Klingon!

This is absurd.
Beauty is culture specific, so any preference one way or another is merely a reflection of cultural bias.

Certainly, some scripts are harder to write than others if you're not a native, but that doesn't make them inherently ugly.

Well, beauty isn't so easily defined. But certainly nobody can accuse Vietnamese of being the most beautiful... The thing is, as much as I value political incorrectness, I can't claim it was the fault of the Vietnamese people - it was the Europeans.

Nick:
- What's absurd is such extreme relativism.
- Why didn't you complain in the other thread? Because people were only saying nice things?

BTW, John, what's your selection? :-)

hhp

[redacted]

nobody can accuse Vietnamese of being the most beautiful

Perhaps not beautiful, but I've always found it fascinating. Perhaps it's the linguist in me.

Although I am part Cherokee, I find most implementations of the Cherokee syllabary to be ugly.

Also, bicameral writing systems seem to tend to have one nice "chamber" and one not. Armenian's lc is very nice, but its UC has ungainly members; Latin has a sublime UC, but its lc is homely (but not ugly).

BTW, can Morse Code -which is essentially a writing system- be beautiful? Maybe once in a blue moon to some rare soul, but certainly not enough to be qualified as Beautiful.

> You were asking for our opinions

Exactly.
And it is furthermore possible -and desirable- to aggregate people's opinions.

hhp

No, I'm going back to what I said before: Deseret
At first it looks pretty with those loopy shapes, but somehow it just doesn't work for me.

Ignore Shinn. You were asking for our opinions, not a statement of what 2 plus 2 equals.

Answer: Amharic.

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

Although I am part Cherokee, I find most implementations of the Cherokee syllabary to be ugly.

I'm working on it.

- Why didn’t you complain in the other thread? Because people were only saying nice things?

Right on. Peace.

Ignore Shinn. You were asking for our opinions.

That was my opinion, Clark.

Nick, I didn't ask what scripts are objectively hideous, I asked what ‘you’ -- the Typolloi -- think are the least attractive scripts. I'm interested in the opinions, culturally or idiosyncratically biased as they undoubtedly will be.

John, I don't perceive scripts as being attractive or repellent.
I'm not immune to beauty, but IMO it's all in the execution.

Now hang on, you're asking which script is minging? But I love Latin type in some faces but hate Latin type in other faces. Wouldn't that extend to other language systems as well? For me it's all about the typeface and less or nothing to do with the language system itself.

I can understand someone disliking a particular script but they will almost certainly have a typeface (or handwriting) in mind when they are making those judgments, won't they? Does anyone genuinely have a neutral idea of a script without attaching a particular rendering, whether it be calligraphic or typographic. Does such a neutral or elemental version of each script even exist? Nope, that's just too subjective to be in any way meaningful.

For example, I find one script largely hideous, but I don't think that saying which it is will be in any way constructive in this debate, it may even be spiteful! Next, there are some versions of that particular script that make the thing itself look better and some that make it look worse. The same is true for Latin.

>>>it’s all in the execution

That, and what I have become used to and thus wedded, affectionate, anaesthetised, immune, indifferent or even completely switched off to.

How about Braille - something about it gives me the bumps.

I think Braille is pretty ingenious. Simple, systematic, useful, usable.
It ain't pretty though, I'll give you that.

I'll say again that I think the Futhark ain't pretty. Not hideous, just not pretty. I really can't think of a hideous one (although Vietnamese does come pretty close).

I’ll second Deseret. Although I think that has a lot to do with how quickly it came into existence—most writing systems took at least a few centuries more.

Also not wild about Malayalam, but I won’t call it “ugly.”

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

Vietnamese does look like an explosion in a diacritics factory. I think it is more humorous than ugly. It is like an overly patched shoe, it still works as a shoe but it makes you wonder how long it will last.

In all truth, I don't think there are any dog-ugly scripts, just some less likable breeding combinations that have been unleashed on to the world.

ChrisL

Si,

Klingon is a divine script, even otherworldly.

ChrisL

>Klingon is a divine script, even otherworldly.

As is Deseret ;-)

>>BTW, can Morse Code -which is essentially a writing system- be beautiful?

