4 ms·

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 th

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.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  2^3.3 is approx 10. What alphabet only has 10 characters? Sticking to 26 letters only is 4.7 bits. 20 characters is 4.3 bits. I agree that we don't need upper and lower case. In fact you may notice I did not include the 2 cases in my calculation of number of glyphs in English. I contend that of the 26 modern letters, at least 20 (and up to 23) can fit on the 7 seg display and still be recognizable. Granted the 7 seg alphabet would be forced to use the (currently) upper case form for some letters (like A), and the lower case form for others (like q), but at least one of the two forms fits the 7 segments for every letter except M,T,K,W,V,X. Since we already accept not having two forms for each letter, we may as well re-assign the former capital U as a "double sized u" aka W. As M is W upside down, the same trick applies to make a 7-seg M. Yes I've mangled the letters, but the outline of the shape is close enough that you won't trip up reading it in the context of a word. There's already some precedent for using "7" to replace T (as in 1337 5p34k). So that just leaves K,V,X as "not recognizable on 7 segment display". But you've kind of made my point for me. > and in keeping the letterforms sufficiently distinctive to quickly recognize whole words. Just by evolution the letter forms evolve towards the minimal amount of distinguishable features needed to encode the whole alphabet. Evolution is an optimizer not a designer. The fact that there are still 3-5 letters left that didn't get optimized into 7 segments is what we should expect from such a process.
  - brandmeyer 5y ago
    > 2^3.3 is approx 10. What alphabet only has 10 characters? My claim is that the 7-segment display is only usable for its original design scope: the numerals 0-9.
    - IIAOPSW 5y ago
      As every kid who has ever punched 80085 into their calculator can attest, it obviously can be used for some amount of text. In fact it can clealry do AbcCdeEFghHiJLnoPqrtuUy. If you're willing to accept that numbers can almost always be told apart from letters by context rather than by glyph, it can also do BGOSZ. https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/segment7 https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/segment7
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > I contend that of the 26 modern letters, at least... Who uses only letters? You want an alphanumeric display, to show 26 (27,8,9...) + 10 = 36 (37,8,9...) characters. That's your actual everyday "alphabet". And then you're totally screwed from the start: 0OD, 1iIl, 2Zz, 5Ss, 6bG, 8B, 9qg...
ramblenode 5y ago
> as there was no way to simplify it or organize it better IPA? A perfect dictionary would have a one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds. English is both redundant (c-k, c-s) and lacks letters for certain sounds ("ch").

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.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
2^3.3 is approx 10. What alphabet only has 10 characters? Sticking to 26 letters only is 4.7 bits. 20 characters is 4.3 bits. I agree that we don't need upper and lower case. In fact you may notice I did not include the 2 cases in my calculation of number of glyphs in English. I contend that of the 26 modern letters, at least 20 (and up to 23) can fit on the 7 seg display and still be recognizable. Granted the 7 seg alphabet would be forced to use the (currently) upper case form for some letters (like A), and the lower case form for others (like q), but at least one of the two forms fits the 7 segments for every letter except M,T,K,W,V,X. Since we already accept not having two forms for each letter, we may as well re-assign the former capital U as a "double sized u" aka W. As M is W upside down, the same trick applies to make a 7-seg M. Yes I've mangled the letters, but the outline of the shape is close enough that you won't trip up reading it in the context of a word. There's already some precedent for using "7" to replace T (as in 1337 5p34k). So that just leaves K,V,X as "not recognizable on 7 segment display". But you've kind of made my point for me. > and in keeping the letterforms sufficiently distinctive to quickly recognize whole words. Just by evolution the letter forms evolve towards the minimal amount of distinguishable features needed to encode the whole alphabet. Evolution is an optimizer not a designer. The fact that there are still 3-5 letters left that didn't get optimized into 7 segments is what we should expect from such a process.
- brandmeyer 5y ago
  > 2^3.3 is approx 10. What alphabet only has 10 characters? My claim is that the 7-segment display is only usable for its original design scope: the numerals 0-9.
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    As every kid who has ever punched 80085 into their calculator can attest, it obviously can be used for some amount of text. In fact it can clealry do AbcCdeEFghHiJLnoPqrtuUy. If you're willing to accept that numbers can almost always be told apart from letters by context rather than by glyph, it can also do BGOSZ. https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/segment7 https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/segment7
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > I contend that of the 26 modern letters, at least... Who uses only letters? You want an alphanumeric display, to show 26 (27,8,9...) + 10 = 36 (37,8,9...) characters. That's your actual everyday "alphabet". And then you're totally screwed from the start: 0OD, 1iIl, 2Zz, 5Ss, 6bG, 8B, 9qg...

ramblenode 5y ago

> as there was no way to simplify it or organize it better IPA? A perfect dictionary would have a one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds. English is both redundant (c-k, c-s) and lacks letters for certain sounds ("ch").