16 ms·

Here's an interesting revelation that likely has something to do with why letters are shaped the way they are. We have a 26 letter alphabet, plus space, plus 10

Here's an interesting revelation that likely has something to do with why letters are shaped the way they are. We have a 26 letter alphabet, plus space, plus 10 numbers, plus the punctuation !?.,;:/-+#()". That's 50 symbols in total which works out to a bit rate of about 5.64 bits per letter. Nearly all of our glyph's can be written as is on a 7 segment display like you would see on a microwave. With just a tiny amount of redesign, our writing system would be exactly 7 bits. Meaning, without any intent or understanding of information theory, our ancestors gradually gravitated towards a writing system that has just 1.36 bits of extraneous code space. This is far to efficient to ignore. It wasn't until the digital revolution that the 7-segment pattern belying most letters was apparent. There is no "7 segment font" for the Guttenburg printing press. Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. Vocabulary almost certainly has evolved in a way that efficiently compresses semantic information. We just haven't noticed the 7 segments yet.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ianstormtaylor 5y ago
That's a really nice mental model for it. I learned a similar concept in Typography class... for an assignment to design a new number. I was a little indecisive and apologized when I showed up to critique with two different number drawings [0]. My professor (Cyrus Highsmith [1]) looked at them and said not to worry because they were the same number anyways. I didn't get it at first, but a few minutes after sitting back down I realized what he meant, and it's stuck with me ever since. Using the 7-segment display as an example would have been a great way to explain the concept to me at the time. I'll remember that for next time! Also a cool way to think about it, because it begs the question of which 7-segment permutations don't map to existing symbols, for whenever someone needs to design a new one in the future. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/8zB44gi.png https://i.imgur.com/8zB44gi.png [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Highsmith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Highsmith
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  One thing which obviously cuts down the code space of 7 segments is the fact that there's no levitating glyphs. They all touch the floor somehow. Another thing that cuts down on the code space is the fact that there's no disconnected glyphs. All the segments touch at least one other segment. I suppose you could write 11 on a single 7 seg display, but you wouldn't think of 11 as a single character. The last restriction that cuts things down a tiny bit is that for vertical line characters (i,l,1), it doesn't matter if you use the segments on the left or the right. They are still the same character. Applying these constraints, There are a handful of could-be letters left over. Some are already in use like the upside down A (used in mathematics), Capital Gamma, entailment symbol (used in logic). Others, like upside down and/or backwards F, upside down 4, and -| aren't used anywhere AFAIK.
  - jerrre 5y ago
    To save others from looking it up: upside down A: ∀ Capital Gamma: Γ Entailment symbol: ⊧ That last one would also be hard to represent in a 7 segment display, perhaps that would be the upside down F
    - IIAOPSW 5y ago
      The other entailment symbol. ⊢. Sometimes called "the turnstile".
amelius 5y ago
How do you put a "W" on a 7 segment display? Or "M"?
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  Well, if you give up on capital letters (which you'll have to anyway), a W is obviously a double-U. As in a U of twice the height. And of course, since u and w upside down are just n and m, by symmetry m is the double-height n. Yes this is a bit of a stretch but when you write it out they look similar enough to the correct shape that you can still read the words just fine. The letters that don't really fit in any way that looks right are x,v and k.
  - rimliu 5y ago
    How do you write Š or Ž? Or Ш or Ж, Щ, Ю? Or Δ? Or ლ?
    - IIAOPSW 5y ago
      I've addressed this in another comment. The short answer is that it's a mistake to read my comment as saying 7 segments per se in the usual figure-8 shape is universal to how brains comprehend writing. It's not. You can dig up counter examples all day because that wasn't my point. My point was that for a given language, the writing system tends to evolve to the point where each glyph contains just enough distinguishing features to not confuse it with any other glyph. There is also selective pressure to reuse the same segments but in different combinations, rather than try and come up with wholly different lines for each glyph which can only be learned by rote memorization. The end result of these pressures is that any language will evolve towards its own version of a 7 segment display. Call it a k-segment display, where k is only slightly higher than log_2(the size of the alphabet). I don't know what the k segment display looks like for Cyrillic or Greek or whichever other alphabet you pulled the other glyphs from, but I'm sure one could be found. It definitely exists for Korean, as the Korean alphabet was designed in the 19th century and the sub-letters are intentional. I mention this because one of your chosen examples is a Korean letter.
deepsun 5y ago
What about hieroglyphs? What about, say, Cyrillic alphabet with 30+ letters? Or Ancient Egyptian alphabet.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  What's the difference again between hieroglyphs and ancient Egyptian? In any case, citing ancient alphabets is not a counter example, because by definition those alphabets would have been early on in the evolution of language before it had a chance to converge towards an optima. Also this misses the point. The division of the letters into 7 segments or into some other system of segments or dots or something else is immaterial. The point is that a writing system will converge towards having as many distinguishable features per glyph as there are bits per character. Any curves or embellishment to a glyph that does not add more information can and will be ignored and forgotten. A glyph that reuses elements of other glyph's will be easier to learn and thus more likely to be adopted. The selective pressure on a writing system is to converge on something similar to the 7 segment display.
  - Juliate 5y ago
    > before it had a chance to converge towards an optima. The problem is that you consider the current state of one specific language as an optima. > Any curves or embellishment to a glyph that does not add more information can and will be ignored and forgotten. Well... you might not have been of the generation that did write a lot by hand. There's a whole lot amount of information you can embed into the way you write/draw your letters, even in the density/dryness variation of ink and the variation of size, inclination, padding, etc. 7-segment display are an accident between manual written text only and today's high density displays. It's reductionist such as saying a zoom call is definitely an optima to replace physical meetings. While this is true, it highly depends on the nature and content of said meetings. The raw difference in bandwidth and quality of information is significantly huge. > The selective pressure on a writing system is to converge on something similar to the 7 segment display. And what if we had a different system that 7-segment display? (which we have, by the way, so better take advantage of that)
