Re: OT: Evolution of dialects (was Re: Tirelat and related dialects)

On Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:07:26 +0200, taliesin the storyteller
<taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:

>> T9, or rather the Nokia phones, have a setting where the words
>> are guessed instantly as you type them, with a minimum of
>> extra button pressing required.
>
>Yeah, but my experience is that it guesses wrong, especially on
>short words like 'et' and 'du' (same two buttons in T9). Though:
>I thought T9 was tuned to a language? You have a phone with
>English T9 or is it universal?
You probably meant tuned via its predictive dictionary...  But (speaking as
one who's composed maybe five words in T9 ever) I've always thought it
should additionally have been tuned in its letter groupings as well.  With a
clever choice of sets of letters, and one that was allowed to vary by
language, I'd imagine the number of collisions could have been minimised
much better than it was.  Parker makes the point that there's another thing
that could then be optimised as well, namely the lettergroup-to-digit
assignment, so that the more common groups ended up in easier positions.
Unfortunately the association abc:2, def:3, ... already existed and I
imagine the designers of T9 felt shackled to it.

I'd be surprised if no-one else has thought this before.  Anyone know of
someone who's tried to optimise the assignments this way, and what the
results were?

ObConlang:  anyone got interesting keymaps / input methods / etc. for their
conlang?  Especially ones that pay attention to frequency considerations?


[If you'll permit me one more paragraph of rant -- there's this neat little
input device called the Twiddler:
  http://www.handykey.com/
Unfortunately its default keymap commits this too:
  http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ccg/projects/twidor/screens.html
Where T9 is understandable as cleaving to an older tradition, this I think
is just indefensible design.  I figure that most anyone who'd care to use
one of these things would care to use it sufficiently much that the speedup
associated to a better keymap would easily dominate any initial mnemonic
benefit that putting the letters in order gives.  Fortunately some folks
have made better ones (GIYF).]

Alex