It is NEVER written by those actually using it...

I am currently using written morse code. Works for me…

pbc

- .... .. ... / - .... .-. . .- -.. / .... .- ... / --. --- -. . / -.. --- .-- -. / .... .. .-.. .-..

Sherlock Holmes' Dancing Men

So what's wrong with Klingon?

(I know there is plenty wrong with it. Just trying to make conversation.)

I think it all depends on how the piece of writing is executed, not specifically the writing system itself. I suspect that most if not all writing systems can look beautiful if it's done by a gifted calligrapher, as stated in the first post.

Of course, there are scripts that look more appealing (to me or maybe to everybody) than others.

Orc is pretty bad.

For a close second, my In-laws gave us these hammered copper plaques with our names transliterated in acient Irish runes.

-=®=-

-=®=-

>- .... .. ... / - .... .-. . .- -.. / .... .- ... / —. —- -. . / -.. —- .— -. / .... .. .-.. .-..

Actually sii there are 3 dots between letters and 7 dots between words in International Morse Code. Not to be a spelling/grammar fanatic… :)

•--••••-••••••-•-•

Sorry, I used this... http://morsecode.scphillips.com/translator.html

I think all is forgiven… :)

I am using this in a club identity. It's fun transmitting messages that look like geometric nonsense. I was looking at another geometric design based on the sidewalks outside the club and no matter how I tried to randomize, it wasn't. Then I changed it to morse code. Much better.

pbc

Thai. Looks like tadpoles to me.

Well, I think cyrillic often looks pretty ugly, especially the caps... But hell, beauty is in the eye of the beholder :-)

"It’s fun transmitting messages that look like geometric nonsense."

I recently came across the ancient berber/tuareg alphabet Tifinagh, which is pretty amazing (and apparently still used by some), though I'm glad I don't have to use it making random notes or shopping lists!

cheerio Queneau

The web.

Texting.

Braille...ain't pretty.
You are judging a system that is meant to be touched by how it looks. I don't care for the Latin alphabet because it tastes horrible.

I think the "Q" tastes great! Plus it has a
handle so you don't get your hands dirty.

hhp

Hrant grabs Q's by their tails! :-{
Doesn't that hurt them? (I'm such a girl.)

Hrant, you said "Q". Hehehe.

Greek tastes like dolmades to me :-)

ChrisL

I’ll second Deseret. Although I think that has a lot to do with how quickly it came into existence—most writing systems took at least a few centuries more.

I think this is the main problem with most writing systems that I consider to be 'less-than-well-informed' (not necessarily ugly), It seems several more recent script/alphabet developments that were developed with only one media in mind (be it handwriting, type, typewriter, screen, &c.) suffer from having characters or diacritics that are clumsy at least to design in a range of type styles and probably and probably sometimes clumsy in writing.

I quite like Latin script, it has an almost endless range of styles: from all the calligraphic hands and all the wonderful type styles that were developed first for Latin script. However, Latinized Vietnamese is an assault on the eyes and it seems to me that whoever concocted the current orthography didn't do so in as thoughtful a manner as might have been done. I like Latinized Navajo MUCH more than Vietnamese and it seems that Navajo solves some of the same problems as are present in Vietnamese in a more elegant (but probably not perfect) manner. I really don't like the combining accents in Vietnamese that always seem (to me) to be colliding, no matter how nicely you try to make them appear. Vietnamese needs a refresh.

I really like the Cyrillic script. I think it works better in writing than in print. The capitals are wonderful, but the canonized form of the lower case could do with some more experimental treatments to find something that harmonizes better with than the current iteration. That said, I don't feel that the so-called Bulgarian Cyrillic is an improvement on the more common form. Perhaps there is some native Cyrillic user with as much wit as Marian Bantjes who can critique the alphabet in such a way as to inspire designers to take more risks in trying to develop a better typographic Cyrillic lowercase. But overall it works, except I find that all the extra letters required for Abkhaz are atrocious, just try designing a good looking 'K/ka with vertical stroke' (u+049C/D), it IS possible, but the 'Abkhasian C/che with descender' (u+04BE/F)(and even without the descener) is reprehensible. Abkhaz needs a refresh.

