31–40 of 136 posts
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A letter is a symbol. This is just switching to new symbols.
It sort of makes the words become symbols.
(And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.)
Thinking about it-- you increase your bandwidth immediately. You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Use the extra bits to add in the more confusing vowels sounds, and appropriate current digraphs where they aren't confusing.
Chording becomes your standard input device; just press every sound that's in the word at once and move on. Anyone would be able to type as fast as they could talk, at least, and read far faster. Text to speech and vice versa would be much easier. Machine translation would make you perfectly legible to the non-phonetically-literate, and the vastly improved typing speed would more than make up for any minor hiccups. It would be much, much easier to teach English to children and non-natives, so much so that we'd stop using letters for everyday writing. Alphabetic English would be bizarrely unintelligible within a couple generations, but again, thanks to machine translation, perfectly readable.
Of course you get all of this just from having a phonetic alphabet; a concise binary representation is just icing on the cake. If your goal is to get people to read different, why not go for the grand prize?
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This looks much better. I'll report back when I'm done reading.
Cool. Curious if others like this style better than the original link also.
I think that I mostly had a problem just understanding the letters of the original font. It's probably harder for me to convert using a normal font, but at least I can read it in general.
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Maybe I'm just tired, but both of these were near-uninteligable to me even at the beginning. It could also be simply that I'm a bit compulsive about reading -- I find it impossible to gloss over even a single word that I can't puzzle out, so even the first lines stop me in my tracks even though I can read all the words but one or two. In any case, if you have the inclination, a version that started even more gently m…
> if you have the inclination, a version that started even more gently might work better for me. How's this? http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple-2.html
For what purpose?
Mostly for space-efficiency. See http://dotsies.org for a better description.
I'd argue that the text on the right, in the green font, is just as readable as the dotsies, while taking up less space.
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Mostly for space-efficiency. See http://dotsies.org for a better description.
Dotsies aren't all that space-efficient, though, when compared to regular old text. For example, in this comparison: http://i.imgur.com/Ldd70.png I'd argue that the text on the right, in the green font, is just as readable as the dotsies, while taking up less space.
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> if you have the inclination, a version that started even more gently might work better for me. How's this? http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple-2.html
When I read that style I feel like I focus on the normal letters and ignore the new characters.
I wonder if it would be interesting to have a hybrid. Like maybe the letters could start out as Roman, then change (one at a time) into the letter-shaped dots, then change (one at a time) into just dots.
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Cool. Curious if others like this style better than the original link also.
About half way through, and it's going very well. I think that I mostly had a problem just understanding the letters of the original font. It's probably harder for me to convert using a normal font, but at least I can read it in general.
So... if I want the single letter 'B' by itself, it looks exactly the same as the letters A, C, D or E? In other words, 'DE' look exactly the same, without any reference, as 'AB', and there is a haphazard set of similar combinations? I'm not doing that. Learn Braille instead.
Example? Your own comment. How do we know which definition of the word "look" you are using? Context.
