3 ms·

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

by 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.

3 ms·

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

by 9dev 5y ago

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.