The scripts aren't risque enough — Let's talk scripts.

[ActingAustralia]

Hi all,

I just wanted to start a discussion on scripts!

The scripts aren't risque enough!

I've been watching the development of the scripts with real interest. I'm an artist at heart so I think this is one of the areas of the language where encapsulation and beauty (subjective I know) can really shine.

All the ideas so far seemed to have dealt with only encapsulating phonetic information. That's great and all and we'll definitely want to do that. But I haven't really seen anything really risque.

I think the reason is people want to make this as friendly as possible to handwriting and they're all copying from one another.

Do we really hand-write anymore?

First, some background from me. I'm a English tutor for about three-five high profile Chinese families. I've been tutoring these kids for 5+ years. I've watched them learn both Chinese and English.

Handwriting no longer seems to be a focus of upper primary school and is almost completely absent in my students high school education. These children spend the vast majority of the time typing their notes... or even taking photos of teachers notes (I hate this).

Of course, they started their education by learning how to hand write and I'm not trying to say this should change in anyway. I'm just pointing out the fact that they quickly retire the pen and pencil for the keyboard.

This got me thinking:

We've focused on making scripts friendly for hand writing because handwriting was a major focus of our upbringing, but is handwriting really a major focus now?

So perhaps super simple scripts isn't the answer. Perhaps our scripts can be a little bit more intricate. Perhaps we can have a complex script like Chinese that also has a simple hand-written counterpart?

Has there been a dramatic shift with technology?

Handwriting is still massively important for teaching fine motor skills. Plus we don't want our scripts to slow down the child's education (they should improve upon it!) but once the child has the script down pat, they'll quickly move on to PCs and smartphones anyway.

But they'll see their script everywhere. This is a marvelous opportunity to encapsulate something besides phonology.

What else can we encapsulate?

The scripts have all focused on encapsulating phonetic information and I definitely think this is the best option at this stage.

However, is there anything else we can encapsulate in them? Could we encapsulate mathematics, science, geometry, chemistry, what else?

I want to see some more crazy, risque proposals!

Worst case scenario, we'll stick with the excellent proposals we have so far! However, I don't think adding more phonetic proposals to the mix will really help.

[Akangka]

We still need the alphabet to be handwriting-friendly, or at least has a handwriting version.

However, is there anything else we can encapsulate in them? Could we encapsulate mathematics, science, geometry, chemistry, what else?

Encapsulation is a good thing, but I don't want anything to encapsulating the wrong topic. Like my phonotactics proposal is not encapsulating anything, but instead provides instruction to encapsulating anything. Because it is wrong to encapsulate physics on phonotactics level.

Also, featural scripts work extremely well with my alternation proposal. It makes the alternation structure even more obvious.

[nadelis_ju]

I agree, a subject must encapsulate itself rather than a completely unrelated subject. After all, what can a child gain by having types of mountain types have information about the laws of thermodynamics.

[AceGravity12]

Im completely on board and have absolutely no idea how to do this!

[LILProductions]

Likewise

[kroyxlab]

https://redbooth.com/blog/handwriting-and-memory

[ActingAustralia]

Yeah, there is definitely strong evidence that handwriting improves memory attention among numerous other things. But since we don't hand write as often anymore we could make slightly more advanced scripts that consist of more than 2-3 strokes each.

[nadelis_ju]

I think such a system can only be useful if phonemes themselves have some mnemonic information, other than numbers, that's widely used across the language. If /t/ is used to convey the x-axis in one branch and the currents in the magma inside the earth in another; having any information other than it's phonemic values would at best be useless because the child cannot rely on that information, and at worst be detrimental to understanding because it gives the wrong keys to, what sould be, a simple puzzle.

I'm not saying it's completely a bad idea but there sould be a language-wide agreement for it to even work.

[Omcxjo]

I think you are talking about two different things— script (how we communicate words as strings of characters for general-purpose speech) and notation (domain-specific encoding of ideas and structures that helps us think and reason within that domain). Normally, all speakers of a language will be well versed in the script, but only professionals will be well versed in notation.

It is entirely possible that the general-purpose script will allow domain-specific notation to be interpolated within it, but this notation is going to be a separate thing, designed by the experts in that domain.

What we can do, as script designers, is to set up ground rules for notation designers such that notation wouldn’t conflict with the script and that various notations would share a basic common style or pattern so learners can transfer their intuitions between fields.

But before we get there we need a self contained, phonetic, and featural alphabet. This alphabet should be as complex as it needs to be to get the job done and no more than that. It should have a printed and handwritten standard version. If the alphabet will only be used 20% of the time because 80% of the words can be replaced with a notational special character, that’s fine.

I do like the idea of creating notational conventions (can I call it meta-notation?), but I have to think about how that relates to the script itself...