spanish.

For a little variety there are multiple choice questions in both directions.

The lessons also include listening…

…and speaking.

Obviously these require the use of speakers and a microphone or headset. If you do not have a microphone you can adjust your settings so that Duolingo won’t asks you to speak. I don’t know how well it understands what I say but I find that if I speak too quickly it asks me to try again. As for Duolingo’s voice, it is a computer generated female voice with a neutral Latin American accent. It voices all the Spanish text in the lessons, not just the listening exercises, so you get a lot of listening practice. I find it quite easy to understand, though of course the intonation and rhythm are not completely natural. I can understand some Spanish already so I can’t say whether a total beginner would be able to understand it at first.

Each skill area also includes simple translation tasks from live websites. Again you can use the mouseover popups to see definitions of any words you don’t know. The more you use the popups, the less difficult the subsequent translations will be, and vice versa.

As you can see, Duolingo provides you with a link to the website so you can check the context of the sentence, and it also shows you thumbnails of any images that might be relevant. After you have taken a stab at the translation, Duolingo shows you some other people’s translations and presents you with one of them to rate.

This is where the power of crowdsourcing is unleashed. According to Duolingo’s creators, by soliciting multiple translations and then getting multiple users to rate them, Duolingo can generate translations that are good as what you would get from professional translators.

Duolingo has other features as well. It recommends daily review and if you skip a day, Duo the owl starts to cry, so it’s best to practice every day! If you make a typo or error it tells you what you did wrong, and if you make too many mistakes you have to do a little extra practice. Every time you reach a learning milestone you see a splash page with a big bright gold ribbon and hearty congratulations, with the option to share your success on Twitter or Facebook. It may not seem like much but it really is encouraging. One small detail I really appreciate is that after you type or speak a response, the focus of the page moves to the “Check” and “Continue” buttons so you can just hit Enter to proceed without having to use the mouse.

I haven’t tried Duolingo’s social features yet. The website has a section where you can ask questions that others can answer (more crowdsourcing!), and each skill area also has its own questions section. You can also follow other users and view their progress. I don’t know whether there will be opportunities for interaction as well. There is an option to enable Facebook Connect so perhaps that is where you can chat with your new Duolingo friends.

The screen scrape at the top of this post only shows a fraction of the skill areas available. There are 44 in all for Spanish, and it is going to take me quite a while to get through them all. I don’t know what happens after that or how fluent I will be at that point. The lessons do cover all the parts of speech and most verb tenses. I presume that once you get through all the lessons all you do is translate, but perhaps they have other surprises prepared.

One thing I would like to do after getting through the Spanish lessons is to try another language from scratch to see what that is like for a total beginner. I already know some Spanish so the lessons have been quite easy so far. The only other language available right now (other than English) is German, which is fortunately a language I would like to learn. They are also planning to add French, Italian and Chinese (by which I presume they mean Mandarin) in the future. I am not too interested in Italian but I could stand to brush up on my French and I’d love to learn Mandarin. I have the feeling I will be spending a lot of time on Duolingo!

If you want to try Duolingo you can get on the waiting list here. It can take a while to get in (unless you try some creative grovelling like I did), but it’s worth the wait!

For more see Duolingo: Mixing it up.

Learn a language while you translate the web

I was listening to Spark yesterday and heard about Duolingo, a new web project that aims to translate the entire web with volunteers who want to learn a new language. The way it works is that Duolingo presents sentences in the new language and the user tries to translate the sentence into their mother tongue. If you don’t know a word you can mouse over it and a suggestion will pop up. Computers are very good at translating individual words but terrible at putting them together into meaningful sentences, so that is what the human part of this equation contributes. How much you mouse over the words determines the complexity of the sentences you get, so the experience is always tailored to your level of proficiency.

According to creator Luis von Ahn (who also invented ReCaptcha, which helps digitize books), people are actually learning languages on Duolingo as quickly as they would using conventional methods. The system also asks people to vote on the best translations for each sentence, and they say the results are as good as you would get from professional translators.