Juliate 5y ago
With all due respect, that sounds more like numerology after the fact. 7 segment font has been designed to work with 7 segment display designed to accommodate a simplified-lower-density English alphabet. It's a typical engineering feat that says not much of the source alphabets/calligraphies: if you were used only to cursive, kurrent or gothic calligraphies, 7 segment is not much relevant. If you are using greek alphabet, you also get into trouble to differentiate between latin and greek characters. Not speaking of other languages representations.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  With all due respect, if every letter can be encode and letters are fungible, in what way is it lower density English? It's not lower density. The density was always this low. >It's a typical engineering feat that says not much of the source alphabets/calligraphies It says everything about alphabets/calligraphies. We could have lived in the world where each of the 26 glyphs was as unique as a frame of TV static, and there was no way to compress them down into segments or anything else. We didn't end up in that world. We also didn't end up in the world where clever engineering got each letter down to 12 segments, which is fine but still has twice as many bits in the glyph as there is information to encode. No, we ended up in the world where the "typical feat of engineering" was possible, and thus have a representation that only wastes 1.36 bits per letter. An engineer could not have willed a system of k-segments into existence and imposed it on users. An engineer cannot make things look like letters if they do not already look like letters. The 7 segments had to be the subconsciously recognized abstract form of letters this entire time. >if you were used only to cursive, kurrent or gothic calligraphies then there would be a different subconscious abstract form of the alphabet and a different near-optimal k-segment display would have been invented.
  - Juliate 5y ago
    > An engineer could not have willed a system of k-segments into existence and imposed it on users. They did reduce something that existed to a lower resolution so that it fits into k-segments: how do make o (lower case o), O (upper case o), 0 (zero), D (upper case d), Q (upper case q) coexist on a 7-segment display without ambiguity? You start by deciding that lower/upper case it not important and that only one case for each letter will subsist. That's reduction. > The 7 segments had to be the subconsciously recognized abstract form of letters this entire time. There are other languages of which the scripts do not fit in this view. English Roman-derivative alphabet is not "better" because it compresses itself more into a specific-imposed compression format. https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 is a perfect illustration.
rimliu 5y ago
> We have a 26 letter alphabet Who are "we" here?
- Grustaf 5y ago
  English speakers. (If you think about it, we are writing in English here)
albert_e 5y ago
counter examples: "Hello" in ... ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ (Kannada) नमस्ते (Hindi) வணக்கம் (Tamil) ہیلو (Urdu) こんにちは (Japanese) ନମସ୍କାର (Odia)
wolpoli 5y ago
How do you distinguish between D/O/0 on a 7-segments display?
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  d/o/0 One of the compromises you have to make to get 7 segment writing system is that you won't always have capital and lower case options. Rather, some letters can only be written lower case, some only upper case, some both, and some sort of both but one of the cases conflicts with a different glyph (eg lowercase l and i). Eliminating case entirely and just having one symbol per letter is fine since capitalization isn't encoding much anyway. Another compromise/hack you can do is accept 1337 5p3ak as de jure spelling. So the number and letter characters are literally the same, and reading them as one or the other depends on context (or perhaps a special "this is a number" glyph like "#"). I admit some of the transpositions into a pure 7 seg alphabet feel like shoes that are slightly too tight. But we can break them in with time!
9dev 5y ago
This seems to be the American ASCII mistake all over again: Just because a tiny slice of the global population uses a 26 letter alphabet doesn't mean there's an underlying truth for humanity as a whole. Conveniently omitting all other alphabets and glyphs there are seems a little ignorant to me. Your theory immediately breaks apart if applied to anything but the USA.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  You've misunderstood my theory as being about 7-segment displays specifically. For another language that uses N letters, you should be able to find a k-segment display such that k is not much greater than log_2(N). The theory is that writing systems evolve to encode their alphabet optimally in the information theoretic sense. 7 segments is the pattern that evolved for the ~50 symbol alphabet needed for English. Different sized alphabets and different arrangements of segments do not contradict this theory.
- arketyp 5y ago
  The theory doesn't necessarily break down? The specific example given just wouldn't apply. The point was that there is an interesting correspondence between alphabetic letters and the latent space which compresses it most efficiently and densely. As a conjecture, we could expect something analogous for vocabulary in general.
- anthk 5y ago
  Well, back in the day the Spanish ñ was written with just "nn". Medieval times, yes, but we already use ch (and in church) and "ll" (close to y in yes), so in the end would be another digraph. And the accented letters in Spanish just denote a stress mark when the spelling is not following the rules. Cortes is "CORtes", it means "courts". Cortés is "corTES", it means "courteous". Then, in ASCII, it could be represented as Cort'e's or cort|e|s or any other small symbol. The diaeresis over ü would be a bigger task, but not impossible.
pm215 5y ago
Given that the Chinese writing system has retained its large number of complex-to-draw characters for thousands of years, I think it's a bit of a stretch to consider that an alphabet is "far too efficient to ignore". Historically AIUI the alphabet is a comparatively rare invention -- more writing systems borrowed the concept from somewhere else than developed it from scratch.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  I'm sure when you break down written Chinese into all the basic shapes and modifying radicals, you will find a number of segments that is very close to the number of bits needed to encode a single character. Written Chinese looks very complex because it codes far more than 7 bits per glyph. But that doesn't mean it is wastefully encoding. I add the caveat that traditional vs simplified Chinese suggests I might be wrong on this specific example, and that institutional stability and standardization froze Chinese writing in place before it naturally evolved to a simpler state.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Most Chinese characters consist of a radical (out of 200 or so) and a sound part. So it's not like Hangul or some other systems where you can definitely break them up into many smaller parts. It's true that visually speaking, some sound parts consist of for example boxes or lines that are also used in other characters, but they have no independent sound, or even deeper meaning.
