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Dotsies (2012)

dotsies.org

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Re: Dotsies (2012)

#131

Post by blueblimp »

jpfed wrote: post #81
airesearcher wrote: post #61

Why didn't the designer select dot positions based on letter frequency or letter pairing frequency in English? This could have yielded a font that would be more likely to make pretty geometric shapes. Even a simple improvement like vowels all having higher dot positions in the font, and consonants having lower positions, could be interesting. It seems that the dot positions are just based on letter position in the al…

My suspicion is that the way to improve legibility is to consider ways to make symbol images more robust to noise. In particular, if a symbol image were perturbed, would the context help you figure out what that symbol should be? For each letter, we can build a histogram of contexts that letter occurs in for a sufficiently large corpus. An example is the letter "o", whose occurrences in the previous sentence have the…

That's a very interesting point and suggests that, counterintuitively, it would actually be bad for (for example) vowels to look similar to each other.

Another way to use language statistics would be to make the font variable-width (which may help with legibility) but make commonly-occurring letters thin.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#132

Post by jacobush »

blueblimp wrote: post #126
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…

Hangul (the Korean writing system) came to mind immediately for me too. I can't read Korean, but the writing system is very well designed, being phonetic and compact. It would be great to have something like that for written English.

Like what Mark Twain suggested. https://msu.edu/~jerrymc/humor/spelling.html

" For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. "

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#133

Post by bredren »

When watching sci-fi films like Prospect that feature strange character systems, I often wonder how we might have turned toward something like that to label ships and stuff. (Presuming no alien cultural injection)

And then I see this, and despite some of the valid criticism of this particular set I now understand how english or some other recognizable written language might not be a guarantee for labeling in the future.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#134

Post by bredren »

kijin wrote: post #96
Koshkin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But dots are more compact than strokes.

Strokes allow for much more graceful degradation when you have to use a pen and paper.

I think a key point of the language is that it points toward machine-reproduced printing and display only. Writing can still be Chinese, English or any other language. But for in-place printed labeling or digital display, something like this might be interesting.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#135

Post by visarga »

punnerud wrote: post #117
bcheung wrote: post #49

Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim. If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get co…

Could we compare Dotsies learnability with "normal alphabeth" by checking which one is easiest to train with deep nevral network (NN)?

Dotsies would be trivial to learn if they are in digital form. Think of QR readers. I can't even imagine handwritten dotsies, they would probably be a mess.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#136

Post by krautsourced »

jacobush wrote: post #132
blueblimp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hangul (the Korean writing system) came to mind immediately for me too. I can't read Korean, but the writing system is very well designed, being phonetic and compact. It would be great to have something like that for written English.

Like what Mark Twain suggested. https://msu.edu/~jerrymc/humor/spelling.html " For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the s…

Funnily enough, that's very close to how a non-English-speaking German would probably spell English words :)

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#137

Post by idle_zealot »

krautsourced wrote: post #136
jacobush wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what Mark Twain suggested. https://msu.edu/~jerrymc/humor/spelling.html " For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the s…

Funnily enough, that's very close to how a non-English-speaking German would probably spell English words :)

I believe that was the intended joke.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#138

Post by dylan604 »

jacobush wrote: post #132
blueblimp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hangul (the Korean writing system) came to mind immediately for me too. I can't read Korean, but the writing system is very well designed, being phonetic and compact. It would be great to have something like that for written English.

Like what Mark Twain suggested. https://msu.edu/~jerrymc/humor/spelling.html " For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the s…

I think I've read that language while grading middle school paper from kids that did not pay attention in grammar classes.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#139

Post by idle_zealot »

mkl wrote: post #104
beizhia wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Or it would require standardizing on certain pronunciations.
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