Since I am interested in learning languages and like to play on the web I am very eager to try Duolingo, but it is still at the private beta stage. All you can do is submit your email address and get on the (reportedly massive) waiting list for an invitation. So far only Spanish, German, and English are available, but they plan to add more languages as they work out the bugs.

At this point Duolingo is entirely free with no ads, and von Ahn wants to provide translations for free at least for non-commercial content. However, Von Ahn has a habit of getting bought out by Google and it’s hard to imagine every web page being translated into every language without Google-sized computing power behind it. But it’s clear that von Ahn is not doing this to make his fortune but to allow the people of the world to understand each other. Perhaps this is the beginning of Web 3.0, where the world wide web will be truly accessible to the whole wide world. I can’t wait to try it and will report back when I do. In the mean time, watch the introductory video and sign up!

Suntory Time!

In my last post I mentioned research that looked into whether languages that sound fast really say more. Japanese was the fastest language they tested, but had the lowest density of information. I think this illustrates the situation:

Thursday Tweets

A lot of good things appeared in my Twitter stream today and I thought I would share some of them here. First of all, two classics have been adapted into graphic novels, The Odyssey (via @rogueclassicist) and Don Quixote (via @batpoet). I suppose adventures stories lend themselves to a visual format, especially in the male-dominated graphic novel/comic book market. What are the chances we’ll see a graphic Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice?

The online book community is mourning the loss of Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg. He is said to have invented the ebook, and began by hand-typing classics such as Homer, Shakespeare, and the Bible into his computer and posting them online. Now the work is carried out by an army of volunteers all over the world using scanners and optical character recognition. However the human touch is still required, and you can help by joining Distributed Proofreaders. If you are the sort of person who notices the typos in today’s poorly edited books, you’re just the sort of person DP needs! There’s a nice community of book lovers there and it’s a great way to give back to the world of books.

Finally, have you ever noticed that some languages sound faster than others? Have you wondered if they are saying more or if there is just a lot of “filler” in the language? Well, according to some recent research [here’s the whole paper](via @StanCarey), it seems that the information density of a language is inversely proportional to the speed with which it is spoken, with the end result that languages (at least the ones that were tested) dish out roughly the same amount of information in the same amount of time. In other words, languages that sound faster don’t really say more than languages that sound slower. I don’t know if this research is conclusive or has been confirmed elsewhere, but it makes me wonder if the brain has an optimal speed for taking in verbal information, regardless of language. I do know one thing for sure: my brain is not fast enough to take in everything on Twitter!

Why it’s good to know other languages

Thanks to Susan for telling me about this episode. :)

Everyone’s Learning Languages!

via Women Reading

Polyglot: Read!

Whenever I am asked how I was able to succeed in many languages in a relatively short period of time, I always make a bow in spirit to the source of all knowledge: books. My advice to learners can thus be expressed in one word: read!

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Polyglot: Why it’s better to learn languages from books

I see another difficulty in practicing a language with others. An uninteresting partner is uninteresting in a foreign language as well.

I have written about how much I suffered in Japan because everyone wanted to practice their English with me and I couldn’t attain with the greatest effort to get answers in Japanese to my questions asked in Japanese. In the end, someone took pity on me and recommended a certain Mr. Matsumoto, who understood my sorrow and showed willingness to converse with me in Japanese in the afternoons.

Mr. Matsumoto proved to be a Buddhist monk. He was indeed ready to talk in Japanese, but unfortunately his only topic was Buddhism; specifically, that 11 of its 12 branches held completely false views. Only the branch that he followed was the true one. While he was explaining to me what the sole correct interpretation of the Lotus Sutra was for the third hour, I slipped away.

