16 ms·

Wow, they made a deliberate effort to design glyphs that all look exactly the same. Every single letter written in cursive would be indistinguishable from 5-6 o

Wow, they made a deliberate effort to design glyphs that all look exactly the same. Every single letter written in cursive would be indistinguishable from 5-6 others.

KirinDave 8y ago
You think? I've spent a few days memorizing the script to the point where I can read roughly like a grade schooler (I don't see words yet, just letters). Slowly working through Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" [1] and I'm surprised. It's not a substantial problem. The only place where I struggle with this is a few of the vowels, particularly around A sounds. That's because they're all short glyphs. A much bigger obstacle is that I don't actually know how to spell most words phonetically. I've always had an excellent memory for characters, so I pretty much learned to read by memorizing whole words. So when I go to write a word like "today" and I struggle to choose between "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑱" and something silly like "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑧𐑘" (because there is supposed to be a Y there dangit!). [1]: https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/_a_christmas_carol_-_shavian.pdf https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/_a_chris...
userbinator 8y ago
The fact that many of them are rotations/reflections of others also makes it much harder to recognise when text is in its correct orientation. Not really a problem if you're reading a book, but for things like signage and labeling I could see it being a source of ambiguity. Looking at the glyphs really makes me appreciate the fact that traditional, "evolved" alphabets are naturally quite redundant --- it adds an important layer of error-resistance.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  So after seeing this story I decided to learn basic Shavian and, about 4 days in, I can read like a 3rd grader. I thought this might be a problem for Shavian, as well, but after experiencing it; it's really not. Go check out something like a copy of Dune (https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/dune_first_draft_excerpt.pdf https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/dune_fir...) and turn it on its side (or even flip it over). It's not really an issue to immediately recognize what the right way up is. If nothing else, a single proper noun will give the entire game up. It's not like Shavian is unique in that different orientations of the text can resemble proper letterforms. Many scripts have that and they're just fine.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Also the characters which are basically larger and smaller versions of the same shape. Now to figure out if you're at the correct apartment, you need to know the font size used on the door.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    It's not really possible to write a normal word without using one vowel, so this problem doesn't exist at all. The tall letters are pretty cleverly selected in this fashion.
kqr 8y ago
This is generally okay for natural language which already has a bunch of redundancy and doesn't need more. For non-natural language words, that's more important.
kybernetikos 8y ago
I've been interested in making a custom script for a while but I always get stuck wondering if there is any research on most easily distinguishable shapes. Still not found any.

Wow, they made a deliberate effort to design glyphs that all look exactly the same. Every single letter written in cursive would be indistinguishable from 5-6 others.

KirinDave 8y ago

You think? I've spent a few days memorizing the script to the point where I can read roughly like a grade schooler (I don't see words yet, just letters). Slowly working through Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" [1] and I'm surprised. It's not a substantial problem. The only place where I struggle with this is a few of the vowels, particularly around A sounds. That's because they're all short glyphs. A much bigger obstacle is that I don't actually know how to spell most words phonetically. I've always had an excellent memory for characters, so I pretty much learned to read by memorizing whole words. So when I go to write a word like "today" and I struggle to choose between "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑱" and something silly like "𐑑𐑵𐑛𐑧𐑘" (because there is supposed to be a Y there dangit!). [1]: https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/_a_christmas_carol_-_shavian.pdf https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/_a_chris...

userbinator 8y ago

The fact that many of them are rotations/reflections of others also makes it much harder to recognise when text is in its correct orientation. Not really a problem if you're reading a book, but for things like signage and labeling I could see it being a source of ambiguity. Looking at the glyphs really makes me appreciate the fact that traditional, "evolved" alphabets are naturally quite redundant --- it adds an important layer of error-resistance.

KirinDave 8y ago
So after seeing this story I decided to learn basic Shavian and, about 4 days in, I can read like a 3rd grader. I thought this might be a problem for Shavian, as well, but after experiencing it; it's really not. Go check out something like a copy of Dune (https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/dune_first_draft_excerpt.pdf https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/dune_fir...) and turn it on its side (or even flip it over). It's not really an issue to immediately recognize what the right way up is. If nothing else, a single proper noun will give the entire game up. It's not like Shavian is unique in that different orientations of the text can resemble proper letterforms. Many scripts have that and they're just fine.
saalweachter 8y ago
Also the characters which are basically larger and smaller versions of the same shape. Now to figure out if you're at the correct apartment, you need to know the font size used on the door.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  It's not really possible to write a normal word without using one vowel, so this problem doesn't exist at all. The tall letters are pretty cleverly selected in this fashion.

kqr 8y ago

This is generally okay for natural language which already has a bunch of redundancy and doesn't need more. For non-natural language words, that's more important.

kybernetikos 8y ago

I've been interested in making a custom script for a while but I always get stuck wondering if there is any research on most easily distinguishable shapes. Still not found any.