What about diacritical marks? Without them it's restricted to English.
Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
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Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#62This reminds me a great deal of Mark Twain's plan for the improvement of English Spelling:
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#63I haven't put in the time to become fluent in reading Dotsies (Dotsie?) yet, but find it fascinating. I can imagine a multitouch keyboard made for Dotsies, that could be quite a bit more efficient once learned.
Has any research been done on optimizing graphemes and common words for multitouch typing?
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#64This 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…
Thanks for the link! I've never studied Korean before, looks quite interesting. I'd also be curious to see if there were a way to merge the phonetically featural traits of Hangul with the narrowly mathematical nature of dotsies. Do update us with where you get to thinking about Chmodish :)
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y. The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be. > just press every sound that's in the wor…
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…
> The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word
That's not typically the case - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard.
> this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm
Stenography is very fast, but can't replace a normal keyboard (i.e. you wouldn't want to use MS Word with it or code with it). Also it has a large learning curve and can vary from person to person.
> using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back
On the other hand, you don't have to move your fingers around - they stay in one place. And it makes possible a very large number of key combinations (when using both hands) that can be used as optional shortcuts for typing common words.
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#66What about diacritical marks? Without them it's restricted to English.
Here are some accents. I'm adding them to the font as people request them at https://twitter.com/dotsiesfont
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#67the density reminds me of chinese
No that it's necessary, but I can't see any comment anywhere here or on the dotsies about numbers...
Also - diacriticials. This works fine in English, but pretty much every other place that uses the latin alphabet needs to use some kind of extra marks - even if we ignore the ones that are basically de-facto unused these days.... but in spanish the ´ is rather importnat to indicate emphasis and hence meaning or past tense, the ¨ is used occasionally, and n and ñ are two different letters, rather important if you want to be saying "happy new year" instead of "happy new anus" (año = year)
perhaps an alternate version for different languages? Spanish should be easy considering we only have to take into account ´ and ¨ as a diacritical - the rest "ll" and 'ñ' are taught in school as separate and distinct letters in the alphabet (as htey relate directly to pronunciation, no exceptions- ll is always a y, ñ is always like "ny" - not sure about the ¨ - it's not used often, and the difference is subtle - though possibly important - common in people's names I think, where you'd want to get it right. - have to look it up.
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
sorry i started it.. i meant perceiving a word as one symbol vs a combination of letters. that will speed up and increase the amount of information we can take in, drastically. considering we do use few thousand words max, to do 99% of our communication (sorry forgot where i read this article), learn those symbols, your eyes now can see much more at once, and brain can digest accordingly. this is a serious upgrade fo…
That's what I'm saying, you already do that. When you read a line of text your eyes move several words at a time, but your area of focus is only wide enough to really see a few letters at a time. You are recognizing some words wholesale, simply ignoring others and filling in with context. The impression that you have seen the entire line of text is a clever illusion developed inside your brain. You very rarely pay at…
If you want your kids to read faster than you get them on speed reading training - just takes constant training.
Teach them sign language, while young when it's really easy to learn (harder for us adults, though apparently not hard either) - it could open up a lot of doors, and if I'm not mistaken it's somewhat internationalized? If enough of the new generation groks that, imagine what it does for communication.
Teaching them a new alphabet nobody uses won't help anything, other than theri own shorthand - but that can be improved even better by teachin ghtem real shorthand.
Also consider having them learn a second language - Mandarin probably. Throw in a romance language and they'll have no trouble learning new languages in a snap throughout life.... they'll naturally see patterns and grab concepts adults who grow up with a single language/alphabet don't.
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
sorry i started it.. i meant perceiving a word as one symbol vs a combination of letters. that will speed up and increase the amount of information we can take in, drastically. considering we do use few thousand words max, to do 99% of our communication (sorry forgot where i read this article), learn those symbols, your eyes now can see much more at once, and brain can digest accordingly. this is a serious upgrade fo…
That's what I'm saying, you already do that. When you read a line of text your eyes move several words at a time, but your area of focus is only wide enough to really see a few letters at a time. You are recognizing some words wholesale, simply ignoring others and filling in with context. The impression that you have seen the entire line of text is a clever illusion developed inside your brain. You very rarely pay at…
Yeah, and speaking for myself, actually parsing the words is never the slowest part of comprehending a piece of text. Much slower is figuring out what a whole thought is saying, figuring out how it fits into the fabric of the text, figuring out whether it’s right, what it says about the author’s agenda, what news ideas it provokes, etc.
There’s certainly some marginal advantage to come from improving word parsing speed, but just like any speed reading technique, that advantage goes only so far, I would guess. (For instance, if I’m only trying to recognize words & nominally parse the grammar, I can move my eyes much faster and cover text extremely quickly, but when I’m doing that, I’ll typically realize at the end of a paragraph or page that I don’t fully understand what’s being said because I haven’t taken the time to think through all the implications.)
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#70the density reminds me of chinese
No that it's necessary, but I can't see any comment anywhere here or on the dotsies about numbers... Also - diacriticials. This works fine in English, but pretty much every other place that uses the latin alphabet needs to use some kind of extra marks - even if we ignore the ones that are basically de-facto unused these days.... but in spanish the ´ is rather importnat to indicate emphasis and hence meaning or past t…
Numbers are unaltered. Optimizing them wouldn't save much space in normal english text, since they're rare.
Hey, new anus is a perfectly respectable holiday.
Here are some examples of accents: http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1.
I'm adding more to the font as they're being requested.