Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> > I also don't know which basis has of the opposite view
> (that rotations and
> > reflections are bad for a writing system); I guess that it
> comes from some
> > ergonomic evaluation of human visual capabilities.
>
> My objection was not to rotations and reflections per se (after all,
> we've had p q b d for about 1000 years now), but to the overall great
> similarity among the characters devised bye original poster,
> whose name has been snipped to oblivion from the tops of these
> postings. It was at least as bad as the Shaw Alphabet.

Now I remember: it had been discussed in this list!

It was a discussion between Doug Ewell and Peter T. Daniels about "What
makes a good script" and the G.B. Shaw's alphabet:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/127
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/messages/127?threaded=

> BTW I see neither rotations nor reflections in hangul! The letters are
> clearly top-left-oriented, and anyway are brush-written so symmetry
> always gives way to gracefulness.

Perhaps Adam was talking about Hangul vowels? There are 8 vowel letters
whose symmetry suggest rotating the same basic shapes.

Two letters are vertical strokes with 1 or 2 dots on one side; the other 6
letter look like the same 2 shapes rotated 3 times by 90 degrees, obtaining
6 more letters.

Notice that I wrote "look like": I don't imply that the inventor(s) of
Hangul actually rotated letters and attributed a meaning to this. Perhaps
they simply used all the possibilities of a few basic strokes, so that the
resulting letters where not too much complicated.

_ Marco