And where does IPA fit within this scheme, is it a script? Is it an orthography? Is it an extension of the Latin Alphabet? (I am guessing it's a bit of all of these things) Some of the 'letters' (as that is what they are for some African orthagraphies) could have been better planned such as the hooked f or all the hooked letters for that case. If new orthographies are going to continue to incorporate IPA symbols, some of these letters ought to be rethought. I personally think that a truly 'international' alphabet or script should be better designed and should be descriptive such as the Korean script or perhaps even Tengwar (I'm sure I'm the only one that would love to see that last suggestion fly!) IPA needs a refresh. Talk about a type battle! There's a challenge for a whole team of seasoned type designers.

And I haven't looked closely enough at it, but I think it'd be a challenge to make N'Ko look good.

It's interesting that the writing systems I find least well-conceived are those that are extensions of other more 'stable' writing systems. but perhaps this has to do with my own experience and frustration actually trying to design some of these characters.

...just try designing a good looking ’K/ka with vertical stroke’...

This is only an issue if you're not willing to accept the odd deviation from uniformity. Consider the comma in Helvetica, or the tail of the "a" in Clarendon Bold--these characters have strokes which are atypically thin compared with anything else in the font. Or the ring accent in most fonts.

Nick, but think about screen fonts: I've had to hint this damn character before. To get this letter to read well at small sizes (on screen or otherwise) you have to create a very ugly glyph shape.

> Talk about a type battle!

Indeed. Something I like to state now and again: Graphic design is to writing system design what poodle training is to anaconda taming.

> It’s interesting that the writing systems I find least well-conceived
> are those that are extensions of other more ’stable’ writing systems.

I agree, and it makes sense. And it casts a much needed bad light on all that "Latin is great because it's so extensible!" codswallop.

> This is only an issue if you’re not willing
> to accept the odd deviation from uniformity.

No, I believe in non-uniformity, but there's no reason to believe that ugly/ungainly structures must be the result.

Try extending the Latin alphabet with this:
http://www.rtc.org/pics/intro/intro_scn.jpg

hhp

> Hrant, you said “Q”. Hehehe.

Oh, I just got the joke...
I just have to ask: how exactly did yours get a handle?! ;->

hhp

...but think about screen fonts:

Right. Even today, would nationalists affirming their identity through alphabet reform consider how the confetti of diacritics and modifying marks attached to letters might display on screen at low resolution?

But if that is a problem, why not just drop the accents below a certain screen size? For instance, Slovak writing allows fewer diacritics than Slovak in print.

Nah, just use Morse Code: it works
great at 2 PPEM - including leading!

hhp

Hrant wrote: What’s absurd is such extreme relativism.

A refreshing statement.

The mashup of Arabic numerals and Latin letters in western alphabets is an awkward one. To this day, the first face I designed is unfinished because I couldn't create figures that didn't detract from what I had established with the alphabet. Obviously there are piles of type that have succeeded at this challenge, but you don't feel that until you try to draw type and make it work.

Am I the only on to get Sii's Braille pun? :)

Please don't acknowledge the puns. It only encourages them.

Si was just goosing it a bit, Joe. He deserves encouragement but goodness knows puns should never be tollerated on this esteemed site.

ChrisL

Did you mean trollerated?

hhp

:-)

ChrisL

Joe's "Pun Enforcement Taskforce" - a PET project?

Crrrrringe :-)

But to do it, Si, you need a PETdegree:-)

ChrisL

Has anyone mentioned my handwriting?

-=®=-

No, Russ, first they would mention mine, followed closely by my son's, then you might be third worst :-)

ChrisL

Sorry, the doctors and pharmacists come first, by a long shot.

Pitman ITA sort of falls in the same boat as Vietnamese and Cherokee -- a lot of bastardized shapes crammed into odd spaces, that no typeface could really fix because there are some fundamental flaws in their design.

"... bastardized shapes crammed into odd spaces, that no typeface could really fix because there are some fundamental flaws..."
The web again!

As for Vietnamese: it was not “the Europeans”.
It was the French (which is strikingly obvious).

