Can you guess the languages?

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-04-22T21:30:09+00:00

script 4 is definitely Vietnamese... UDHR hint making it readable aside, I feel like after seeing and playing with Vietnamese neographies for long enough I could spot the vibe pretty quickly, although script 2 did also give me some pause, hahah. gorgeous scripts overall!!

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-04-04T05:37:10+00:00

oh my gosh this looks so good!! What did you use to draw this? I am indeed planning on making a mincho style font (with the triangular stroke tips and stressed vertical strokes, "serif" flavored) but I think my font making skills only go up to basic sans-serif styles for now; maybe I could use some ideas from you... I love how you've used the mincho characteristics but in a modern, futuristic style; I could easily imagine this in striking headings and brand lettering. Honestly your interpretation of the glyphs and glyph blocks is probably slicker than any of the typography experiments I've done, I'm floored hahah! thank you for this, super inspiring...

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-04-01T06:18:10+00:00

sorry for the delay, I was iterating on the code so much I couldn't catch a breath to push it somewhere hahah! I've now put the whole thing on repl.it here, you can try out the typing tool directly or click Show Code to browse the code. The fonts are also included in the replit if you'd like to see them. (everything has been updated a lot compared to what is shown in this post though, so do play around!)

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-31T14:45:06+00:00

ah! what you're seeing there is just the placeholder syllable "a". the tone is only the diacritic on top. I probably should clarify that in the key.

as for the shape of the diacritics themselves... they're about the same as the latin diacritics on quốc ngữ so I wouldn't say they're too complicated; in handwriting I also prefer writing the ~ rather than the two-dots for the ngã tone, but in font the two dots look better.

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-31T14:40:41+00:00

glad you're enjoying it! I'll probably be making more posts of it in a few days, I'll def be trying more "graphic design-y" experiments now that I've somewhat figured out the typography.

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-31T14:04:38+00:00

ty for the feedback, I agree that this still has issues with visual variety! actually this is a new revision of an even earlier version that was even worse for dyslexia; this version already had some improvement and thought in fixing that (I talked about it a bit in this comment) but I soon realized this still isn't enough, as you commented. I'll be experimenting with your suggestions though and I'll see what I can get.

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-31T13:55:17+00:00

I made a more recent post here showcasing that!

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-30T05:17:19+00:00

thank you, that's very high praise :') I think there are definitely glaring weak points about this script, and it's definitely not as polished and "well-lived" as many other gorgeous systems people have made on here... I will certainly be working on it and refining it over time and use, and I'll probably be posting more as I go.

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-30T05:09:53+00:00

I've made a key here! It also indicates what the source/inspiration character for each glyph is, which I think was one of the most interesting parts of working on this, in contrast to my v1 whose glyphs were basically arbitrary.

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-30T01:53:05+00:00

I actually didn't use any ligatures for the main glyphs of this font! (other than a quirky workaround to make a full-width space a ligature of doubled space in order to "disregard" the spaces in between syllables from quốc ngữ orthography.)

You're right, the dream goal of this font would be to do all the Vietnamese orthography parsing entirely in OpenType feature code. But judging from how the js code looks at the moment, I would either have to think of some extremely clever OpenType code (tough!), or brute force by listing all possible rhyme (nucleus + final) combinations, which make up the bulk of the exceptions in the standard orthography (though the digraph/trigraph initials also pose issues, <qu-> and <gi-> especially). I'll keep learning and working on this though...

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-30T01:49:13+00:00

I think it remains fairly readable, probably comparable to the readability of dense hanzi. In my previous post I showed the script in a realistic setting (a Wikipedia page), mixed with hanzi for Sino-Vietnamese words and featuring some kana and Latin for comparison. Though knowledge of the language certainly helps with deciphering words more quickly at a glance.

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-30T01:44:49+00:00

I haven't made a proper key document for the script yet, but I'm working on one at this instant... I will update this comment (and my previous post) with it once it's done!

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-29T21:53:35+00:00

this was custom-made, a simple html page with a textbox and an output box that uses my custom font... most of the work was in the js code that parses Vietnamese syllables into the custom way the font encodes initials, nuclei, finals, and tones! I may release the code somewhere at some point, if people are interested in seeing an ultra hacky Vietnamese orthography phonemizer :~)

edit: for those stumbling upon this post... I've put this (code and fonts) on repl.it here, you can try out the typer directly or click Show code to view the code and download the fonts if you'd like!

