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Sunday, May 10, 2015

Artificial writing system

I was wondering if it were possible to make a single simple character for every word in the English language, which is around 100,000 words not counting really esoteric ones... Similar idea to Chinese but easier to write and with simpler basic elements...
Consider the following chart:


Each numbered line or curve is a stroke divided into six basic categories, when writing a character one would learn to always write strokes from a lower number category first and subsequently write the strokes in that category in the character in their order by number as seen above...
For example, one would write character 1 below as follows, the vertical line first, because that's category 1, then the diagonal line because that's the next lowest category, 3, then both the halves of the circle are written left half first because both are category 6, but the left half is a lower number, 1,  within that category, then the right half is number 4 within that category so goes last...
Character 2 would start with the horizontal line because that's category 2, then the two diagonal rightmost first, then the bottom c shape.

So the fact that every character can be written by stroke order also makes it possible to alphabetize all the possible characters like so, all characters that start with category one strokes go first, then within that group characters who have a first stroke with a lower number go before those with a higher number, and a tie is broken by comparing second strokes and so on to the last stroke, with the rule that for characters sharing exactly the same strokes but one has more strokes total, the shorter goes first...
The fact that they can be alphabetized makes it possible to make a dictionary for the words...

So the number of possible characters is hard to say exactly because you generally don't want any character with disconnected parts and it can get hard to say when that might be, choosing 2, 3, 4, or 5 strokes from 26 possible strokes is somewhere north of 90,000 characters so 99.99% of the words that people use could be written simple with one character... Next I might write a computer program that generates a sample sheet of text written in this language I think it will look pretty interesting...

**Division of meanings**

I was thinking that the way the word is written could show the part of speech, for example starting with a stroke from category 1 could be a noun, which most words are in the English language, category 2 could make the word an adjective, category 3 verb, and category 4 adverb, Anything composed solely from strokes in category 5 and 6 and 7 would be prepositions, pronouns, and other minor parts of speech, of which there are around 1000 in the English language which matches up with the number of ways to create a symbol from the 3 categories. 
And then even beyond parts of speech words could be categorized by how they are written, like the last word above is a noun because it has horizontal lines but the next stroke is category 5 which could, theoretically, indicate the noun is a place of some kind... Maybe further divisions are even possible like the third stroke might indicate a noun is a type of animal...

**Pronunciation

It might be possible to map every word in English to one syllable sounds, since so many aren't used like scrug and footh, one count estimates there are about 100,000 possible, the trick would be to map the possibilities into the writing system...

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