;-)

A little while ago Patrick Doan showed me some work he did on getting Vietnamese to look better. I was impressed. One of the many things he looked at was making the very high frequency letter shapes hnmu shapes more divergent by lowering the join to the stem. From what I could see it was quite a good idea. It makes designing an italic a little harder but in this case it looked utterly worthwhile. He was also looking at what people had been doing to the diacritics with sign painting etc. I suspect that Vietnamese does have some inherent challenges but Patrick's approach to sorting a way forward and the examples he showed me did seem to suggest that there is a great deal of power in execution. Paul's points about nightmare characters are right on though.

>It was the French (which is strikingly obvious).

Surely the "Romans" share some of the blame too? They invented the base characters and the French love of diacritics just made things worse :-)

Andreas, I used to blame the French directly* but then somebody told me (btw, he wasn't French :-) that they were actually springboarding off work done by Christian missionaries (hmmm, maybe he was an atheist :-). Is that incorrect? In any case, actually applying a system can certainly be worse than inventing it, and there the French get all the "credit".

* And would add that what they did still pales in comparison to the hyper-chauvinistic Latinization that has passed for non-Latin type design in the past decades.

Eben, I'd love to see that. And then try to figure
out how the Vietnamese themselves might like it.

Simon, indeed many of our problems go back to the
Romans. Like Modernism. No winkie smiley needed.

hhp

Let's not forget that the Chinese were the first host to offer the Vietnamese their script.

ChrisL

More likely the Vietnamese wanted to write stuff down, and they looked to a dominant culture for guidance, adapting that script to their language. Their old Nôm writing system is indeed logographic*, but not a politically-motivated retrofit of another writing system (retrofits being what Paul noted as typically resulting in an inferior script).

* Which is of course the power of Chinese. Although the Vietnamese did add things to it, they actually didn't really need to - they just needed to assign meanings to the existing symbols.

hhp

"looked to a dominant culture for guidance"

Euphemism.

ChrisL

The history I have heard - this is sheer anecdote so take it with salt as it were - is that Chinese was the writing of the elite and that when roman became taught and used by the majority denied an education in chinese forms by missionaries & so on it simply won through ubiquity.

The phrase "looked to a" is silly and logically false. There is no entity called Vietnamese Culture that can be "looking" or feeling or eating etc. The urge to create these fictions is tempting because it makes story telling easier. But should be resisted in general. In almost all cases failing to resist just stirs up mud where we could otherwise be benefiting from clear thinking.

> Chinese was the writing of the elite

Makes sense - the same thing happened in Korea.

However your view of cultural borrowing is surprisingly narrow. Is this something you've been fed at Reading? Although a given culture isn't a person that can walk, talk and eat, people do feel they belong to a culture, and they see other cultures as entities of sorts; furthermore they see opportunities to take things from other cultures and improve their own culture. This happens all the time in non-Latin type design for example, where a non-Westerner will live and study in the West, develop an admiration for Latin in general and a given typestyle in particular, and proceed to make a font in his own script that mimics it. There's no reason to deny that this sort of thing can happen on a grander scale, specifically the creation of a writing system inspired by and/or based on another. Cultural exchange is not limited to imposition by the materially strong on the weak; remember not least the pronounced Roman borrowing of Greek culture after the military conquest.

hhp

I am not saying cultural exchange and other phenomena don't happen. Of course they do. But this stuff is rich and complicated. And there are people involved. And actual cultural values and tendencies. But still, I am saying that there is no "thing" which is for example "vietnamese culture" which you can have a direct dialog with, invite to dinner etc. It makes more sense to think of a bee or an any colony as an entity than to think of a culture as one. The people who benefit from "entity" making are owners of newspapers who talk about a musical "british invasion" or create stories about soccer teams and "nations opposed". It make for an easy story. But it is, at root, a way of making something which is rich and complicated ( hard/scary) falsely simple (easy/comfortable) . It is a mental/intellectual crutch. Throw it away.

According to the Wikipedia article on Vietnamese, the romanization was done by the Portuguese, not the French.

