Re: Tree writing [Was: Non-linear / full-2d writing systems?]

On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 12:40:15AM -0400, Patrick Littell wrote:
> Several years ago I had been thinking along very similar lines as Teoh has
> been -- a radial, mostly-decorative representation of stories, prayers,
> warnings, what-have-you, with a variable order of interpretation. Basically,
> it was a tree-structure layed out radially, with the root in the center. The
> design motif was itself tree-like, akin to a Celtic "Tree of Life", and each
> glyph was an interwoven pattern.
Actually, what I have in mind is a little more than merely a strict
tree with a unique root. The type of writing I have in mind could, of
course, be tree-structured, but doesn't have to be. It is more
graph-like, in that as long as the 2D space of the paper allows,
symbols could very well form loops and other interconnections beyond
the top-down hierarchy of a tree structure.


[...]
> Firstly, though, think for a moment about the biggest benefit of a
> Chinese-style writing system. Your answer may be different than mine, but I
> consider the best part of the system its ability to simultaneously handle
> similar but mutually-unintelligeable spoken languages. If I speak Mandarin
> and you Cantonese, we may not be able to understand each other verbally, but
> we can still communicate via writing. We don't pronounce the glyphs the
> same, but we assign the same meanings to them.
>
> The only barrier to a language's "participation" in such a system is that it
> must be (basically) analytic and have (basically) the same word order. I
> figure two languages with a slightly different noun-number-classifier order
> wouldn't put up too many barriers, but SOV and VSO languages would have a
> tough time "collaborating" in such a way.
>
> But a *tree* (or a more general directed acyclic graph) is independent of
> the order in which one traverses it. Speakers of VSO participants would thus
> tends towards preorder traversals of nodes, speakers of SVO, inorder, and
> SOV speakers, postorder. VOS, reverse preorder, OVS, reverse inorder, OSV,
> reverse postorder. (The devil's in the details, of course, but you see the
> idea.) So long as the participant languages remain reasonably analytic, the
> system is at least possible. Not for several randomly chosen analytic-ish
> real languages, probably, but certainly for several languages of one's own
> invention!
[...]

Sounds interesting. Although, you'd still have an overall linear order
to it, since this writing would represent spoken language, and there
is only 1 dimension of time for you to speak in. :-) So, not quite
what Sai had a mind, but nevertheless still a very interesting
approach to reconciling languages with different word orders.


T

--
Exaggerate?! I have never, *ever* exaggerated in my whole entire life, not
even 0.000001 times!