> > John Francis, discombobulated, wrote: > > > > > > > > <second-hand car salesman> > > > What you've got here is your standard-issue alien. As personified on > > > X-files, the "post-mortem" film and various other media outputs. > > > Combined with that, there are some lovely runic symbols - totally devoid > > > of meaning but very, very pretty and guaranteed to make it go faster, > > > er, wear nicer. > > > </second-hand car salesman> > > > > My first impression is that it simply says "HELLO" > > hmmm > and we think this because? ;) > > (a) we watch too many X-Files episdoes > (b) we are an alien - but with a different > dialect? > (c) we live in Roswell > > ann getting siller by the minute Assuming there was a real question there somewhere:
I've never watched the X-Files, and I've never been to Roswell. Mind you, I am an official card-carrying [resident] alien. *I* think it might say "HELLO" because that's what it looks like to me. If you only half-look at it (the way you might if somebody wearing the shirt was in a group of people nearby) you could get the impression of some indeterminate character, a character with three horizontal strokes, two copies of a character with a single upright, and another character. That happens to be close enough to the gestalt image that triggers my "HELLO" pattern recogniser. As Ann probably knows, people who read a lot tend to recognise words as a single object, rather than by mentally piecing together letters. That's particularly important for irregular languages like English, where a single-character change can have arbitrarily large effects to how other characters are interpreted (bibles/bibless, for example). So to me, at first glance, it looks like "HELLO". A second look shows up the discrepancies, but just getting me to take that second look means the T-shirt is probably doing what the purchaser intended.