wongarsu 5y ago
> Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. Diacritics are the obvious counter example. The two dots you can put above a, o, u to change their sound, or in other languages above any vowel to indicate it's part of a different syllable then the following vowel. The undercomma to slightly change the sound of a s or c. The accent grave, acute or circumflex to indicate if that e is to be pronounced é, è, or ê (so more nasal or open). And that's just the popular, European ones. Languages like Arabic make diacritics even more central to their writing system.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  Your counter example is correct because I didn't quite phrase what I meant accurately. What I meant was that I, and everyone else, learned the alphabet as 26 things you just had to memorize as there was no way to simplify it or organize it better. AFAIK this is the way its always been, as I've never seen an example of a pre-digital 7 segment font.
  - brandmeyer 5y ago
    Latin didn't even evolve lowercase letterforms until the 9th century AD. "J" didn't evolve as its own letter until sometime in the 16th century AD. Early Roman had only 19 or 20 distinct (strictly uppercase) letters depending on exactly which scholar and century you're looking at. IMO, the various letterforms in use by all of the alphabetic languages have more to do with the available writing technology of their day, and in keeping the letterforms sufficiently distinctive to quickly recognize whole words. Compare Etruscan engravings to early Roman engravings to German blackletter to Spencerian cursive to Zaner-Bloser cursive for example. Hangul has a similar diversity in stroke shapes to Latin characters, but much more diversity in stroke position. I pity the poor engineer who might have been tasked with constructing an N-segment display for Hangul in the days before dot-matrix technology was feasible. Finally, the 7-segment display doesn't actually look particularly recognizable when being used to render latin text. It only really works for the European evolutionary branch of Arabic/Hindu numerals. Even with only 26 (modern! English!) letters, we still have enough stroke diversity that we'd prefer to render text with more complexity. 2^7 segment combinations for only 2^3.3 characters doesn't sound so optimal any more, does it? But if you want to stick with your information-theoretic observation, I'll point out the completely unrelated fact that some of the early and successful forward error correction schemes for Gaussian channels use rate 1/2 coding. Anything optimized for burst errors is quite different, though.
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
Nice story, but probably untrue.
lanna 5y ago
> We have a 26 letter alphabet, plus space, plus 10 numbers, plus the punctuation !?.,;:/-+#()". That's 50 symbols in total which works out to a bit rate of about 5.64 bits per letter. Your choice of punctuation, most of which cannot be represented on a 7 segment display, is arbitrary[1], ASCII/US keyboard centred, and only added to your argument to increase bit count. [1] why include /-+ but no *, =? # but no @, &, $, %? () but no []{}<>? " but no '?
- ummwhat 5y ago
  On my alt because had to step away from computer. Why /-+ Don't interpret them as math. Those are "or" (as in yes/no), hyphen, and "and" (as in you+me). I rejected ampersand because the use case was covered by +. I included one set of parenthesis because parenthesis are a gramatical necessity as scope can otherwise be ambiguous, but more than one style of parenthesis is redundant. I reluctantly added # because in order to fit everything in 7 sev, you are sometimes forced to use 1337 5p34k. So it might be necessary to have a symbol for "read this as a number". Contrary to your assertion that I was just padding out the count, I was actually trying to do the opposite and keep the extra symbol count down to only what is needed. You could cut all the special characters and still be at over 5 bits.
  - lanna 5y ago
    You can't represent ! without being ambiguous with 1IL. You can't represent .,;:/+#(). You can't represent G, K, T, V, X, Z. The way you proposed to represent M and W is non-intuitive, to say the least. You cherry pick between lower and upper case letters, discarding half of them, only to shoehorn them into your model.
    - IIAOPSW 5y ago
      You can't represent G, K, T, V, T, V, X, Z You said T and V twice. I already admitted elsewhere V,X,K are problematic. G -> g -> 9. Z -> 2. S being indistinguishable from 5 means you are forced to accept collision between numbers and letters anyway, so by the conventions established in 1337 5p34k, T -> 7 is an acceptable substitute. Accepting that there is only one form of a letter, no more capitals, you can do "(" with what used to be C, and ")" with a backwards "C". "/" is absolutely doable with 7 segments. Of the 50 symbols I started with, there are just 9 that don't really fit in a visually intuitive way. KVX.,;+# And honestly that's fine. The point of this exercise wasn't alphabet reform. The point was that 7 is a close estimate for the number of bits needed to define the shape of a letter in the English alphabet. The fact that the 7-segment system can cover just over 80% of these glyphs without anyone intentionally designing it that way is suggestive of the idea that alphabets naturally optimize towards some system of n-segments. >You cherry pick between lower and upper case letters, discarding half of them, only to shoehorn them into your model. Not really sure whats the problem here. I've been consistent. 1. The distinction between upper and lower will no longer exist. There is just one glyph per letter, sometimes the glyph formerly known as "upper", sometime the glyph formerly known as "lower". 2. Some glyphs that might have been used as an upper/lower version are instead used to encode something that otherwise wouldn't have a glyph (like m, w, parenthesis). It's not shoehorning to repurpose the symbols I previously removed for redundancy. >The way you proposed to represent M and W is non-intuitive Try writing out a few sentences this way. I assure you it has enough in common with the outline of M and W that you won't trip over reading it.
bitcurious 5y ago
> Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. Most kids today who learn to write learn to write the Latin alphabet learn by tracing individual strokes or “atoms” as you put them. Minimizing strokes introduces cursive. Stepping back into history, there’s a lot of overlap between how you would carve letters into a clay tablet/stone and how a seven segment display works. So that’s a fun parallel.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  You've piqued my interest. Further reading?
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwP0KUlnZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwP0KUlnZg
Nition 5y ago
Can we get a name for the Internet phenomenon where a post like this says "Nearly all [thing] is this way..." and then several replies are "aha, not true, what about [exception]?" If someone says "Most..." or "Nearly all...", they already know there are exceptions.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ianstormtaylor 5y ago

