Show HN: Bliss – A constructed writing system for fast and beautiful writing | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bliss – A constructed writing system for fast and beautiful writing

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54 pointstcsenpai44 comments

Of course, this is just for fun and is absolutely NOT to be used for anything related to security or secrecy.

Anyway, I'd love to hear some feedback :)

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You might want to choose a different name to prevent confusion with Blissymbols, a constructed writing system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols

https://www.blissymbolics.org/

http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/bliss-2302/ (5 minutes after start)

Nice, I will consider using a more unique name!

Many years ago, I've been playing around with similar ideas - although my attempts were probably more like "abstract fonts" then actual ciphers.

What feel kinda curious to me about this one, is that I see no reason or pattern for why certain letters are circles, squares or triangles. It seems to be a case of just taking all consonants in the order they have in the latin alphabet, and then randomly making the first four circles, the next four squares, the next four triangles, etc...

In my own attempts I would always try to have meaning to the shape. Like is it a voiced sound or not? Is it a plosive? Is it "soft" or a "hard" sound? etc.

So, if you a see a triangle, you know that imparts a certain quality to it... the only distinction you see here is between vowels and consonants?

Yep this is a very simple conscript and is indeed created "progressively". For sure, the next iterations will take into account all the advices I read here

Which language is this writing system meant for? It doesn't seem like a great fit for English due to the vowel system. Based on a quick check, something like 40% of the most common words will require using at least one wovel placeholder. (Either start with a vowel or have two vowels in a row).

Also, you say in the intro that this script is intended to have some unique advantages. What are they? The article doesn't actually mention any.

Good point, sometimes I get distracted and lose the intro :)

The unique advantage (well, "unique") is the fact that is easy to memorize, at least for me

It would be nice to have some example words and sentences because I can't quite picture how the vowels look.

I am in the process of trying to understand how to make a font with diacritics. Meanwhile here is an handwritten example.

Note how the vowels can be put in different ways as long as they keep their positions. Also forgive my terrible handwriting.

https://imgur.com/a/AAa2m53

Anyway, let me try:

Let's say you have a upside triangle which is an "L" and you want to write "le" (because why not). You draw the triangle and then you draw just below the triangle the "e" symbol. You can decide if to make it linked to the shape above (sort like a bubble coming out from the bottom in this case) or to keep them separated (so it would be a sort of smiling mouth under the triangle).

I don’t know man. Since the invention of pens/pencils, language has gravitated towards not lifting the pencil. It looks like I can write that in cursive in about 2 seconds. In other words, in the same amount of time it takes for me to draw a really shitty triangle, I can have written an entire word.

See my sibling reply. This is true of my native script. It started off with straight lines a couple of millennia ago (when stone tablets were used), but when writing moved to palm leaves (http://www.natlib.lk/collections/olaleaf.php), the script gradually became rounded because the sharp stylus used to tear the leaf.

Interesting. Probably it was indeed the case for a period of time that not lifting your quill was fast.

I am not sure that for ball pens or pencils, not lifting has any advantage.

> I am not sure that for ball pens or pencils, not lifting has any advantage.

You already know the answer if you've ever written anything quickly by hand: it has significant advantages.

No. Not for me.

Also, drawing angles breaks the flow and speed of writing. Back in university, I remember replacing squares checkboxes by circles because it was faster to draw. (And a friend copying me when he noticed it) All those angles seem painful to write by hand.

Totally true. Indeed the goal of creating a conscript, at least for me, is to have fun and be able to keep something like a journal that would look funny and "cryptic" at a quick glance. Maybe one day I will manage to create a cursive that is also nice to see and easy to remember : )

You might find my native language, Sinhala, quite interesting: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/sinhala.htm

E.g.

  ක ka
  කි ki
  කු ku
  කෙ ke
  කො ko

Looking at it, and also long live omniglot!

Many writing systems of Southeast Asia borrowed this idea and work quite similarly as a result. Here's Burmese, which also writes vowels on all four sides of the consonant they follow:

ကာ - ka ကီ - ki ကူ - ku ကေ - ke ကို - ko ကော - kaw

Remarkable similarities there!

Fun! I would recommend relating characters based on their function, pronunciation, origin rather than their place in the alphabet. For example B has more in common with P than with C. Similar for D and T, G/K, I/J/Y.

I was thinking about it, I then went to the classic positional way for simplicity. But I will work on it, is a work in progress :)

I think Tolkien's Feanor's Tengwar might have been inspired by phonetically-inspired indic scripts, and it certainly relates characters more nicely than alphabetical order does.