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Through the wonders of Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia, I just discovered Kató Lomb (1909-2003), a Hungarian translator and interpreter who worked in 16 (sixteen) languages. Though her training was in chemistry, the Depression forced her to seek alternative employment, and she decided to try teaching English. (80 years later that is still a viable alternative for unemployed graduates!) Then came Russian (which was handy when the Soviets took over Hungary), French, and so on, and so forth. Each time she had some immediate incentive to learn a language (usually economic), and so she racked up language after language. She denied having any particular gift for languages, and in fact did poorly in language classes as a child. What she did have was motivation, and a method that made learning interesting. Her key to learning was to seek out texts that were interesting enough to stick with through the rough patches. She did most of her learning by reading novels. Wanting to know what happened in the end was a great spur to keep slogging through unknown words. Though she did make some use of grammars and dictionaries, and even formal classes, the bulk of her learning came from reading books. It’s the only way she was able to learn so many languages so quickly and so fluently. She felt that traditional teaching methods that focus on grammar, vocabulary lists, and boring exercises were ineffective and slow. It’s hard to argue with that given her results!

Though I am only part way through Polyglot, I definitely recommend it to anyone interested in languages. As if to illustrate her point, she also tells some very funny stories, so it is quite an entertaining read as well. Bonne lecture!

Stephen Fry: The Pleasure of Language

A tweet from pausetowonder alerted me to the fact that Stephen Fry (of Jeeves,Wilde, and Ode fame) was on Twitter. I soon found out that along with being a prolific twitizen, he also has an elaborate multimedia website. One of his recent blog posts and “podgrams” concerns his thoughts on language. I highly recommend listening to him deliver it in his velvety humane voice (try clicking on the RSS buttons to get direct links), but you can also read it. Here are some of my favourite bits:

My language (as the sum of my discourses, as linguistic strata that betray my history, as geology or archaeology betrays history) is my language and it is a piece of who I am, perhaps even the defining piece. In my case it is in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus … not because I was a classical scholar, but because I was taught by classical scholars and grew up on poets, dramatists and novelists who knew the classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me…. As Henry Higgins reminds us in Pygmalion, English is for all of us the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible. We unconsciously use the tropes, tricks and figures of our great writers, just as we might without knowing it use a tierce de Picardie or a diminished seventh when humming in the shower.

…

For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious.

…

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

I am enchanted by the idea that our use of language gives away not only our own personality but our cultural genealogy right back to antiquity. It is one of the wonders of language in general and English in particular that it keeps reinventing itself. Fry sides, at least in theory, with those who say there is no right or wrong in language. It is merely a matter of convention, and convention changes whether we like it or not. It’s hard to argue against that, but if there is no right or wrong language, there is still good and bad language, and it is good language that Fry is championing.

He is absolutely right that those who like to play with words very quickly learn how unacceptable that is to those who don’t. Aside from social opprobrium, there usually isn’t much scope for creativity when writing for school or work. I remember once at work sending a piece I was rather proud of to an editor and receiving it back with every passive verb slavishly converted to the active voice, something which did considerable violence to the flow of the paragraphs in question. In the end she did concede that it was better as originally written and reversed the changes, but another higher-up decided to change the order of one section, demolishing the crescendo that I had carefully built up. The notion of telling a story and taking the reader somewhere, even in technical nonfiction, did not compute. What is sadder still is that after a few more years of churning out governmentese I was starting to use it outside of work. I don’t think I have recovered yet!

What are we to do? How can we make society safe for the sort of speeches we read in Austen or even Shakespeare? We barely have time to enquire after each other’s health these days, never mind tell each other ornamented tales. I think we’ve been tweeting at each other for some time now; Twitter has only made it visible. Perhaps the blog will help reverse the tweetification of English. Where else can ordinary people express complete thoughts in any style they like in public? I say: Long live the blog!

Frompoetrytoprosewithwordspacingandwordorder

I really have to thank Stefanie for mentioning Paul Saenger’s book, Spaces Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. I have always been interested in the origins of language and writing, and reading a little bit of this book on Google Books has supplied many amazing insights into the development of writing and language. We tend to think of the invention of writing, some 5,000 years ago, as the invention of the tool we use to communicate with each other today. In reality it was something quite different.

At first, alphabets lacked vowels, and so words were written out separately, with spaces between them, to make decoding them easier. However, after vowels were invented, it became much easier to decipher words and sentences, and the spaces were eventually abandoned. This sounds incredible to us, since we know how much faster it is to read with spaces, but there is an explanation, or at least a theory.

