Hacker News Reader

Comment by snthpy | Hacker News Reader

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com