That's a really nice mental model for it. I learned a similar concept in Typography class... for an assignment to design a new number. I was a little indecisive and apologized when I showed up to critique with two different number drawings [0]. My professor (Cyrus Highsmith [1]) looked at them and said not to worry because they were the same number anyways. I didn't get it at first, but a few minutes after sitting back down I realized what he meant, and it's stuck with me ever since. Using the 7-segment display as an example would have been a great way to explain the concept to me at the time. I'll remember that for next time! Also a cool way to think about it, because it begs the question of which 7-segment permutations don't map to existing symbols, for whenever someone needs to design a new one in the future. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/8zB44gi.png https://i.imgur.com/8zB44gi.png [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Highsmith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Highsmith

IIAOPSW 5y ago
One thing which obviously cuts down the code space of 7 segments is the fact that there's no levitating glyphs. They all touch the floor somehow. Another thing that cuts down on the code space is the fact that there's no disconnected glyphs. All the segments touch at least one other segment. I suppose you could write 11 on a single 7 seg display, but you wouldn't think of 11 as a single character. The last restriction that cuts things down a tiny bit is that for vertical line characters (i,l,1), it doesn't matter if you use the segments on the left or the right. They are still the same character. Applying these constraints, There are a handful of could-be letters left over. Some are already in use like the upside down A (used in mathematics), Capital Gamma, entailment symbol (used in logic). Others, like upside down and/or backwards F, upside down 4, and -| aren't used anywhere AFAIK.
- jerrre 5y ago
  To save others from looking it up: upside down A: ∀ Capital Gamma: Γ Entailment symbol: ⊧ That last one would also be hard to represent in a 7 segment display, perhaps that would be the upside down F
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    The other entailment symbol. ⊢. Sometimes called "the turnstile".

