"A letter came from Shiroyagi-san (White Goat)/ But Kuroyagi-san (Black Goat) ate the letter without reading it." "Yagi-san Yubin" (Goats' Letters), a poem by Michio Mado (1909-2014), is about ...

Represented by letters of the alphabet, they are the component sounds of spoken words. Most people automatically hear, for example, that the word "goat" is made up of three sounds: "guh," "oh ...