An example of introducing tengwar to latin-scripted "lang belta" readers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qz22f7ScqHnacRHn_PM1zZ3nUhV...

as well as the opposite direction, introducing latin script to "tengwa" readers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gK3q843zdDOpsmKP1lHfoYpDXuf...

I once spend some time on a very compact writing system that would use five of the segments of the seven segment display (not using the two vertical segments on the right) and use those for the next letter in the word. With the requirement of the characters always having at least one vertical segments that leaves you with 28 combinations, just enough to represent the 26 characters of the Latin alphabet. I was wondering if one would recognize words from the shape of the 'glued' together characters.

Do you have a draft of it? It seems very interesting!

Took me some time to find my notes and it turned out it was actually based on an bit higher version of the 7-segment display: It uses four horizontal lines and three vertical ones. I spend some time writing some JavaScript to display the text. (I have no experience in creating font files yet.) You can view it yourself at: http://www.iwriteiam.nl/D2406.html#3

I like it. I am trying to create a cheatsheet (aka a simple alphabet translation) by simply writing all the letters one by one separated by a space. It might come in handy!

One thing these systems often overlook is that in the physical world symbols don't necessarily come aligned to invisible horizontal lines. For various reasons users may need to write vertically, along a curve, in a cross-word fashion...

A system where every symbol repeats with 90 degrees rotation multiple times is... not going to be very useful. Some writing systems like Arabic or Devanagari sidestep this by forcing the symbols to align on a line, but they sacrifice some functions to gain that.

Another aspect is kerning: when symbols don't uniformly fill the allocated space some pairs of symbols will inevitably look farther apart than others. Ideally, there should be as few such pairs as possible.

Of course, there are some other practical constraints like the direction in which the writer needs to move the writing tool, will the writer be able to see the symbols as they write them due to how they move the tool. How easy it is to confuse an essential element of a symbol for a decoration (what if you try to create a cursive version of a grotesque font? what if you want serifs?)

----

If I were to approach the task of creation of ideal writing system, I'd probably be looking at symmetries. An approach that would ensure that symbols are more or less unique under affine transformations. Another thing: something that eg. Japanese phonetic alphabet tried to do: group symbols by morphology. Eg. "B" and "P" should be more similar than, eg. "B" and "A", but there should also be a common theme for "B", "D", "G", "V" that's absent from "P", "T", "K", "F", and so on.

Also, there's really no reason to stick with Latin alphabet as the template. The I/J/Y, C/K/Q and V/U/W groups aren't good, just one character for the group is enough.

What is the actual use case here?

As stated, it’s not for ciphers.

As commented it’s not for dyslexic people.

As remarked upon it’s not for speed writers.

In addition it’s just the Latin alphabet using a set of squares, circles and triangles. So much so that V was thrown in with U as though this competed with the original Latin (which also had no distinction between I & J).

So we have potentially hard to both read & write character set that has way too many chances of being misread due to sloppiness (e.g. people like me and my spider crawl) that provides just what benefit?

The one and only goal was to have fun creating something that my mind could memorize very easily and that would look funny and "cryptic" at a first glance :)

For fast writing, I'd say shorthand is probably much better. Gregg and Teeline are the more popular variants, with a more simplified version of Gregg called Gregg Notehand.

Any dyslexic people here? I am not, but I understand mirror images of the same symbol can be problematic, and this alphabet is built out of them.

This alphabet forgoes almost every ergonomic feature of most alphabets. It is going to be very difficult to read quickly, or while e.g. driving, or even just to scan a page.

There is a reason that historical alphabets quickly developed highly distinct symbols, and it is only very loosely connected to the symbols represented at first (e g. Hebrew י representing a hand). And you'll notice that these forms - across most language familys - took only a few hundred years to develop, and have remained largely unchanged for two millennia. The modern forms of most language letters - at least the European and Middle Eastern ones that I am familiar with - are nearly perfect for their purpose.

At least, the letters are ))

Copying from above, not for laziness (maybe) but because it is the same answer :)

Good point, will be taken into account for my next one!

So... It's Hangul?

No idea of what Hangul is...yet

In tokipona, each word [can] have their own glyph: https://jan-ne.github.io/tp/sp

I fear all those triangle letters (LMNPQRST) would be hard to distinguish in a handwriting - even in you example I'm having difficulty to discern T and S in THIS.

Is there a comparison of speed between this and normal cursive writing? I'd like to see just how much faster it is

It isn't faster than cursive. I think even when you're used to it it will be dramatically slower. Except the four vowels, every letter is more intricate, many involve multiple strokes, and most start with or leave your pen on the wrong side.

Cool idea.

I often thought, writing speed could be improved quite a bit if we just removed strokes from some characters.

bro, a serious question. which part of it is "fast"?

The trip to the loony bin.

Well, you have a point here lol

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