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Dotsies (2012)

dotsies.org

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Re: Dotsies (2012)

#101

Post by qlk1123 »

KennyCason wrote: post #90
qlk1123 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring. What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean Characters. As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols are always more appealing to me. I st…

I'm impressed, If you remove the Kanji from Japanese, my reading speed goes down significantly. Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed. What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English readi…

Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective as a native English speaker and a Chinese learner.

> I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc.

It had been a dominating language/writing system for part of Asia, and we can still find its legacy in Vietnamese, Korean, Japan.

But I think "legacy" is the keyword here. As a software engineer, the Chinese writing system is not in a ideal shape at least for me. There used to be systematic ways/principles to create characters, but there has never been any sustainable approach to "maintain" some of the internal consistency. It's like stacking workarounds one after another, and it becomes what we see today. Users can just accept it without any efficient way to modify or even refactor it, not mentioning the burden and effort to create just one beautiful font design.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#103

Post by bencollier49 »

neurobashing wrote: post #70

The first thing I thought of was Marain, from The Culture novels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture : “Designed to be represented either in binary or symbol-written form, Marain is also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing language by the Culture. The symbols of the Marain alphabet can be displayed in three-by-three grids of binary (yes/no, black/white) dots and thus correspond to nine-bit wide binary numbers…

Came here to say the same thing. Interesting to see that someone has (independently?) had the same sort of idea.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#104

Post by mkl »

beizhia wrote: post #85
nine_k wrote: post #83

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 m…

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.

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.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#105

Post by the_clarence »

I spent time learning it years ago. It was... useless. It’s just too small and not readable. But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well, so maybe I should have persisted. If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies that would really impress me.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#106

Post by nabla9 »

As others have pointed out, this is not ideal. At least it requires lots of work.

If we could start from the scratch, Hangul style syllabic blocks that combine alphabetic and syllabic systems might be the ideal.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#107

Post by School-Cotton »

johnfn wrote: post #99
merricksb wrote: post #82

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571 (2017, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 (2012, 98 comments)

I was going to post some comment about how the comments here were all overly negative for what was obviously just someone having fun. Then I read the comments in 2012. Jesus Christ. In any case, it's sad to me how when people on HN see someone having a bit of fun or messing around, their first instinct is to knock it down.

The website is not presenting this as just having fun, but rather making the strong claim that it is actually better than the writing system we've been using.

Making such very strong claims ("I've come up with something better than what civilization has produced thus far...") naturally invites debate, especially when they seem implausible on their face and aren't backed up by a very solid argument. There would be a lot fewer negative comments if this were presented like "hey, look at this neat game I made up..."

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#108

Post by School-Cotton »

TomMckenny wrote: post #60
jeremyw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like HN should implement a "positive-only" or "constructive-only" flag for posts, whether set by posters or moderators. Perhaps all Show HN. Start to experiment, see what sticks.

It is a pity an intellectually curious person's work posted to a forum of presumably intellectually curious people gets a bit beat up. George Bernard Shaw worked out a new alphabet too. Tolkien built a language for books about goblins and elves. I can't image how they would be greeted. But perhaps it's just a bad day or hour or something.

Tolkien did not claim that his invented language was better than English and should replace it.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#109

Post by retreatguru »

vokep wrote: post #6

I love the way it teaches you, but the other comments are correct. It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility (without necessarily any allegiance to dyslexic fonts), could be pretty interesting. In middle school when bored once I made my own symbolic alphabet, I found it really is extremely…

This was my favourite aspect of dotsies: that words began to have familiar shapes. I stopped needing to parse certain words because their shape was so unique and memorable.

At the same time it would be interesting to see it implemented based on letter frequency rather than order in the alphabet.

It was great fun to read!

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