3 ms·

Initial concerns: - Is it guaranteed that the ruleset can produce any sequence of collisions? - Seems like the vast majority of possible states would represen

Initial concerns: - Is it guaranteed that the ruleset can produce any sequence of collisions? - Seems like the vast majority of possible states would represent words with concurrent phonemes, which is pretty much undefined behavior for the human mouth. I guess you don't want the ideograms to be too informationally-dense, but that's a pretty sparse encoding. - Example table only does CV syllables and it's not immediately obvious to me how to extend it to more syllable types. (especially crazy consonant-dense clusters like "twelfths") You could have ∅ entries in each vector, but then you start to lose some of the natural "timing" analogy if some collisions don't represent syllables. - Not a lot of visual distinction between different words (e.g. "like" and "site" are just 1 step vertically transposed from each other). - Each word has many many possible ideograms, not just because each collision can be generated multiple ways, but also since you can create non-colliding "noise" cells in unused areas. I guess you could leverage the expressiveness somehow, like tending to use certain collision types or cell states implies something about the context / pragmatics. I do really like the out-of-the-box thinking that inspired this, but I also like seeing it taken to the rational extreme. How can you get the dynamic nature of the cellular automata shine in your system? What distinguishes it from using the same table, but just putting numbers in the cells for when each combination occurs?

WorldMaker 7y ago
Good list of concerns. I'd also add that the slower pace of writing system changes versus direct phonetics is more often a feature rather than a bug. For instance, despite some rather huge shifts in phonetics over centuries and distributed across a large variety of accents, written English is relatively stable, allowing people to read Middle English and sometimes even Old English documents with relatively more ease than had they followed more strictly phonetic renderings.

WorldMaker 7y ago

Good list of concerns. I'd also add that the slower pace of writing system changes versus direct phonetics is more often a feature rather than a bug. For instance, despite some rather huge shifts in phonetics over centuries and distributed across a large variety of accents, written English is relatively stable, allowing people to read Middle English and sometimes even Old English documents with relatively more ease than had they followed more strictly phonetic renderings.