Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban neography

[Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On 6/21/05, Aleksej R. Serdyukov <deletesoftware@yandex.ru> wrote:
> Matt Arnold wrote:
> > coi rodo,
> >     A couple of years ago I read of Eric S. Raymond's Tengwar orthography for Lojban (http://www.catb.org/~esr/tengwar/lojban-tengwar.html) and it got me thinking about Lojban alphabets. I had an idea which I've been working on for a couple of years, to design an alphabet along certain principles:
> > 1. Each word would be written without the pen leaving the page; no dotting i's or crossing t's. A gap in the line would represent the period character, which is a pause.
> > 2. Unlike cursive, the baseline would be in the vertical center instead of at the bottom, so that voiced consonants and vowels would tend to be descenders, and unvoiced consonants would tend to be ascenders.
> 
> How would it be to use on a computer?
> 
> 
> {se'i} I want an alphabet that would be both simple to hand-write and to
> computer-use.

In this vein, a while back I designed a new alphabet for computer use.
I didn't worry about matching the shapes to the sounds, as I believe
that there is no practical advantage to doing so. I didn't worry about
making it easy to handwrite--I'd rather see a completely new script
designed for handwriting. I designed the font so that the shapes would
be maximally unique and identifiable at extremely small font sizes. I
think I failed considerably on this point, as the human mind tends to
classify shapes based not on their orientation, but on their
non-oriented shape and complexity, etc. and different letters in my
font have several kinds of symmetry. I tried reading text for an hour
a day for about two weeks, and my reading speed (normally 200-300+
wpm) hovered around 25 wpm near the end. With a few more months of
practice, I might have regained a more natural speed (though probably
not as fast as with the roman alphabet, ever), but I felt the effort
wasn't worth it.

Here are some images and the font and source:
http://pdf23ds.net/weird-font . Interestingly, after two months, I can
still read the screenshot rather haltingly. Learning this kind of
stuff tends to burn itself into your brain rather deeply.

I think the lesson I learned from this is that an alphabet where each
letter was much, much more distinct would probably do better. The
distinction would have to be something more readily recognizable by
the brain. And in this aspect, the current roman alphabet is well
suited. I don't believe, after my experiment, that it's possible to
improve on it significantly for computer/display use. Something to
keep in mind is that fluent readers tend to read the whole word at
once, so it's important to have words with distinct outlines and broad
shapes. Varying heights seem important.

However, my font is extremely beautiful, compared to anything I've
seen. Tamil is kind of nice, but not as modern-looking to me. (It
doesn't display well on windows at low font points--I don't have the
hinting right. Curvy fonts are hard to hint correctly, and windows'
font renderer sucks compared to Linux's.)

For handwriting, however, I think there are a number of improvements
that could be made on the roman alphabet. Matt's script is a start,
but I think that it's important to keep the stroke counts as low as
possible, and I think a number of improvements could be made there. I
don't think legibility should be a priority for a script designed for
handwriting, but rather speed. I don't think legible handwriting
should be a priority any more. Handwriting itself may fall completely
out of use in a few more decades. It's important that the shapes
remain distinguishable, but some cues could be taken from, e.g. Gregg
shorthand in this area. While Gregg, IIRC, is based on the sounds of
the speech and not the letters, I don't think that's necessary or
desirable to emulate, even in a script designed for use not just with
lojban.

Chris Capel
-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)