For one thing, unless you have been trained to read by sight, spaces do not speed up reading. Give text without spaces to an adult and their reading speed slows to a crawl. Give the same text to a young child and their reading speed is pretty much the same because they haven’t progressed beyond the point of reading by sounding out syllables. Adding spaces does not speed up their reading because they haven’t learned to recognize whole words by their shape. Moreover, according to Saenger, if you give a child text without spaces they will automatically read it aloud. This is exactly how the ancients “read.” Today we might call it recitation instead. One ancient text that points to this quite explicitly is the Quran. It’s first word is “Read,” which is interpreted to mean “Recite,” and indeed the book was first transmitted orally and only later written down.

I think the underlying answer to the question of why we stopped using spaces is that writing was developed more as a mnemonic device for oral recitation than as a way to record thought. Saenger doesn’t say this explicitly, but this is how it seems to me. Ancient texts, especially poetry, are full of complex internal rhythm and rhyme that only make sense aloud. This is the natural outgrowth of oral culture. Books were read much as we used to play cassette tapes: from beginning to end. Separating text into sections or paragraphs and numbering pages were not at all common practices, especially among the Romans. “Reference reading,” that is consulting a book for specific information, was unknown. Writing may seem “digital” to us, but it was “analog” to them—an integral oral performance rather than a collection of individual bits of information.

Ancient languages were inflected, meaning that the function of words was determined by their prefixes and suffixes, not word order. Words could theoretically be placed in any position, and they were often jumbled (in our view) for effect. Typically, the whole sentence had to be read and held in working memory before the relations between the words and the meaning of the sentence could be understood. As it turns out, according to modern experiments, we can retain many more words in our memory if we hear them. It is simply much easier and faster to read inflected language aloud, and as pointed out above, if you are reading phonetically, adding spaces doesn’t make it any easier or faster.

So, how is it that we came to our senses and adopted the style of language we use today? I haven’t gotten to all the details in Saenger’s book yet, but it seems that the breakdown in the system of inflection started in late antiquity. The “vulgar” Latin that Jerome used in his monumental translation of the Bible known as the “Vulgate” was already starting to drop inflection in favour of word order. This was considered degenerate by scholars, who were probably concerned with preserving their high erudition, but in the end, utility trumped artistry. Throughout the middle ages, inflection gave way to word order, and thanks to the monks and scribes of Britain and Ireland, spaces between words were reintroduced.

Now language was written according to the logic of cause and effect—subject-verb-object— not according to the music of rhythm and rhyme. Word order allowed people to decode the syntactical meanings of words on the fly, and so it was no longer necessary to say them aloud to keep them in memory. Finally, spaces between words allowed us to start reading even more quickly by recognizing the shapes of words, and we haven’t looked back since.

The adoption of word spacing and word order was, I think, as revolutionary as the invention of writing itself. They not only made reading possible for the masses, they also (along with punctuation) made the writing and reading of more complex thinking possible, and so scholarship blossomed. The Renaissance was probably only a matter of time after that. Yes, we have lost the music of the high poetic language of the ancient orators and poets, but mass literacy and intellectual progress were obviously worth more to our ancestors. The people have spoken!

To test some of this for yourself, try the exercise on this page from Rice University. The site has other interesting information on the development of language as well.

Words 2.0

What do you get when you combine Web 2.0 and the English language? Wordia. Launched last week in honour of Dr. Johnson's 299th birthday, it is an online dictionary where you can post videos of what a particular word means to you. Now you can show the whole world what a word geek you are! My favourite so far is fermata.

via Book Patrol

So You Think You Can Edit?

If I weren't for my health (or lack thereof) I might be an editor right now. By the time I got sick I had already taken several concrete steps in that direction and had even gotten some paying jobs. It's not an easy profession—freelancers are chronically underpaid, and staff editing jobs are scarce and getting scarcer—but it's something I love to do and am good at. Or rather, was good at! This Washington Post article decrying the loss of copy editors at newspapers is also an editing exercise. It contains scores of errors, but I was only able to catch 37 of them. How many can you find?

via blog.rightreading.com

Study Languages with WordChamp

Thanks to a blurb on the Association for Latin Teaching blog I learned about a great online language learning tool, WordChamp. It is designed to supplement language classes with three tools: flashcards, networking, and their fantastic Web Reader.