Also 70% of the vocabulary is from the Chinese, and like Chinese it does not conjugate. This makes it well suited to Chinese characters--more so than Japanese, which does conjugate verbs, and so needs additional symbols beyond Chinese characters. It also has tones and sounds like its neighboring language, Cantonese. However, a base of words is, if I understand the article rightly, from a different language group--something like English, with its Germanic roots and heavily Latin vocabulary.

But the non-French Europeans were non-governmental. My point is, that lays the blame -at least for the creation of the system if not its formal application- on individuals and smaller interests, as opposed to an entire chauvinistic culture.

hhp

Welsh orthography gives me headaches.

Not that the English manipulations of the Latin alphabet are saintly, what with the varying pronunciations of the "-ugh" suffix.

As we've seen with the discussion of Vietnamese, it's not only the letters, but how they're used that makes or breaks a writing system's beauty.

Klingon was mentioned earlier, an invented language for fictional alien creatures that at least at some point in history was more widely studied and spoken than Esperanto. Its official script is the Latin alphabet

used as described here,

> Its official script is the Latin alphabet

How retarded is that.

hhp

Let's say a Vietnamese village full of people is dying of thirst. There might be strangers who come by from other cultures who have plenty of water to drink, do the Vietnamese say, "No, I won't drink your water because it is not from my culture, I choose to go without first."? No, they don't ask what business they have there or if they are harboring deception or imperialistic intent, or a foreign religion based on an unknown world, they just drink the water and are satiated.
The Vietnamese have had a very long history of being either invaded, annexed, colonized, and prostilitized by foreigners both eastern and western. From the Chinese to the Americans, they have known no peace until the mid 1970's. Some foreigners brought aspects of written language to a culture that was vastly illiterate. Many Vietnamese were thirsty for written communication and literacy and took from their invaders and those who also came to bring "salvation of their souls" reading and writing since they had precious little of their own to begin with. When they could, they finally cast out the waves of different invaders and began their own life.
If at some point, they decide they need a new script instead of the patchwork they adopted from foreigners, they will devise it themselves. Until then, the Vietnamese don't need yet another foreigner or group of foreigners to either make up their minds to do it for them or convince them to do the task themselves. Hindsight is easy and outsiders may think they know better (including me and anyone else on this forum) but it is not our call to cast judgement on what they should have done in the past or should do in the future. Sure, we can give our opinion on the aesthetic feeling we get from their script but their is no need to cast blame. We can save that for the more heinous things we and other nations have done.

ChrisL

It's not retard at all. The great majority of the people learning the Klingon language are native users of the Latin script. Most of them are not terribly interested in the invented scripts: they're interested in the language.

>It’s not retard at all. The great majority of the people learning the Klingon language are native users of the Latin script. Most of them are not terribly interested in the invented scripts: they’re interested in the language.

This was the reason Klingon was kept out of Unicode.

Whatever the reasons that various political entities have adopted national versions of their local language(s) using the Latin script, there doesn't seem to be a connection with how they have gone about customizing the script.

Certain languages, such as Slovak and Vietnamese, certainly emphasize a strongly visual national character, but I wonder if the disposition of diacritics has a negative impact on reading. On the other hand, languages such as Serbian and Malay make do without a lot of diacritics.

Polish has a lot of diacritics, but they distribute fairly evenly in text, not bunching up as in Czech or Vietnamese.
Greek (polytonic) has a huge amount of diacritics, but again, their distribution isn't clustered.

Chris, although I can't pretend to be a "native" in more than
three scripts, I still wouldn't consider myself an "outsider" to
Vietnamese even if I were... Klingon! We share this environment.

> they’re interested in the language.

Well, maybe one fine day enough of them will care about visible language too. All it might take would be to notice the greater contemporary importance of reading versus listening in pretty much all natural languages! And they could easily have planned ahead for such a versatile future by applying a much more sensical and equally robust approach: have an "official" non-Latin writing system, and simply implement a transliteration to Latin. In fact since this is all invented anyway they can still arrive at such a setup, starting from the Latin and reverse-transliterating a new script.

> This was the reason Klingon was kept out of Unicode.

Every cloud has a silver lining...

hhp

As a native Czech speaker living permanently overseas I have been omitting the diacritics in Czech in my typing for decades. Originally, because there were no keyboards/software here that would allow it, nowadays because of habit. My friends and relatives who live in UK, Germany, US and elsewhere do the same.

