On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 21:26:47 -0400, Don Osborn <dzo@...> wrote:

> but the resulting similarity of everything meant you
> had to pay very rapt attention to each form in order to read text in
> it (or so it seemed to me; this was not like Chinese characters which
> have many unique forms and resulting combinations, but rather used
> positioning and number of dots and straight lines to make the
> distinctions, as I recall).

This brings up a thought, which is that of the relative legibility of
various scripts. I think that one should primarily consider how easy or
difficult a script is to learn as one's first writing system (CJK is
surely difficult), but also its relative difficulty to someone learning it
as another writing system after one's first. My thoughts might be mostly
nonsense; at least, there are many courteous and civil people here!

It occurs to me that "psychophysics" of perception might well be of more
importance than generally realized. It seems that having many distinctive,
easily-noticed features in the set of glyphs for a writing system can be
helpful; I'm thinking of Tamil, which still amazes me when I look at it
(not often). Sinhala might be a good candidate, as well.

Within reason, the more easily-distinguished the glyphs are from one
another, I should think the better the readability, *but* at the same
time, a neatly-bordered and "smoothly-flowing" run of text helps (I think
) readability. (I'm probably mixing up readability and learnability to
some degree.) Surely, Myanmar/Burmese has some very-prominent
interruptions in its general borders! For some time, it has seemed to me
that CJK glyphs are created to minimize similarity of appearance; there
seem to be relatively few that look almost the same, but I really don't
know.

Otoh, much of Thai and Armenian, neither which I read at all, but can
identify, seems to consist largely of paired vertical strokes. To my
ignorant eyes, the letters look similar enough (I think) that they are
somewhat hard to distinguish. I'm reminded of a small illustration of part
of a Latin ms. which had almost mechanically-perfect, evenly-spaced
vertical strokes in some words, such as "minimum"; it was shown to explain
why dots on minuscule i's were needed.

Thaana, and iirc Bugid, seem to be hard to read, from the standpoint of a
learner.

As well, the size of distinguishing details relative to that of the whole
glyph seems to matter; details seem rather small in Thai, for instance.I'm
reminded of some Fraktur faces in which the f and the k seem to be made
about as similar as one can make them, almost as if it were a matter of
pride. One comment was that in a certain face and size, the two letters
differed by only 40 millionths of a square inch!

Of course, different type fac designs can make a considerable difference
in legibility, which surely confuses the whole matter. While one might
think of comparing scripts of similar size designed with a uniform stroke
width (and the same width for all of the scripts), I think that would
"insult" at least one of them! (Otoh, I would like to see more of Everson
Mono, which, most likely, "insults" none of the writing systems included
in it. I really think Michael would not design anything ugly or
inappropriate.)

I'm not trying to denigrate any writing system; these are only a
dilettante's stray thoughts.

Maybe I'm spouting some nonsense, but I'm willing to learn!

Some time back, it occurred to me that some elaborate glyphs, especially
South and Southeast Asian, took some time to write! Those people were not
in a hurry, it seems to me. (The opposite seems to be modern cursive
Hebrew; it looks really "fast and simple.")

Best regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
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