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> 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 c
by 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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 agoThat 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 agoi 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 ago7-segment letters look significantly different from regular letters. No curved lines, for one.
- bradrn 5y agoI 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