Amazingly, there are only a very few instances indeed where the lack of diacritics could cause any confusion: on the whole, Czech writing is comprehensible without (IMO). However, diacritics are necessary as a guide to pronounciation in the spoken language. I find the diacritics distracting in reading and sometimes wish the Czechs reformed again and done away with it.

As with the criticism of Vietnamese writing presented above, I think that using diacritics generally is really trying to make scripts do something they were not designed to do, to fine-tune otherwise convenient adoption from another culture. From that point of view, the fewer the better. Examples of adapting scripts without diacritics abovnd (apologies, should not iest).

Speaking of diacritics, I feel that the system of vowelling points for Hebrew--nikkud--detract from the beauty of the script. For some reason, the dot above (vav, shin) and in front (vav) don't seem to be clutter, but all the stuff below never works visually. And I have the feeling it can't really be 'read', but rather laboriously pronounced. For non-native speakers, it's a tremendous help--that's what it was created for--but it doesn't look very good. With both nikkud and teamim--the cantillation marks for chanting sacred texts--it really becomes a mess.

Native speakers generally don't use it, nor does the Torah scroll, so it's no big issue. But that's my two cents.

Alphabetic and other phonetic-based writing systems -- i.e. those that represent spoken language symbolically -- are always faced with the question of how much of spoken language to represent. Spoken language is phenomenally rich, and only phonetic transcription systems such as IPA are designed to represent any sound that humans can make (including specialised additions for disordered speech of various kinds). Most writing systems represent only a subset of linguistic phenomena, but may provide options to increase that subset. The Vietnamese alphabet is complex because it represents more discreet vowel sounds than many other writing systems, and it consistently represents tone. It isn't unique in this. The Thai alphabet, for example, represents a very similar set of linguistic phenomena, but it looks better because the letters, vowel signs and tone marks evolved in parallel, rather than overloading marks onto Latin letters that had evolved without them.

The majority of sub-Saharan African languages are tonal, but most of the orthographies indicate tone optionally, i.e. it is not marked consistently but only in pedagogical materials or when necessary to distinguish otherwise identical words in situations where meaning might be ambiguous. Nasalisation is another phenomenon that is optionally marks, again to distinguish words. This means that text in an African language may either look quite clean and simple, or may be liberally covered in tone and other accent marks, depending on the variety of linguistic phenomena represented.

Since the Greek language reform, the number and density of diacritics have been greatly reduced in Monotonic. The problem always exists is that there are numerous published works in use still today which use the older Polytonic system, therefore, it is still needed. This is not just for scholarly works and ancient writing, but the many books and articles written prior to the reform or the many that ignored it. Greek is still less cumbersome because there is not as much stacking above and below the xheight as there is in Vietnamese.

ChrisL

I put forward Sutton SignWriting™ for the prize. It's a system based originally on a movement notation used to describe dance, rather than a script conceived from the get go as a writing system for sign language. (There are several proposed sign language scripts, one dating back 200 years, but none has become as widely used as SignWriting.) The system is essentially a combination of stylised pictographs of handshapes and the face plus several kinds of conventional arrows and assorted diacritic symbols used to describe head, eye and hand movements. The symbols are arranged as schematic drawings of the spatial arrangement of the hands and face when a sign is made (from the perspective of the person signing.)

For a taste of what it looks like, follow these links to a relatively long article about SignWriting by a deaf author and a page with SW greeting cards on the SignWriting web site:

http://www.signwriting.org/archive/docs6/sw0526-US-Why-SignWriting-Frost...
http://www.signwriting.org/cards/

There are two things I find ungainly (to keep it nice) about the system. For one, the symbols are all very blocky and and drawn in a very rudimentary way and the system actually requires the interiors of many symbol shapes to be coloured in solid (or for parts of the symbol to be "broken" and the line gapped in white) to convey certain kinds of information. The second thing is the way the symbols are arranged as a schematic drawing of everything that happens when a sign is made, from the point of view of the signer.