amelius 5y ago

How do you put a "W" on a 7 segment display? Or "M"?

IIAOPSW 5y ago
Well, if you give up on capital letters (which you'll have to anyway), a W is obviously a double-U. As in a U of twice the height. And of course, since u and w upside down are just n and m, by symmetry m is the double-height n. Yes this is a bit of a stretch but when you write it out they look similar enough to the correct shape that you can still read the words just fine. The letters that don't really fit in any way that looks right are x,v and k.
- rimliu 5y ago
  How do you write Š or Ž? Or Ш or Ж, Щ, Ю? Or Δ? Or ლ?
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    I've addressed this in another comment. The short answer is that it's a mistake to read my comment as saying 7 segments per se in the usual figure-8 shape is universal to how brains comprehend writing. It's not. You can dig up counter examples all day because that wasn't my point. My point was that for a given language, the writing system tends to evolve to the point where each glyph contains just enough distinguishing features to not confuse it with any other glyph. There is also selective pressure to reuse the same segments but in different combinations, rather than try and come up with wholly different lines for each glyph which can only be learned by rote memorization. The end result of these pressures is that any language will evolve towards its own version of a 7 segment display. Call it a k-segment display, where k is only slightly higher than log_2(the size of the alphabet). I don't know what the k segment display looks like for Cyrillic or Greek or whichever other alphabet you pulled the other glyphs from, but I'm sure one could be found. It definitely exists for Korean, as the Korean alphabet was designed in the 19th century and the sub-letters are intentional. I mention this because one of your chosen examples is a Korean letter.

