Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Problems that I immediately see with the approach:

* No baseline or other orienting structure, so vertical shifts easily change meaning ("ab" turns to "bc"), same for rotations.

* No redundancy to allow for recognizing incomplete / garbled / damaged letters.

Both features are prominent in any machine-readable encoding (like bar codes or QR codes), and are relatively easy to find in any human script.

The idea behind making more compact visual representation of letters has merit. This particular implementation of it is impractical, though. It only looks acceptable on a demo page.

(While at it, I know two well-designed phonetic writing systems: Tengwar and Hangul. Neither is super compact, but both are easy to learn and read, because of the internal logic. Dotsies are way more arbitrary; they don't exploit any connections between letter or sounds they represent.)

View on HN

There's also Shavian and Quikscript for English, which handle the language phonetically. I think it's a big miss for any new writing system to keep a language with 38 or so sounds limited to 26 letters. Not to mention other languages that might want to use it.

Don't forget about the deseret alphabet. I think it's a shame that never stuck.

Deseret us a bit too frivolous graphically, and not consistent enough.

Also, English has many pronunciation variations, and links between many words may be obvious in writing but not as much in sound (breath / breathe). English needs something more of a morphology-based writing system, not a pure phonetic representation (like Spanish).

I learned Shavian a few years ago, with my own transliteration dictionary based on my New Zealand English pronunciation (which Shavian doesn't quite seem to handle all of). Unfortunately, different dialects of English have very (inconsistently) different pronunciations, and hence there would be many different spellings for the same words; I really struggled to read Shavian written by people from other parts of the world. Going phonetic may well mean giving up on fast reading through whole word recognition.

Or it would require standardizing on certain pronunciations.

I don't think that's possible. Much of the popular media in the English-speaking world is in a standard-ish General American accent, and yet still the diversity in accents is enormous.

The only way I can think of to do it is if all phones and computers had really good voice control systems that nonetheless only understood the standard pronunciation (like early versions of Dragon dictation). The voice system makers have a vested interest in not doing that, but in understanding everyone as they talk. Arabic has tried for centuries, with the full force of a major religion, and yet still the language is splintered into mutually unintelligible dialects.

People talk how they talk, and it's constantly changing. I don't think anyone can control that.

My native language, Romanian, is written exactly as it is heard. Dialects with differing pronunciations still exist. In practice, everyone who speaks in dialect, writes the words as if transliterated from the official pronunciations (which is taught in schools), but pronounces the words as they're used. So in writing everyone gets each other. Orally, it can be a bit difficult sometimes.

This is what I meant to suggest. Pick a canonical set of pronunciations to be used in writing.

This is a font, not a new writing system.

For many languages (though probably not English) you could likely hack something with clever use of ligatures.

The first problem effectively makes this DOA. A bunch of dots on a page can mean anything if there isn't a grid to orient them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com