Basing the character inventory on shapes, plus the use of colouring-in of shapes and breaking-up of lines is unique as far as I know among all writing systems. Every other writing system I can think of relies on combinations of straight and curved lines to form its characters. The way the SW characters are drawn results in the most ungraceful character set of any script I have seen, and in fact all other systems that have been proposed for sign languages follow the usual line-based construction of characters. One major disadvantage of the script is that handshapes and arrows – as well as being coloured in or broken – are rotated on the page/screen to reproduce more or less precisely the direction they face or point, and are precisely placed on the writing area to show where and how a hand touches another or touches the face. This makes for an extremely convoluted and complicated computer representation and input system, with a plethora of characters (and positions in the sign diagram) for every minute difference in the way a given handshape can be held in space.

Combining characters in schematic drawings of a sign being made (including rotating handshape symbols in space and colouring them in or gapping them at one end to represent which way the palm faces), together with the way sequences of fingerspelling handshapes are arranged in horizontal lines, makes for a chaotic visual image on the page, with no consistent arrangement of characters in space, unlike any other script I know of. The way all the symbols are drawn and combined leads to a situation where one can only communicate a minimal amount of information per page, way less than any other natural script. This seems to me to be a major barrier to wider adoption and use.

Myself, I think SignWriting's basic idea of representing the simultaneous combination of handshapes, locations and movements by combining characters in a two-dimensional matrix is sound, rather than stringing them out in a line the way other sign language scripts have done. But I have trouble seeing how SW as it is can be repaired without gutting the system and rebuilding it.

I have been working on an alternative to SW that follows the basic principles of sinoform scripts. The basic component characters are drawn with combinations of strokes similar to Sino-Japanese hànzì/kanji and Korean Hangul and arranged in square matrices just like complex kanji or hangul syllables. The overall appearance and rhythm is somewhere in between Chinese script and Korean Hangul, which I think makes for a far more attractive appearance, and also for a much more economical computer representation and simpler input as well.

It is true that Vietnamese to those unfamiliar with the language looks like a horrible mess. However, as a speaker of it, you get used to it eventually just like any other writing system. I don't think the diacritics are much of a hassle - reading and writing is much easier than some people make it out to be. I am also learning Chinese and also the old Vietnamese writing system of Chữ Nôm. I love Chữ Nôm - it's complex yet has a certain mystical beauty about it like Chinese. Oh and before the modern Romanised script called Chữ Quốc Ngữ and even before the Chinese style Chữ Nôm, the ancient Vietnamese had their own writing system called Chữ Khoa Đẩu which was a set of tadpole-like etchings.

[Cho những ai mà không quen thuộc với tiếng Việt thì chắc chắn là họ sẽ thấy cái bộ chữ Quốc Ngữ rất là lộn xộn và xấu xí. Tuy nhiên, khi đã học ngôn ngữ Việt, thì ai nấy đều cũng phải quen thôi. Tui nghĩ rằng ba cái dấu phụ dùng trong chữ viết không lộn xộn gì mấy - và sự đọc và viết tiếng Việt lại dễ hơn nhiều người nghĩ. Tui cũng rất thích Chữ Nôm - cho dù nó khó học thật nhưng nó có một cái nét đẹp rất là đặc biệt như chữ Hán. À trước khi người Việt lấy Chữ Quốc Ngữ làm chính thức và cũng trước thời người Việt sử dụng bộ chữ Hán-Nôm, từ thời cổ người Việt đã có dùng một loại chữ Khoa Đẩu mang những cái ký hiệu y hệt như mấy con nòng nọc.]

So a rough timeline would be presented as:

[Before the CE] > [~100BCE > 1919CE] > [~1200CE > 1919CE] > [~1700CE +]
Tadpole script > Chinese script > Vernacular script > Romanised Script

>Wow this font does not do Vietnamese any justice :P

> you get used to it eventually

That does not make it a good thing. You can get used to losing a leg too.

A writing system where the differentiation between letters relies on tiny floating bits is severely sub-optimal. Not to mention the aesthetic ungainliness.

People can handle very expansive character sets; a swarm of diacritics added to a poor base set might seem convenient and cost-effective, but culturally and functionally it's really only useful to the colonial power in the long term.

hhp

A writing system where the differentiation between letters relies on tiny floating bits is severely sub-optimal

That could be said of practically any writing system.

