The Most Important Thing!

I've just learned the most important little noise in Morse, dit, di, di-dit. It is TEA! Yippee and huzzah for dit, di, di-dit.

Morse Step Two

To keep things simple, I'm going to start with the first six letters, E T I A N M.
E: .
T: -
I: ..
A: .-
N: -.
M: --

WordFinder list 103 words that can be spelt with the letters E T I A N M. Not all of these would be considered English words in other fields, eg one of the words is 'amnt'. This is either a contraction of 'amount', or it's a contraction (san apostrophe) of 'am not'. Either way, it's a useful little word to use in practise.

The two letter words that can be made from these first 6 letters are: aa, ai, am, an, at, em, en, et, in, it, ma, me, mi, na, ne, ta, te, and ti. I'm just trying to build up a few patterns, and getting used to the dots and dashes.

A useful website is Morse Code world.

Training To Be A Spy

A number of years ago, I decided to teach myself to read upside down. This was done by sitting on the bus, reading. It was great fun when people commented, "Your book's upside down." I would smile sweetly at them and reply, "Yes, I know. I'm training to become a spy."

Now it feels like the time is right to begin phase two of spycraft, learning Morse Code.

The explanation is more frequently used the letter, the shorter the code for it is. The letters were assigned codes according to the binary tree above. There are differences in letter frequencies between languages, and also between dialects. In American English there's a plethora of words ending in '-ize'. These words are rendered '-ise' in English. This alters the frequency with which 'Z' appears.

However, it doesn't account for the discrepancy where 'O' is viewed as less frequent than 'K' in the Morse tree! English (and American English) has most definitely changed since the 1830s when Morse Code was created, but surely not that much.

65 of the 100 most used words can't be made using the letters from the top three tiers. If B, Y, W, and H are added, it reduces the list to "of, have, for, from, which, can, up, know, take, could, think, come, about, last, give, just, very, look, like, such, find" - 26. Although this does not prevent the 14 letters in contained in the top three tiers being used to make many, many words.

I think the best approach is to learn a couple of letters each day, and make words from them, (or the last line of the chorus of 'Old MacDonald had a farm': . .. . .. ---