deepsun 5y ago

What about hieroglyphs? What about, say, Cyrillic alphabet with 30+ letters? Or Ancient Egyptian alphabet.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
What's the difference again between hieroglyphs and ancient Egyptian? In any case, citing ancient alphabets is not a counter example, because by definition those alphabets would have been early on in the evolution of language before it had a chance to converge towards an optima. Also this misses the point. The division of the letters into 7 segments or into some other system of segments or dots or something else is immaterial. The point is that a writing system will converge towards having as many distinguishable features per glyph as there are bits per character. Any curves or embellishment to a glyph that does not add more information can and will be ignored and forgotten. A glyph that reuses elements of other glyph's will be easier to learn and thus more likely to be adopted. The selective pressure on a writing system is to converge on something similar to the 7 segment display.
- Juliate 5y ago
  > before it had a chance to converge towards an optima. The problem is that you consider the current state of one specific language as an optima. > Any curves or embellishment to a glyph that does not add more information can and will be ignored and forgotten. Well... you might not have been of the generation that did write a lot by hand. There's a whole lot amount of information you can embed into the way you write/draw your letters, even in the density/dryness variation of ink and the variation of size, inclination, padding, etc. 7-segment display are an accident between manual written text only and today's high density displays. It's reductionist such as saying a zoom call is definitely an optima to replace physical meetings. While this is true, it highly depends on the nature and content of said meetings. The raw difference in bandwidth and quality of information is significantly huge. > The selective pressure on a writing system is to converge on something similar to the 7 segment display. And what if we had a different system that 7-segment display? (which we have, by the way, so better take advantage of that)

Juliate 5y ago

With all due respect, that sounds more like numerology after the fact. 7 segment font has been designed to work with 7 segment display designed to accommodate a simplified-lower-density English alphabet. It's a typical engineering feat that says not much of the source alphabets/calligraphies: if you were used only to cursive, kurrent or gothic calligraphies, 7 segment is not much relevant. If you are using greek alphabet, you also get into trouble to differentiate between latin and greek characters. Not speaking of other languages representations.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
With all due respect, if every letter can be encode and letters are fungible, in what way is it lower density English? It's not lower density. The density was always this low. >It's a typical engineering feat that says not much of the source alphabets/calligraphies It says everything about alphabets/calligraphies. We could have lived in the world where each of the 26 glyphs was as unique as a frame of TV static, and there was no way to compress them down into segments or anything else. We didn't end up in that world. We also didn't end up in the world where clever engineering got each letter down to 12 segments, which is fine but still has twice as many bits in the glyph as there is information to encode. No, we ended up in the world where the "typical feat of engineering" was possible, and thus have a representation that only wastes 1.36 bits per letter. An engineer could not have willed a system of k-segments into existence and imposed it on users. An engineer cannot make things look like letters if they do not already look like letters. The 7 segments had to be the subconsciously recognized abstract form of letters this entire time. >if you were used only to cursive, kurrent or gothic calligraphies then there would be a different subconscious abstract form of the alphabet and a different near-optimal k-segment display would have been invented.
- Juliate 5y ago
  > An engineer could not have willed a system of k-segments into existence and imposed it on users. They did reduce something that existed to a lower resolution so that it fits into k-segments: how do make o (lower case o), O (upper case o), 0 (zero), D (upper case d), Q (upper case q) coexist on a 7-segment display without ambiguity? You start by deciding that lower/upper case it not important and that only one case for each letter will subsist. That's reduction. > The 7 segments had to be the subconsciously recognized abstract form of letters this entire time. There are other languages of which the scripts do not fit in this view. English Roman-derivative alphabet is not "better" because it compresses itself more into a specific-imposed compression format. https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 is a perfect illustration.

rimliu 5y ago

> We have a 26 letter alphabet Who are "we" here?

Grustaf 5y ago
English speakers. (If you think about it, we are writing in English here)

albert_e 5y ago

counter examples: "Hello" in ... ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ (Kannada) नमस्ते (Hindi) வணக்கம் (Tamil) ہیلو (Urdu) こんにちは (Japanese) ନମସ୍କାର (Odia)

wolpoli 5y ago

How do you distinguish between D/O/0 on a 7-segments display?

IIAOPSW 5y ago
d/o/0 One of the compromises you have to make to get 7 segment writing system is that you won't always have capital and lower case options. Rather, some letters can only be written lower case, some only upper case, some both, and some sort of both but one of the cases conflicts with a different glyph (eg lowercase l and i). Eliminating case entirely and just having one symbol per letter is fine since capitalization isn't encoding much anyway. Another compromise/hack you can do is accept 1337 5p3ak as de jure spelling. So the number and letter characters are literally the same, and reading them as one or the other depends on context (or perhaps a special "this is a number" glyph like "#"). I admit some of the transpositions into a pure 7 seg alphabet feel like shoes that are slightly too tight. But we can break them in with time!

