Year five! Can you believe it! Half a decade of Fact of the Day! It's come to the point where I'm reading what I wrote this time last year to work out what to say haha!
Anyway, I do like the end of the year. A time for something new. Retrospection, introspection,
circumspection, self-inspection, should've-gone-to-spection, etc. I think I'm feeling
as uncertain as I've ever felt before about what could be coming in 2026, which is kind
of exciting in a way, I suppose - including regarding FOTD! So keep your eyes peeled
tomorrow (or later today, depending when you're reading this!), I suppose.
Looking back, 2025 has been quite a turbulent year; hopefully 2026 is a little more stable,
but that will reveal itself in time. For now - the final fact!
After 364 days of somehow marching on despite ever-surmounting delays and spamming to catch up,
#aFactADay2025 comprises a corpus
of roughly 55 thousand words and 335 thousand characters - less than 2% different to '24. Consistency, I s'pose. This year
has been far too hectic for me, so I'm afraid today's fact is a little unconventional: a webtool!
After 52 weeks, and 14 facts on each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, I present to you a fact
on every letter of the alphabet!
Also let it be known that I have typed out the hashtag 365 times now and only today did I get it right first time. I swear to God I've made a type on that every day this year until this moment, somehow. It means something, I'm sure.
There's some information in the box below about what exactly I'm talking about here, but you
can get this message out the way by clicking the button below. (It will reappear if you reload
the page, of course.) For now - happy new year! Thank you ever so much to all my readers; every
comment, reaction or like I get on a post absolutely makes my day. All the best for 2026!!
Orthographic Minimal Pairs
That's quite a few big words. I've spoken a lot about phonemes over the course of FOTD, so
I'm surprised this has never come up before. Basically, a minimal pair in a language is a pair
of words that differs only by one sound - a phoneme. Eg, "pot" and "pat" differ by that sound
in the middle, the vowel; whereas you could also pronounce the «p» slightly differently, as
speakers of Indian languages often do (due to aspiration). There is no pair of words (minimal pair)
in English whose meaning depends on the pronunciation of "p". This is kinda the definition of
a phoneme in a language - fascinating stuff really; I can definitely recommend giving
Wikipedia a glance, or looking it up
on YouTube or the likes.
Anyway that's not what I'm here to talk about. Orthography is a lot easier to deal with, and
more importantly, it's less important! By which I mean, there's less research into this and
I get more nerd bonus for having a truly useless webtool. Orthography is how a language deals
with its writing system - also worth looking up on Wikipedia - but for now you can just think
of it as "letters n stuff".
"Orthographic minimal pair" is a phrase I've never seen used in a technical capacity (granted,
I've not researched this in depth - I kinda went headfirst into this). Basically,
words that differ by only one letter - for example,
"carpe" and "carve". But we can do better - as it happens, "carce", "carie", "carle", "carme",
"carne", "carse" and "carte" are also words in my very long* word list. Some of them are probably
tenuous loanwords ("carpe" probably as in "carpe diem"?) or proper nouns, but who cares! We can be
as ridiculous as we like! Select as many letters as you please and see how many minimal pairs,
trios, or much more there are! Or scroll down to the bottom to see what the longest minimal pair
is! Or try out something you would never have thought would have a minimal pair - A and X have
loads?? Who knew!!
This project has been kind of a rush for me, so it's far from perfect. I'll probably update it,
maybe even add features, or future-proof it, or add other corpuses/languages/etc. We'll see what
happens, and I'll update this note accordingly.
In that vein, I will warn you that my code is far from
optimised... I wrote this all in one day so please don't go nosing in the files! They're not
a sight for pretty eyes! Including 3- and 4-letter words can take a good few seconds of
computation time in my experience...
Setting up...
If this box doesn't disappear by the time you've finished reading this warning, something's up.... Get in touch with me with details from the console
This text sits here until something happens. But what are you doing until something happens?
This webpage is part of the Fact of the Day
run by someone who unfortunately goes by too many names to bother putting anything here.
Please do contact me via Tumblr (link above) or Discord @onepo - I love talking to people
and nerding out and getting feedback and all that malarky!!