4 ms·

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

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.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    > 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. This is absolutely not true. If this happened, you would have a very bad writing system. Human communication systems have tons of redundancy in. The actual regular alphabet used by English has tons more shapes and detail that you are accounting for, and it uses it incredibly inefficiently. You can create a huge number of additional letters using the shapes that the alphabet is using. And this is a good thing. It adds redundancy, and it very specifically is not the case that "each glyp contains just enough distinguishing features to not confuse it with any other glyph" - in fact, it contains far more distinguishing features than you need! This is to allow you to recover the information when things are unclear. There is excess information encoded as a form of error correction. This is true for writing systems, for language grammars, for vocabularies, for every part of human communication. We always over-specify, to allow for understanding even when the receiver misses out parts of the information.
    - IIAOPSW 5y ago
      I calculated out a redundancy of 1.36 bits per glyph. Taking that at face value, it would mean the space of possible glyphs is about 2.5 times the space of used glyphs. Is "between 2 and 3 times as many letters as there currently are" congruent with what you consider "tons more information"? If so, we haven't actually contradicted each other on any matters of fact. Just on matters of what it subjectively means to have "tons more information". 1 bit of error correction for 5.6 bits of information sounds pretty good.
      - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
        The amount of "unused" glyphs is not the 128 - "used glyphs" since you put several together. You would need to count the number of distinct 7-segment combinations that bear a glyph for this to hold.
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        That is the redundancy after you completely changed the alphabet, though. It is not the redundancy of the actual alphabet that people use, which is far, far higher.
        IIAOPSW 5y ago
        i made 2 letters look slightly different, threw up my hands on how to write 3, and ignored capitalization. that's not "conpletely changed". what other redundancy are you saying i've thrown out?
        user-the-name 5y ago
        7-segment letters look significantly different from regular letters. No curved lines, for one.
    - bradrn 5y ago
      I think you overestimate the amount of redundancy required for a usable writing system. For instance, Thai has a large number of confusable characters: consider pairs such as คด, ชซ and ขฃ. [0] is an interesting exploration of letter shape in Thai — redundancy is good, so Thai people have invented numerous strategies for making letters more distinct. [0] http://wrdingham.co.uk/thai/tellthai_preface.htm http://wrdingham.co.uk/thai/tellthai_preface.htm
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    > the Korean alphabet was designed in the 19th century False, it was in 1443. https://www.korean.go.kr/hangeul/setting/002.html https://www.korean.go.kr/hangeul/setting/002.html
- wongarsu 5y ago
  or é (which appears in lots of "English" words, like résumé), or ä (which appears to be the preferred spelling of doppelgänger in most dictionaries [1]), or ' as in "it's". Even ignoring that other languages exist you run into countless problems
ZetaZero 5y ago
how do you 7-segment an I, O, S, T?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ramblenode 5y ago
But now you've just invented new glyphs... Clearly not every letter in the canonical English script can be rectilinearized onto the 7 segment display even if the alphabet can be encoded in 7 bits. That is a significant difference between being able to encode it and being able to represent the existing script.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  That's true but I did say "nearly every letter" not "every letter can be". The point was that 7 is a very good estimate for the number of bits needed to define the shape of a letter. We could add in a few "edge case segments" to get the rest of the way, then look at how frequently those segments are used, calculate the entropy change from Shannon's formula and refine our estimate. But that's a lot of work for something that isn't going to move the needle very far from 7.

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.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  > 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. This is absolutely not true. If this happened, you would have a very bad writing system. Human communication systems have tons of redundancy in. The actual regular alphabet used by English has tons more shapes and detail that you are accounting for, and it uses it incredibly inefficiently. You can create a huge number of additional letters using the shapes that the alphabet is using. And this is a good thing. It adds redundancy, and it very specifically is not the case that "each glyp contains just enough distinguishing features to not confuse it with any other glyph" - in fact, it contains far more distinguishing features than you need! This is to allow you to recover the information when things are unclear. There is excess information encoded as a form of error correction. This is true for writing systems, for language grammars, for vocabularies, for every part of human communication. We always over-specify, to allow for understanding even when the receiver misses out parts of the information.
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    I calculated out a redundancy of 1.36 bits per glyph. Taking that at face value, it would mean the space of possible glyphs is about 2.5 times the space of used glyphs. Is "between 2 and 3 times as many letters as there currently are" congruent with what you consider "tons more information"? If so, we haven't actually contradicted each other on any matters of fact. Just on matters of what it subjectively means to have "tons more information". 1 bit of error correction for 5.6 bits of information sounds pretty good.
    - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
      The amount of "unused" glyphs is not the 128 - "used glyphs" since you put several together. You would need to count the number of distinct 7-segment combinations that bear a glyph for this to hold.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      That is the redundancy after you completely changed the alphabet, though. It is not the redundancy of the actual alphabet that people use, which is far, far higher.
      - IIAOPSW 5y ago
        i made 2 letters look slightly different, threw up my hands on how to write 3, and ignored capitalization. that's not "conpletely changed". what other redundancy are you saying i've thrown out?
        user-the-name 5y ago
        7-segment letters look significantly different from regular letters. No curved lines, for one.
  - bradrn 5y ago
    I think you overestimate the amount of redundancy required for a usable writing system. For instance, Thai has a large number of confusable characters: consider pairs such as คด, ชซ and ขฃ. [0] is an interesting exploration of letter shape in Thai — redundancy is good, so Thai people have invented numerous strategies for making letters more distinct. [0] http://wrdingham.co.uk/thai/tellthai_preface.htm http://wrdingham.co.uk/thai/tellthai_preface.htm
- bmn__ 5y ago
  > the Korean alphabet was designed in the 19th century False, it was in 1443. https://www.korean.go.kr/hangeul/setting/002.html https://www.korean.go.kr/hangeul/setting/002.html
wongarsu 5y ago
or é (which appears in lots of "English" words, like résumé), or ä (which appears to be the preferred spelling of doppelgänger in most dictionaries [1]), or ' as in "it's". Even ignoring that other languages exist you run into countless problems

ZetaZero 5y ago

how do you 7-segment an I, O, S, T?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ramblenode 5y ago

But now you've just invented new glyphs... Clearly not every letter in the canonical English script can be rectilinearized onto the 7 segment display even if the alphabet can be encoded in 7 bits. That is a significant difference between being able to encode it and being able to represent the existing script.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
That's true but I did say "nearly every letter" not "every letter can be". The point was that 7 is a very good estimate for the number of bits needed to define the shape of a letter. We could add in a few "edge case segments" to get the rest of the way, then look at how frequently those segments are used, calculate the entropy change from Shannon's formula and refine our estimate. But that's a lot of work for something that isn't going to move the needle very far from 7.