9dev 5y ago

This seems to be the American ASCII mistake all over again: Just because a tiny slice of the global population uses a 26 letter alphabet doesn't mean there's an underlying truth for humanity as a whole. Conveniently omitting all other alphabets and glyphs there are seems a little ignorant to me. Your theory immediately breaks apart if applied to anything but the USA.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
You've misunderstood my theory as being about 7-segment displays specifically. For another language that uses N letters, you should be able to find a k-segment display such that k is not much greater than log_2(N). The theory is that writing systems evolve to encode their alphabet optimally in the information theoretic sense. 7 segments is the pattern that evolved for the ~50 symbol alphabet needed for English. Different sized alphabets and different arrangements of segments do not contradict this theory.
arketyp 5y ago
The theory doesn't necessarily break down? The specific example given just wouldn't apply. The point was that there is an interesting correspondence between alphabetic letters and the latent space which compresses it most efficiently and densely. As a conjecture, we could expect something analogous for vocabulary in general.
anthk 5y ago
Well, back in the day the Spanish ñ was written with just "nn". Medieval times, yes, but we already use ch (and in church) and "ll" (close to y in yes), so in the end would be another digraph. And the accented letters in Spanish just denote a stress mark when the spelling is not following the rules. Cortes is "CORtes", it means "courts". Cortés is "corTES", it means "courteous". Then, in ASCII, it could be represented as Cort'e's or cort|e|s or any other small symbol. The diaeresis over ü would be a bigger task, but not impossible.

pm215 5y ago

Given that the Chinese writing system has retained its large number of complex-to-draw characters for thousands of years, I think it's a bit of a stretch to consider that an alphabet is "far too efficient to ignore". Historically AIUI the alphabet is a comparatively rare invention -- more writing systems borrowed the concept from somewhere else than developed it from scratch.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
I'm sure when you break down written Chinese into all the basic shapes and modifying radicals, you will find a number of segments that is very close to the number of bits needed to encode a single character. Written Chinese looks very complex because it codes far more than 7 bits per glyph. But that doesn't mean it is wastefully encoding. I add the caveat that traditional vs simplified Chinese suggests I might be wrong on this specific example, and that institutional stability and standardization froze Chinese writing in place before it naturally evolved to a simpler state.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Most Chinese characters consist of a radical (out of 200 or so) and a sound part. So it's not like Hangul or some other systems where you can definitely break them up into many smaller parts. It's true that visually speaking, some sound parts consist of for example boxes or lines that are also used in other characters, but they have no independent sound, or even deeper meaning.

wongarsu 5y ago

> Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. Diacritics are the obvious counter example. The two dots you can put above a, o, u to change their sound, or in other languages above any vowel to indicate it's part of a different syllable then the following vowel. The undercomma to slightly change the sound of a s or c. The accent grave, acute or circumflex to indicate if that e is to be pronounced é, è, or ê (so more nasal or open). And that's just the popular, European ones. Languages like Arabic make diacritics even more central to their writing system.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
Your counter example is correct because I didn't quite phrase what I meant accurately. What I meant was that I, and everyone else, learned the alphabet as 26 things you just had to memorize as there was no way to simplify it or organize it better. AFAIK this is the way its always been, as I've never seen an example of a pre-digital 7 segment font.
- brandmeyer 5y ago
  Latin didn't even evolve lowercase letterforms until the 9th century AD. "J" didn't evolve as its own letter until sometime in the 16th century AD. Early Roman had only 19 or 20 distinct (strictly uppercase) letters depending on exactly which scholar and century you're looking at. IMO, the various letterforms in use by all of the alphabetic languages have more to do with the available writing technology of their day, and in keeping the letterforms sufficiently distinctive to quickly recognize whole words. Compare Etruscan engravings to early Roman engravings to German blackletter to Spencerian cursive to Zaner-Bloser cursive for example. Hangul has a similar diversity in stroke shapes to Latin characters, but much more diversity in stroke position. I pity the poor engineer who might have been tasked with constructing an N-segment display for Hangul in the days before dot-matrix technology was feasible. Finally, the 7-segment display doesn't actually look particularly recognizable when being used to render latin text. It only really works for the European evolutionary branch of Arabic/Hindu numerals. Even with only 26 (modern! English!) letters, we still have enough stroke diversity that we'd prefer to render text with more complexity. 2^7 segment combinations for only 2^3.3 characters doesn't sound so optimal any more, does it? But if you want to stick with your information-theoretic observation, I'll point out the completely unrelated fact that some of the early and successful forward error correction schemes for Gaussian channels use rate 1/2 coding. Anything optimized for burst errors is quite different, though.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

