Re: Non-linear / full-2d writing systems?

Ray Brown:

> > could be really good but also very hermetic. And it
> > makes you feel like an Egyptian when it comes to proper names... Unless
> > you
> > create a unique logogram for yourself.
>
> Why? They are written with mosdtly _phonetic_ symbols and enclosed in a
> cartouche. I don't see how this really relates to either ideograms or
> logograms.
Why should one's name by phonetic?

As for me, IRL, I have a "name" that is a glyph. I don't particularly
identify with my legal or going names - Sai Emrys is... a nickname, of
sorts; a useful thing to have, but not "My Name" (tm). (Glyph is here:
http://www.livejournal.com/~saizai ) So I of course would argue that,
yes, you should/can create a unique logographic name. ;-)

Cartouches: they just strike me as aesthetically displeasing, and
wasteful of time. If you're going to want a phonetic sub-orthography,
then yes it'd have to be linear, but no need to bound it; you could
just point to the start of the string.

> >> If you're going to treat them as a whole,
> >> why not fuse them 2d, or even in a completely overlapping /
> >> integrating fashion? Why keep the bounds of the constituent atoms and
> >> then string those along?
> >
> > Yes and no. I said "A few words one above the other" because it's a
> > convenient way to write them but that's of no importance. What matters is
> > that these few words describe a mental image *together.* That's why I
> > used a
> > framing around my semagrams;
>
> Like a cartouche around a proper name   :)
>
> But if the _words_ describe a mental image when taken together is it not
> necessary to know how the words relate to one another, otherwise we could
> finish up with ambiguities like the infamous "little girls' school"?
Er?

But yes, /me reiterates suggestion. :-P

> > I think that losing data is the only purpose of a 2D writing system:
>
> ?? Loosing _data_ doesn't seem a good idea to me. Nor have I considered
> this the purpose of 2d writing.
I think he meant a different thing by "data" (one that confused me):
that is, the linearization would need salt (his "data") to recreate
the full-2d graph/tree links that are broken in linearization.

Unless that's wrong too, in which case I don't get it.

> That sounds to me just like plain bad writing! If the data is not
> necessary and, indeed, superfluous, then IMO it should not be there quite
> irrespective of whether the writing is 1d, 2d or 3d.
But you could have immediate footnotes! All the detail you could ever
want on some obscure sub-point of a tangent, visible on zoom...

> [snip]
> >> That does beg the question, though, of how much you could screw with
> >> it so as to render it not just nonlinear, but *nonlinearizable*...
> >> *hmmmmmmmm*...
> >
> > That's absolutely impossible. We already "linearize" our everyday 4D
> > universe every time we speak. 2D is flatter(more flat?) than 4D... So
> > whatever the number of dimensions, we can reduce them to only one: speech.
>
> But I thought Sai wanted a writing that did _not require_ a reduction to
> speech. So what has speaking got to do with it?
I see speech, here, as merely an example. I agree in principle,
though; absolutely anything and everything is linearizable if it is
expressable at all.

So perhaps I should revise my hmmm above to read "not linearizable
without loosing damn near everything in the process in a way that's
cognitively irrecoverable". That is, if the linearized form (which
contains the same data, by definition) isn't readily understandable
compared to the nonlinear, that would satisfy this.

IOW, can you use the nonlinear-2d to encode something that is
amazingly more intuitive / easy to grasp / dense than linear?

> Interestingly, I was at first rather indifferent about the 2d business -
> but as this thread progresses I'm getting more and more interested in the
> type of writing I think Sai has in mind, rather than some 2d
> representation of spoken language. The latter I could do by 30th June -
> but I don't think I could do it as well as Trent has done  :=(
>
> But the former by June 30th? I think not   :=(
Hehe. Thanks?

Butyeah, it's been a long-term back-burner project of mine. I've yet
to actually do anything concrete with it other than the throwaway
examples (of "commercial transaction frame" being the atom, and some
copular links) I did for the term paper.

I expect a really good one to take quite a bit more work - and, more
importantly, a few more cognitive breakthroughs of understanding just
how one could use it.

 - Sai

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