Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@...> wrote:

> ... However, your characters are far, far too similar in appearance
> to each other to constitute a practical script. (That's the other
> main objection to the winning entry for Shaw Alphabet, too.)

Oddly enough, I had just been wondering about the uniformity of my
letters and the effect on readability right before I received Peter's
message.

I remember reading somewhere about studies that showed that Latin-
script text written in all lowercase is easier to read than all
uppercase, partly due to the "more distinct letterforms" of lowercase.
I wonder if that's why I find lowercase Cyrillic text so tiresome to
read -- most letters are simply small versions of the uppercase
letters, unlike Latin and Greek.

As a non-expert, it hadn't occurred to me that there was such a thing
as a level of uniformity so excessive that it would render a script
"impractical" or unsuccessful.

This leads to the bigger question (and if this isn't on topic for
Qalam, nothing is):

What features, traits, or attributes make a "good" script?

Peter states that too much uniformity among letterforms (in Ogham,
Shavian, or my Ewellic) can make a script excessively difficult to
read. It seems to me that several living scripts, especially Thaana
(Maldivian) and Ethiopic but perhaps also Thai and Myanmar, have this
problem to a certain extent as well.

Is there such a thing as *too little* uniformity among letterforms?
Do any existing scripts exhibit this problem?

What about number of characters? Logographic and hieroglyphic scripts
require the reader to learn hundreds or thousands of characters,
compared with the relative few in alphabets, abjads, and syllabaries.
It would certainly seem easier to learn 25 to 40 symbols than ten
thousand. But too few symbols may mean that more of them are required
to represent a given language adequately, that supplementary
diacritical marks must be introduced, or that phonemic spelling
principles are abandoned (as in English), all of which impair reading.
Also, many alphabets have adopted separate uppercase and lowercase
forms, which doubles the number of distinct letterforms but apparently
improves readability.

What about directionality? Most scripts today are LTR. Is there
anything inherently more difficult about reading RTL? What about top-
to-bottom (or Ogham bottom-to-top)? Some early scripts were
boustrophedon (alternating LTR and RTL). This seems easier to write
but harder to read; is that true?

What other issues are there? This is clearly a subject on which the
experts (particularly Daniels and Bright, but others as well) can
share some of their expertise with those of us who are interested and
curious, as our presence on this list should demonstrate.

-Doug Ewell doug_ewell@... or dewell@...