Alphabet MonTuesday

in among the acrobats, generals, strongmen, and officials, we found a small pot. it stood-out among the terracotta figures, and their immortal safeguarding of the emperor, because it was made of jade. and even more unusual: given the history of such pots always proves-out a wedding of function and beauty - such pots were for the eye, but through imagination, for the hand as well - we noticed the pot was made without a handle: carbon dating and x-rays show it never had one, unlike every other pot of its kind. but there it was: at the epicenter of 8000 various figures, a strange, hand-size pot, made of jade, the source of which still remains a mystery: it even has a porous color unlike any jade seen before. but what really got the specialists thinking was its weight: it was unsteady. although tests remain inconclusive, speculation shows the weight of the pot is dependent on what holds it - a small child holds it, it is light; a soldier holds it, it is heavy. Dr Ramaar from the Greek Institute for Ancient Gain says it is 'quite astonishing. it might even demand a new interpretation of what we have long assumed, since Archimedes, to be the nature of material.' But as astonishing as all this is, I will declare to you my finding: my name is Dr Altman, and I work for the rarely heard of branch of Yale Linguistics called temple - our name comes from the address of the faculty - 370 temple street. the few of us who work here noticed immediately back in '74, during the unearthing of what's now called the 'terracotta army', the pot was indeed hollow, as many specialists quickly noticed, but that the hollow also had a certain shape. it was immediately familiar to us back then, but we just couldn't figure out how. that was nearly 40 years ago. and we've examined this thing ever since. and we've considered this strange shape, and the fact the pot is somehow weight-dependent, and cross-referenced all we've found with reams of data and theory related to how language lives, how words and letters evolve, how what happened in language thousands of years ago can shape what happens in language tomorrow, and we've decided: that little shape, in that little pot, made from a jade which remains without source, which alters to accord with what holds it, found at the center of a gigantic burial ground: that shape is the next letter of the alphabet