Post #5011 · Thu 130509 152834
Originally posted by Pompolic
Inspired by another thread:
I've been on and off practicing Elian Script for a while now, based off this page. Being a lefty, the constrained left-to-right letter order in standard writing has been a pain for me, so I really like the freedom it gives. Plus it looks all neat and artsy. Is anyone else familiar with it?
Or maybe we could have a discussion about alternate writing systems or something. :B
This system looks neat, but the logician in me is screaming about the idea that the same letter can be drawn many different ways, and the fact that the letters are divided into three classes of differing simplicity (short line, long line, long line with dot) but grouped based on alphabetical order instead of something more sensible like frequency of use (so the most used letters are the simplest and thus the quickest to draw).
I once experimented with a similar cipher system intended for writing very quickly on grid paper. Each grid cell could contain one letter, and each letter consisted of no more than one line with no more than one bend; the position of the line's start, end and bend determines the letter. e.g.:
(I don't remember the actual letter mapping, so this is just gibberish
)
But that has an immediately obvious problem: when the lines are written right at the edge of the grid cells, they butt up against eachother, so _||¯ is indistinguishable from _|¯. That's easily resolved by adding some padding:
Then punctuation and end-of-word could be marked by putting a dot in the corner, and less commonly used symbols might be represented by drawing a circle, triangle, square etc. I don't remember how I had it mapped out originally, never really did use it.
Basically each grid cell is divided into a 3x3 grid itself, and a line can start, end and bend in any of those 9 positions, or can not bend, but can't do more than one of those in the same position. And of course swapping the start and end position doesn't change anything, because it'd look the same.
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