Nice story, but probably untrue.

lanna 5y ago

> We have a 26 letter alphabet, plus space, plus 10 numbers, plus the punctuation !?.,;:/-+#()". That's 50 symbols in total which works out to a bit rate of about 5.64 bits per letter. Your choice of punctuation, most of which cannot be represented on a 7 segment display, is arbitrary[1], ASCII/US keyboard centred, and only added to your argument to increase bit count. [1] why include /-+ but no *, =? # but no @, &, $, %? () but no []{}<>? " but no '?

ummwhat 5y ago
On my alt because had to step away from computer. Why /-+ Don't interpret them as math. Those are "or" (as in yes/no), hyphen, and "and" (as in you+me). I rejected ampersand because the use case was covered by +. I included one set of parenthesis because parenthesis are a gramatical necessity as scope can otherwise be ambiguous, but more than one style of parenthesis is redundant. I reluctantly added # because in order to fit everything in 7 sev, you are sometimes forced to use 1337 5p34k. So it might be necessary to have a symbol for "read this as a number". Contrary to your assertion that I was just padding out the count, I was actually trying to do the opposite and keep the extra symbol count down to only what is needed. You could cut all the special characters and still be at over 5 bits.
- lanna 5y ago
  You can't represent ! without being ambiguous with 1IL. You can't represent .,;:/+#(). You can't represent G, K, T, V, X, Z. The way you proposed to represent M and W is non-intuitive, to say the least. You cherry pick between lower and upper case letters, discarding half of them, only to shoehorn them into your model.
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    You can't represent G, K, T, V, T, V, X, Z You said T and V twice. I already admitted elsewhere V,X,K are problematic. G -> g -> 9. Z -> 2. S being indistinguishable from 5 means you are forced to accept collision between numbers and letters anyway, so by the conventions established in 1337 5p34k, T -> 7 is an acceptable substitute. Accepting that there is only one form of a letter, no more capitals, you can do "(" with what used to be C, and ")" with a backwards "C". "/" is absolutely doable with 7 segments. Of the 50 symbols I started with, there are just 9 that don't really fit in a visually intuitive way. KVX.,;+# And honestly that's fine. The point of this exercise wasn't alphabet reform. The point was that 7 is a close estimate for the number of bits needed to define the shape of a letter in the English alphabet. The fact that the 7-segment system can cover just over 80% of these glyphs without anyone intentionally designing it that way is suggestive of the idea that alphabets naturally optimize towards some system of n-segments. >You cherry pick between lower and upper case letters, discarding half of them, only to shoehorn them into your model. Not really sure whats the problem here. I've been consistent. 1. The distinction between upper and lower will no longer exist. There is just one glyph per letter, sometimes the glyph formerly known as "upper", sometime the glyph formerly known as "lower". 2. Some glyphs that might have been used as an upper/lower version are instead used to encode something that otherwise wouldn't have a glyph (like m, w, parenthesis). It's not shoehorning to repurpose the symbols I previously removed for redundancy. >The way you proposed to represent M and W is non-intuitive Try writing out a few sentences this way. I assure you it has enough in common with the outline of M and W that you won't trip over reading it.

bitcurious 5y ago

> Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. Most kids today who learn to write learn to write the Latin alphabet learn by tracing individual strokes or “atoms” as you put them. Minimizing strokes introduces cursive. Stepping back into history, there’s a lot of overlap between how you would carve letters into a clay tablet/stone and how a seven segment display works. So that’s a fun parallel.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
You've piqued my interest. Further reading?
- bmn__ 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwP0KUlnZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwP0KUlnZg

Nition 5y ago

Can we get a name for the Internet phenomenon where a post like this says "Nearly all [thing] is this way..." and then several replies are "aha, not true, what about [exception]?" If someone says "Most..." or "Nearly all...", they already know there are exceptions.