4 ms·

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)
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    >Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. I consider it near to an optima for encoding English in particular. A different spoken language, which might carry a different amount of bits per symbol, would be best encoded by a different writing system. I'm sure Cyrillic is near optimal for encoding Russian. I don't know enough to tell you how to break Cyrillic into k segments and still have it be recognizable, but it can probably be done. >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. This is one of those claims like "most communication is non-verbal". But really, what's the bit rate of information encoded in writing style? You say "a whole lot amount of information", but how many bits is a whole lot? And in any case, how much of that subtle, undocumented writing feature would one expect to find in a given document throughout history? Were the monks and scribes and masons who were commissioned to inscribe all the civic and religious texts also inscribing all that subtext, or was their handwriting style the result of trying to write as quickly and efficiently as they could manage? Obviously it was the latter. To say the 7 segment display is an accident is to miss the point. No matter what engineers might think is desirable, there was no a priori reason to think that letters with all their different curves and forms would be compressible. We could have ended up in the reality where there was no way to display the letters of the alphabet other than pixel by pixel at high resolution. It could have been that each letter was as unique as a QR code, and anything less than transcription of each black and white dot would fail to suffice. But we didn't end up in that reality. We ended up in the reality where all the information needed to discern the character compresses down to 7 bits, and that's just slightly more than the 5.64 bits represented by the character itself. >It's reductionist such as saying Well call me a reductionist then. >And what if we had a different system that 7-segment display? I couldn't agree more. Flag semaphores make use of two flags held at up to 8 different angles (up, down, left, right, and all 4 diagonals). That gives a code space of 8 choose 2 which is 28. Adapting a similar system for an alphabet would be ideal. Every letter is just two strokes, one coming from the edge into the center point followed by another from that center point to a different edge. Alphabetical order would be easy to remember since it would work exactly the same as hands ticking on a clock. The alphabet could easily expand with 3 or 4 handed characters if needed. The positions of the some of the segments could encode information such as "this is a vowel" or "this is a grammatical particle" making the system that much easier to learn. The system would obviously lend itself to sign language making it more practical to communicate with deaf people.
KoftaBob 5y ago
Hieroglyphs were mostly used for religious/formal writing. Everyday writing in Ancient Egypt used the Heiratic script, which then evolved into the Demotic script, and then finally the Coptic script, which is the Egyptian language written with Greek letters (plus 6 extra letters for sounds the Greek alphabet doesn't cover). The Coptic language is no longer the official spoken language in Egypt (replaced by Arabic), but it's still used today liturgically in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Sort of like how Latin is still used in the Catholic church. What's particularly interesting is that the Greek alphabet was based on the Phoenician alphabet, which was in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Full circle!

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)
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  >Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. I consider it near to an optima for encoding English in particular. A different spoken language, which might carry a different amount of bits per symbol, would be best encoded by a different writing system. I'm sure Cyrillic is near optimal for encoding Russian. I don't know enough to tell you how to break Cyrillic into k segments and still have it be recognizable, but it can probably be done. >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. This is one of those claims like "most communication is non-verbal". But really, what's the bit rate of information encoded in writing style? You say "a whole lot amount of information", but how many bits is a whole lot? And in any case, how much of that subtle, undocumented writing feature would one expect to find in a given document throughout history? Were the monks and scribes and masons who were commissioned to inscribe all the civic and religious texts also inscribing all that subtext, or was their handwriting style the result of trying to write as quickly and efficiently as they could manage? Obviously it was the latter. To say the 7 segment display is an accident is to miss the point. No matter what engineers might think is desirable, there was no a priori reason to think that letters with all their different curves and forms would be compressible. We could have ended up in the reality where there was no way to display the letters of the alphabet other than pixel by pixel at high resolution. It could have been that each letter was as unique as a QR code, and anything less than transcription of each black and white dot would fail to suffice. But we didn't end up in that reality. We ended up in the reality where all the information needed to discern the character compresses down to 7 bits, and that's just slightly more than the 5.64 bits represented by the character itself. >It's reductionist such as saying Well call me a reductionist then. >And what if we had a different system that 7-segment display? I couldn't agree more. Flag semaphores make use of two flags held at up to 8 different angles (up, down, left, right, and all 4 diagonals). That gives a code space of 8 choose 2 which is 28. Adapting a similar system for an alphabet would be ideal. Every letter is just two strokes, one coming from the edge into the center point followed by another from that center point to a different edge. Alphabetical order would be easy to remember since it would work exactly the same as hands ticking on a clock. The alphabet could easily expand with 3 or 4 handed characters if needed. The positions of the some of the segments could encode information such as "this is a vowel" or "this is a grammatical particle" making the system that much easier to learn. The system would obviously lend itself to sign language making it more practical to communicate with deaf people.

KoftaBob 5y ago

Hieroglyphs were mostly used for religious/formal writing. Everyday writing in Ancient Egypt used the Heiratic script, which then evolved into the Demotic script, and then finally the Coptic script, which is the Egyptian language written with Greek letters (plus 6 extra letters for sounds the Greek alphabet doesn't cover). The Coptic language is no longer the official spoken language in Egypt (replaced by Arabic), but it's still used today liturgically in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Sort of like how Latin is still used in the Catholic church. What's particularly interesting is that the Greek alphabet was based on the Phoenician alphabet, which was in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Full circle!