True. I'm not claiming anything qualitative. But also, everything
is -and can be made- better or worse, in some context or other.

hhp

Practically speaking, in the case of Vietnamese, the possible revival of Nôm notwithstanding, maybe the overloaded base letters can have variants depending on what's added (carefully chosen to increase word differentiation). For the "a" you could have a mono versus bi form; for the "o" maybe a round versus schwabacher form (spiky on top and bottom). The problem is this would make it even more "noisy"...

What you really need is for the diacritics to be integral; like how a good ogonek is made. Especially for letters with more than one.

hhp

Thanks, Qinshi, I have little better idea of what is going on now. It still seems very obscure because I did not grow up reading it.

ChrisL

"What you really need is for the diacritics to be integral"
That would be great, but I don't see how it can be practical for all of them.
In any case though, they do need more attention and care, and they most often need more room. I'm curious, has anyone yet made a font that has a smaller x-height for languages like Vietnamese than stuff like Greenlandic? Ideally, I'm thinking a Latin font would need different base glyphs –at the very least, a variable x-height– for any language it presumes to cover, to make it work really well (or really just equally well across languages).
But no, I'm not going to that trouble either… :-\

> has anyone yet made a font that has a smaller x-height for
> languages like Vietnamese than stuff like Greenlandic?

Bilak's Eureka did that for Czech.
(Nice glyphs, but its spacing is way off.)
http://typographica.org/000453.php

hhp

Hmm, Eureka has a smaller x-height because it's optimized for Czech, right?
What I meant is language-dependent *varying* of x-height / base glyphs.
Like, one and the same font (or type system) could have a taller x-height for Greenlandic, which uses very few extenders; narrower glyphs for Finnish, with its many repetitions and long words; a smaller x-height for Czech; an even smaller one for Vietnamese; maybe longer descenders for Polish, to fit ogoneks?, & such.
It would be a pain to make, but I think one must question the functionality of the one-size-fits-all premise of the Latin script.

Gentium was designed to handle all kinds of diacritics, including Vietnamese.

I was recently setting some specimens in Navajo, which uses an extraordinary number of acute accents. Long vowels are indicated by doubling, and stress by acute accents. Long stressed vowels carry an acute accent on both letters, so a page of Navajo text looks like it's had hundreds of darts thrown at it. Also i with both ogonek and acute and, of course, the same doubled.

but to me the Navajo orthography is very reflective of the spoken language: strange and wonderful.

Did anyone mention the Shavian script or the "Shaw Alphabet"?

Navajo vowels present contrasts along four axes: quality (a, e, i, o), length (short or long), tone (low or high; syllabic n also bears tone), and nasality (absent or present). I'm sure there are a number of ways to deal with all of those factors, but if you're going to represent the complexity of the vowel system, one way or another you're going to end up with a complex orthography.

The Hmong Romanized Popular Alphabet deals with some of these issues by using conventional letters in unconventional ways. Doubled vowels indicate nasality; letters at the end of a syllable indicate tone. These conventions work because in there is no contrastive vowel length and because the few syllable-final consonants are predictable from nasality and tone and need not be written. In addition to these innovations, several of the letters and digraphs in RPA represent different sounds than they typically represent in other languages.

To illustrate, in RPA the word /m̥ɔ̃ŋ˦/ (Hmong) is written "Hmoob"; the 'hm' represents voiceless m, the 'oo' represents a nasalized mid-back vowel (the nasality implies the ŋ), and the b represents high tone.

The clear upside to this orthography is that no diacritics or special characters are required; the downside is that, because it violates so many conventions, the uninitiated can't even come close to reading it right even though it's written with the Latin alphabet.

Coming back to Navajo: since virtually all Navajo speakers are also fluent (and, if they're old enough, literate) in English, it's probably easier for them to deal with diacritics and more or less standard alphabetic conventions than it would be to adopt a Hmong-style system that might be more aesthetically pleasing but doesn't work in the way we understand an alphabet to work. Of course, here I'm setting up a false dichotomy; there are probably ways to represent the contrastive features of Navajo that preserve basic alphabetic conventions without going overboard with diacritics.