Learn to read a binary font by reading a story • Hacker News Board

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#101

Post by oskarth » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 11:46 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #57

Cushman wrote: post #33

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (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--…

> Chording becomes your standard input device That's exactly what steganographers do, and they go further along by condensing syllabes, words or even phrases in a single chord. Pretty amazing, although it seems a lot harder than this, and not as good for reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype

In case it wasn't just a mind-typo: stenographer and steganographer are two different things. (Although I guess one could argue that they are quite similar)

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#102

Post by dbaupp » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 11:46 AM UTC

Cushman wrote: post #33

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (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--…

There is problem with phonetic alphabets: people have different accents, and so something that is obvious for an Englishman is confusing for an Australian, or an American.

When I was (briefly) doing some linguistics, there were several times when I spent minutes trying to work out what a certain set of IPA symbols were. (I was pretty good normally, but words with multiple/varying/regional pronunciations are very confusing.)

Obviously, with more practice it'd be easier to read, and if the alphabet were in use around the world, pronunciations and accents would converge.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#103

Post by polymatter » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 12:41 PM UTC

trogdoro wrote: post #89

trogdoro wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I added some characters. Someone give me a plot!

Ok, now the alien can eat the other characters, but I don't know why. Anyone good at making up plots?

Rather than alien, how about a hungry catapillar. And the hungry catapillar can only eat the next word in the sequence. Ok now it sounds like hungry a katamari. nom nom.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#104

Post by noonat » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 1:33 PM UTC

nosignal wrote: post #56

Cushman wrote: post #33

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (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--…

Hangul, the Korean writing system, is at once phonetic and syllabic. Each "symbol" represents a syllable, but each sub-symbol represents a particular sound in the syllable; and each sub-sub-symbol encodes phonetic information about how it should be pronounced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design for a better explanation. A binary representation of the Hangul system could be very interesting. Use the…

I've been learning Hangul recently, and now every language that doesn't encode syllables into the writing system just seems immensely flawed to me. Hangul seems like a very intuitive, logical writing system. There are relatively few exceptions to the rules it sets out, though I think that's likely because it's such a young language -- more and more seem to be creeping in over time as dialects evolve.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#105

Post by Kutta » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 1:39 PM UTC

Cushman wrote: post #33

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (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--…

Phonetic alphabet seems to be a beast greatly different to what this Dotsie font tries to achieve. Dotsie appears to be about compression, reading speed and more utilization of word-picture association.

Phonetic alphabets are not that great a leap, I think. Hungarian has a mostly phonetic 44-word alphabet, and if there is an advantage in reading/writing speed compared to English, it's rather small. I agree with the "easier teaching" part though.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#106

Post by mistercow » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 1:59 PM UTC

david_ar wrote: post #48

I really like this approach (even if I'm still not entirely convinced about the benefits of dotsies). For a while, I've had this idea of a book that starts in standard English, and gradually alters the grammar and introduces new words - so that halfway-through it's written in somewhat of a pidgin/creole language, and by the end you're reading a completely different language (e.g. French or Japanese). I'm not aware of…

Your idea would be much more practical for French than Japanese. Even though there are some changes of word order and grammatical forms in Romance languages that don't directly correspond to English, the differences between English and Japanese seem likely to be irreconcilable into any kind of pidgin dialect. On the other hand, there are far more cognates between English and Japanese.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#107

Post by slowpoke » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

oskarth wrote: post #97

Cushman wrote: post #33

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (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--…

There's simpel-fonetik, which is extremely intuitive. It's basically a mapping from IPA to latin letters. Example: When you read Simpel-Fonetik words, you must pay attention to each letter. Remember: each letter has always the same sound, the sound given in the Simpel-Fonetik alphabet, regardless what letter is next to it. And here it is re-written in Simpel-Fonetik: Wen ju riid Simpel-Fonetik wörds, ju mast pei äten…

Funnily enough, this looks like a German person with no actual knowledge of English trying to write down what someone speaking English is saying.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#108

Post by StavrosK » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 3:53 PM UTC

dbaupp wrote: post #102

Cushman wrote: post #33

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (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--…

There is problem with phonetic alphabets: people have different accents, and so something that is obvious for an Englishman is confusing for an Australian, or an American. When I was (briefly) doing some linguistics, there were several times when I spent minutes trying to work out what a certain set of IPA symbols were. (I was pretty good normally, but words with multiple/varying/regional pronunciations are very conf…

Not really. Greek has a phonetic alphabet, and we're doing fine with accents. You just standardize words and spell them in one way, and the people speaking the dialect just spell them the same, even knowing they sound different. It's not a problem, and you can even emulate the accent in writing for whatever purpose.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#109

Post by Cushman » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:28 PM UTC

sgentle wrote: post #75

Cushman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's been proposed before... It's pretty hard to convince everyone they should start using a new language nobody else can read. (More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto. Ouch.) I think computers change the equation, though. Machine translation would be almost impeccable. Using phonetics visually would make chording intuitive in a way it hasn't been until now... You can do a soft launch where you start out…

I was curious about the "More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto" thing, but from what I can tell it's emphatically not true. The number of fluent Esperantists is somewhere in the tens or hundreds of thousands, whereas the number of fluent speakers of Klingon is closer to a few dozen. Here are some sources, including a particularly cool 2009 Salon article on Klingon, Esperanto and conlangs in general: http://www…

Thanks for doing the legwork-- when you put it like that, yeah, it's pretty obviously wrong. I think where I ultimately got that from was a claim by Guinness that Klingon was the most widely spoken fictional language, which someone took to mean constructed language, and it kind of snowballed. Oops.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#110

Post by njs12345 » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:31 PM UTC

david_ar wrote: post #48

I really like this approach (even if I'm still not entirely convinced about the benefits of dotsies). For a while, I've had this idea of a book that starts in standard English, and gradually alters the grammar and introduces new words - so that halfway-through it's written in somewhat of a pidgin/creole language, and by the end you're reading a completely different language (e.g. French or Japanese). I'm not aware of…

I wonder to what extent you could do this automatically given a text in two languages (e.g. Harry Potter). From a quick google it looks as though text alignment might fall in the category of "possible" NLP problems[1], so it might be feasible on the sentence level..

[1] http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J93/J93-1006.pdf