WordChamp has millions of flashcards in more than 130 language, and students or teachers can create new ones as needed. They also help learners to find a suitable partner to practice with from the country of their choosing. My favourite part of the website is their Web Reader. You just enter the URL of the foreign language website you are interested in reading, and WordChamp will display the site and translate any word you point your mouse at. It couldn't be easier. I've been wanting something like this for years to help me read Spanish newspapers online. And did I mention it is free? Thank you, gracias, merci, and gratias tibi, WordChamp!

The Chosen Letters

This article on how the Hebrews revolutionized writing by inventing vowels blew my mind. Here is a taste:

Around the time of King David (roughly 1000 BCE), the Hebrews took the Phoenician consonantal system and made a seemingly minor improvement.

They used the letter H (which we call a heh) not only as a consonant, but also to represent the vowel A. They used the letter Y (yud) to represent the vowels I and E, and W (now called vav, though back then it probably had a W-sound, not a V-sound) for the vowels O and U. By using letters for both consonants and vowels, the Hebrews created the alphabet.

...

The Hebrew alphabet - ALEPH, BET, etc... - became a world-wide success. It provided the foundation for the Greek alphabet (ALPHA, BETA....) and Latin too: (A, B...).

The Greek alphabet is used to this day in Greece. A variation of it called Cyrillic is used in Eastern Europe for Russian, Serbian, and so forth. Other Eastern European languages, along with the major languages of Western Europe and of the Americas, are written in minor variations of the Latin alphabet. Arabic writing is based on Hebrew, as is the writing of India.

...

The Hebrews gave the world not only writing, but also the world's all-time best-selling book: the Bible. There is hardly a place on earth that has not been touched by it. But there would have been no way to spread and preserve the Bible without writing it down for the masses. And without the vowel letters, the masses would never have been able to read it.

OK, this is where it gets really amazing:

Genesis 17 tells of a covenant between God and a man, Abram, whose name is spelled ?BRM. (Again, the question mark represents an alef, used for a glottal stop.) The ancient word ?B means "father," and, as we saw, RM means "exalted." ?BRM was the "exalted father," or "tribal elder."

When ?BRM enters into a covenant with his God, he gets a heh inserted in the middle of his name: ?BRM becomes ?BRHM. That is, Abram becomes Abraham.

Regardless of the historical accuracy or divinity of the story - and here, obviously, well-meaning people disagree - it is clear to all that it is the special heh, one of three letters that completed the alphabet, that gets added to ?BRM to create ?BRHM. His wife, too, gets a heh added to her name: Sarai becomes Sarah.

The Hebrews didn't stop there. As we saw above, the ancient Canaanite word for "god" was el, spelled ?L, and the word for "gods," therefore, was elim, spelled in Phoenician ?LM and in Hebrew ?LYM. The Hebrews took this common Canaanite word and added a heh right in the middle to create one of God's names: ?LHYM.

In short, the patriarch, matriarch, and deity of the Hebrews all get their names by adding a heh to convert otherwise common words into special ones. The Hebrews used their vowel-letters not just to make writing possible, but to create their most important names.

In addition to ?LHYM, we find a second, four-letter name for God, the tetragrammaton (which means "four-letters" in Greek). The four letters are yud, heh, vav, heh. Common pronunciations such as "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" miss the point. What really matters here is the remarkable fact that this name consists entirely of the Hebrews' newly invented vowel letters, each included once, with the particularly special heh repeated.

The tetragrammaton is unique in ancient Hebrew, in that its pronunciation seems divorced from its spelling. It also seems to lack any plausible etymology, and is unattested in similar ancient languages. Now we know why. The Hebrews paid homage to the vowel letters that made it possible to spread the Word of God by using those letters to refer to God.

Joel M. Hoffman, The Jews invent vowels [The Jerusalem Post]

I knew that the Jews held and hold letters and words to be sacred, but I didn't realize how much. Wow.

via the miraculous mirabilis