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Handout 2: Morse Code and Pig Latin

Morse Code

Samuel F.B. Morse, a Unitarian, in the 1840s invented a code to use with electric telegraph machines. Morse code uses sound to create letters, numbers, punctuation and special characters. According to a Wikipedia article on Samuel Morse , International Morse code is composed of five elements:

short mark, dot or "dit"


one unit long

longer mark, dash or "dah"


three units long

intra-character gap

(between the dots and dashes within a character)

one unit long

short gap

(between letters)

three units long

medium gap

(between words)

seven units long

Pig Latin

Pig Latin is a made-up language used throughout the English-speaking world.

The usual rules for changing standard English into igPay atinLay are:

For words that begin with consonant sounds, move the initial consonant or consonant cluster to the end of the word and add "ay." Examples:

beast = east-bay

dough = ough-day

happy = appy-hay

three = ee-thray

trash = ash-tray

For words that begin with vowel sounds (including silent consonants ), add the syllable, "ay," to the end of the word. In some dialects, to aid in pronunciation, an "h," "w," or "d" is added to the suffix; for instance, eagle could be eagle-hay, eagle-way, or eagle-day.

A hyphen or apostrophe is sometimes used to make retranslation to English easier; for instance: Ayspray is ambiguous, but ay-spray means "spray" and ays-pray means "prays."

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