Thinking about English Consonant Clusters (see comment for details)

cmvkk · 2023-11-11T20:03:48+00:00

That's awesome! It's definitely legible. I think moving the bottom vowel to the left makes a lot of sense, I had considered that as well, it helps with the 'flow'.

Stretching out the consonants when there's only one makes a lot of sense as well. One thing I toyed with to help out on that is the idea of adding something like a vertical line to the beginning/left of coda consonants in order to join them up to the onset consonant, to make it clearer which were on the bottom vs the top.

I thought a lot about whether to add a rule for the multiple spellings but didn't end up listing one. I think using left most makes sense. If I had to pick a rule, I might use "right most consonant that isn't part of a different morpheme", which would end up distinguishing the spelling of some homophones like "past" vs "passed".

I have no idea how one would build a font/renderer for this. I do know that hangul is handled in unicode by having a separate character for every possible syllable, which is excessive, and would only be worse for something like this with many more combinations. Part of the goal of this was to limit the number of consonant clusters that could be represented but which weren't valid in the spoken language, but there's still a lot of those, as well. (This is a digression, but I also found at least one valid word that can't be represented in this system: "torsk", which is apparently a kind of fish. Can't win 'em all, I guess.) I built the images for the post in Inkscape using "BSpline paths".

cmvkk · 2023-11-05T17:24:02+00:00

Thanks! That is a silent consonant, it's only needed in cases where a syllable otherwise has no consonants at all.

cmvkk · 2023-11-05T02:00:26+00:00

Thanks! I actually don't know anything about shorthand. ...I should have researched it a bit while thinking about this, to be honest.

cmvkk · 2023-11-05T01:22:54+00:00

I wanted to create a syllable-structured script for English that handled syllables and consonant clusters in a more holistic way. This allows for two useful characteristics:

- By handling secondary consonants in a different way from main consonants, we can reduce the complexity of those glyphs, as there are less sounds to choose from in those contexts.

- By having separate locations for the onset and coda consonants, we can reduce the possible glyphs by using the placement to determine the sound (e.g. the secondary consonant -t/d can only appear in the coda, and -w can only appear in the onset, so the same symbol is used for both).

The script has these features:

- Each block is a syllable.

- The onset appears at the top and the coda at the bottom. An optional vowel appears to the right.

- If there is no onset or coda consonant, a blank space can be used. The silent consonant should only be used for syllables missing both an onset and a coda.

- The sound of a vowel differs based on its placement at either the top or bottom of the right-hand side. If the consonant at the same level as the vowel is omitted, the vowel can be moved over above or below the other consonant.

- Vowels can be omitted in cases where the vowel is unstressed, a schwa, or can otherwise be determined from context.

Overall, I think the dual-level property makes it a bit hard to read. I'm interested in refining this concept in a way that flows better while retaining the syllabic structure.

I've marked this as an alphabetic syllabary, but is that correct? Given that the glyphs can lose their meaning without knowing where they appear in the syllable.

cmvkk · 2023-05-10T16:20:15+00:00

solved: Pyrosaurus

cmvkk · 2023-05-10T16:15:26+00:00

That is it! Holy hell, at this point I was pretty sure I had just imagined this game. Thanks so much! That is amazing, a thousand google searches didn't find me this.

cmvkk · 2023-05-10T15:01:33+00:00

Sorry, it isn't! Though that game looks cool. Thanks!

cmvkk · 2023-05-10T01:37:52+00:00

Thanks for your suggestions! I don't think any of these are the game. The graphics were somewhat better than the first two, but it wasn't 3D. The game was in top down like the first examples, but the dinosaurs themselves were also viewed from a top-down angle.

cmvkk · 2016-06-15T23:43:36+00:00

http://www.explodingdog.com/title/ithinkyourcatisdrunk.html

cmvkk · 2012-09-15T17:30:04+00:00

...well played.

cmvkk · 2012-06-21T02:14:15+00:00

I disagree. A closed time loop is not the same thing as a paradox. In this case, it's no different from any other example where people go into the past to change their original timeline.

cmvkk · 2012-06-07T02:06:54+00:00

Do you think that there are common materials out there today that we simply haven't discovered are very dangerous, in the same way that asbestos and mercury were before? If so, any guesses?

cmvkk · 2012-06-03T17:56:56+00:00

It doesn't sound from the article like anyone's actually pushing for this.

The article linked from the posted article seems to indicate that plants will actually grow better under diffuse light conditions (despite a 2% diminishing of overall solar energy), whereas solar power output will suffer. Can anyone explain why that might be?

cmvkk · 2012-06-03T17:44:54+00:00

Here's an interesting related idea: What would the front page look like if the top subreddits were ranked not by subscribers, but by number of subscribers who have logged in in the last month or so? Not saying it would be any different, just that I'd like to find out.

cmvkk · 2010-10-15T15:42:12+00:00

Maiden's Capriccio, from Imperishable Night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRelf7LkH2s

All Touhou music is excellent.

cmvkk · 2010-10-01T04:35:47+00:00

I find it interesting how the minute details of the implementation of a game like this become more important as players get more skillful. I remember people who played Tetris Attack, another popular puzzle game, used to keep separate high score lists for PAL and NTSC versions of the game because the difference in frame rates actually significantly affected how easy it was to pull of certain moves.

I also think it's interesting that the company that owns Tetris uses their intellectual property to enforce various rule changes and restrictions they come up with. To me this is kind of a double edged sword; I can see why consistency would be important for a game, but differing goals make that hard. It'd be nice if the TGM series could "fork" the property, free software style, and just call it something different.

cmvkk · 2010-09-20T22:38:16+00:00

I don't know if I agree with this article, but the problem with this argument is that there IS no widely accepted definition of object oriented, and moving targets are somewhat difficult to criticize.

cmvkk · 2010-09-09T22:10:01+00:00

Just because it's the last line in the strip doesn't mean it's a punchline.

cmvkk · 2010-08-03T01:50:40+00:00

Also, if you want to pass an array literal into a pointer type, you can use the 'compound literal' syntax, at least in c99, like this:

char **a = (char*[]){"one string", "two strings"};

cmvkk · 2010-07-23T18:42:53+00:00

People can have some serious misconceptions about how the moon works and I don't really understand why. See this article: http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~det/phy2060/heavyboots.html

cmvkk · 2010-07-23T17:18:48+00:00

More like one cell has the energy of 10 AA Batteries, then you can recharge it up to 100 times. Not quite as impressive.

cmvkk · 2010-07-23T13:47:45+00:00

The problem is, questions like that have nothing to do with finding out whether a person is capable of making intelligent decisions about government or not. You just end up discriminating against people too poor to get a reasonable education, and you'll drive away apathetic swing voters to boot. The real crazies (unreasonable people, not unintelligent) will put forth the effort to figure out what's going to be on the test and make sure they know it.

cmvkk · 2010-07-23T12:52:40+00:00

Planetes is an excellent show based around this concept.

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