Re: Toki Pona Script

Hi Henrik,

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Errm, what was that???  How did I manage to send that?  I don't dare
> to quote.  I wrote a small, simple text with with the following words:
Neither format was entirely clear to me - the first had hollow squares, whilst the
second had MIME codes with equals signs (I'm viewing in UTF-8).

[snip]
> I started out looking at dingbats, arrows, math symbols, etc. first
> (there are quite a lot in Unicode).  Then I remembered that Canadian
> Aboriginal syllables might be well-suited, and indeed found a few
> interesting pictures, too.  And then I remembered that Ethiopic often
> looks like people doing something funny, so I searched them, too, and
> although it wasn't people I found, I found a cute little animal. :-)
>
> (And then I looked at many, many other scripts, too.)
[snip]

You asked for comments.  Here they are, then!

For keyboard & typeset use, I think you've chosen pretty suitable characters
overall, tho I'm not entirely rapt in those for colour names. Those seem to
lack any kind of logic in selection except that they be rather similar to each
other; but that similarity may mark them hard to distinguish. May I suggest
using circled digits instead (I'm pretty sure you'll find at least one set),
following the rainbow spectrum, as follows:
 0 black
 1 red
 2 orange
 3 yellow
 4 green
 5 cyan
 6 blue
 7 indigo
 8 violet
 9 white
- or a subset of these for those colours that actually appear in Toki Pona. (I'm
making the radical assumption that Toki Pona could use Arabic numerals.)

However, for handwritten use, many of the symbols are too complex to write quickly and
too rectilinear to readily approximate cursively. Ideally, I think, a practical
script for any language will enable quick and fluid reading and writing. And it
doesn't hurt if it looks beautiful, too, but that's a bit harder to achieve.

HTH!

Regards,
Yahya

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