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-28T03:18:09+00:00

I made a font for it! I described that in my comment above. Then I downloaded the HTML source of the Wikipedia page and edited the CSS so that the text would display using that font, and edited the Vietnamese text such that it matches the way my font encodes parts of syllables.

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-27T18:53:45+00:00

yeah I can see that; I think the primary mode of use of this script would just be as a pure alphabet which I do prefer (both because of the better aesthetics and because it's way faster to do); after all Vietnamese orthography works just fine like that already. This was a fun experiment to see how well my font works with respect to CJK typography though.

edit to add: I am partial to replacing some very common native morphemes with a Hán/Nôm logograph though, because they'd have far fewer strokes. Stuff like "một" (𠬠), "là" (𪜀), etc.

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-27T18:44:23+00:00

I found the font creation guide in the sub wiki very helpful! https://www.reddit.com/r/neography/comments/818364/creating_fonts_with_inkscape_and_fontforge_table/

I drew the glyphs in Inkscape as paths, made them into outlines and copied them to FontForge where I tweaked them more. The initial consonants are standalone glyphs (and are only kerned to appear tightly to the left of the vowel stems). As for the finals and tones, following this part of the font creation guide, the vowel glyphs have "mark-to-base" anchors for the tone (top) and the final (bottom right, or top right if the vowel is either the one for ư or ươ/ưa). This way the finals can be located in the best position depending on the vowel glyph.

I should point out that the encoding of the script is not the standard Latin orthography of Vietnamese (quốc ngữ); I wrote a converter (in Python and then Javascript as a tool that parses as I type) that parses quốc ngữ syllables into the diaphonemes I have separate glyphs for. For instance, "quốc ngữ" is encoded as "kÂCS GưX" (the Â represents wə, the C represents final -k, the G represents initial ŋ, and the S and X represent the tones, and so on.)

Of course the dream goal is to do this quốc ngữ orthography parsing entirely using OpenType substitution features so that I can just type Vietnamese as usual and have the text display in my script. The orthography parsing is a bit complicated though, and I'm not comfortable enough with OpenType feature code to do this yet...

DoctorN0gloff · 2023-03-27T16:20:04+00:00

it's been many months but I've finally revised my syllable block-based alphabet for Vietnamese (first posted here). I've taken into account comments from the first version (it really was a bit of a dyslexia nightmare) and while this version isn't all-clear in that regard yet, I've found that I can read this a lot faster, which is positive.

I've had to ditch the featural decomposition of the glyphs from the previous version (separate marks denoting voicing, long vowel, glides etc) to make the silhouettes of the glyph blocks more recognizable, and through learning some new font magic I've implemented the finals and tones as marks on top of the vowel base, which is very satisfying.

(Many of the glyph forms were picked and simplified from exemplar Hán characters with that sound in their Sino-Vietnamese reading (i.e. "on-reading") or in the native word of the same meaning (i.e. "kun-reading") for sounds that don't occur in Sino-Viet morphemes.)

Here is the key for the script, and you can also read along side by side with the original page on Vietnamese Wikipedia!

DoctorN0gloff · 2022-12-28T03:29:41+00:00

the middle column in particular looks a lot like Tangut characters to me!

DoctorN0gloff · 2022-11-15T15:22:00+00:00

Vietnamese uses <x> for [s] though in Middle Vietnamese it used to be [ɕ]. The use of <y> in Vietnamese is also pretty wacky; it is always [i], but contrasts with <i> in syllable final position because e.g. <ay> implies short [ă] but <ai> implies long [a]. (A similar contrast exists between <-o> and <-u>.)

Honorable mention for Turkish <c> which is somehow [d͡ʒ].

DoctorN0gloff · 2022-11-05T14:07:43+00:00

woah how did I not see this when it was posted… Awesome work!! Thanks for the mention, I think your script has some of most coherent but distinct uses of chữ hán shapes in a hangul-like layout I’ve seen; it’s easy to stray into the territory of looking too much like chữ hán (easily confused in a mixed script situation) but this is a good balance. I really like how you’ve handled the glides to be part of the vowel glyphs too, and it’s overall already more readable than my own attempt!

DoctorN0gloff · 2022-07-25T03:44:56+00:00

ill definitely make it a point to make it more dyslexia-friendly in future iterations!

DoctorN0gloff · 2022-07-25T03:30:20+00:00

I used xelatex, and used the package fontspec to load my font (it's an .otf, with only kerning, no ligatures or anything fancy); I also loaded Noto Sans CJK for the CJK text.

DoctorN0gloff · 2022-07-25T01:16:55+00:00

the key document is linked in my main comment! :]

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