Script Evolution, Part 0

This is just going to be a short post, about an idea that I had had recently.

As I've probably said before, I've always been interested in different writing systems. So as soon as I saw the "tengwar" script on the cover of the Fellowship of the Ring, I started looking for more information on it.

I discovered that Tolkein, as a perfectionist, wanted his writing systems to seem as real as possible. He had created a "base" script for the tengwar, and slowly evolved it into the modern version, imitating the way that real forms of writing change over time. I thought this sounded like a very interesting idea, and I wanted to try it as an experiment.

So here's a simple idea for a writing system that I came up with recently. The letters are simple geometric shapes, and they're arranged into syllables as in Hangul (the Korean alphabet).

Every couple weeks I will try to write something out over and over in the script. Certain features should hopefully start to change over time. 

So here's the script as it starts out.

I tried to make it straight and angular, as the Latin alphabet originally was (to make it easier to carve into stone, mostly). The vowels O and U were added to the fictional language later, and have more rounded shapes. And the shapes will probably become more rounded through their "evolution", just as A became a and M became m for us.

The alphabet is phonetic, so it doesn't quite match the English alphabet. Most of the letters are pronounced just as you'd expect, except:

• ʔ - the "glottal stop" that occasionally replaces the "t" sound in "button", uncommon. Many "t"s are replaced by this letter in Australian and Cockney dialects.
• Ŋ (next to N and M, if it doesn't show up) - the "ng" sound in the word "singing"
• Þ - the "th" sound in the word "thin", which looked like a "y" in Old English (thus "ye olde...", which is supposed to be "the")
• Ð - the "th" sound in the word "this", slightly different from Þ. Compare ether (using Þ) and either (using Ð)
• X - the "ch" in many German and Scottish words, such as loch. In German, this can be used for both the ich-Laut and the ach-Laut sounds.
• ʃ - not an integral (∫), this is the "sh" sound in "shine"
• ʒ - sometimes spelled "zh", the si sound in "vision" and the s in "measure"
• Y - Used as a vowel here, not a consonant. It doesn't actually appear in English, but has a letter in several other languages: ü in German, u in French, and υ in Classical Greek. Close to the vowel in "seen".

Letters are arranged into syllables, rather than words. Each syllable in English, or most other languages, can be split into three parts: the consonants at the beginning, the vowels in the middle, and the consonants at the end. Thus strength would become str/e/ngth, seed would become s/ee/d, aisle would become /ai/sle, and say would become s/ay/.

In this script, those groups are arranged into blocks. The initial block is in the top left, the vowels in the top right, and the final block along the bottom. (See the diagram).

Wow, I wrote a lot more about that than I had expected. Since a lot of the "evolving" involves simplification, the next iteration should be a lot simpler.

As a final thought, here are the first two lines of a poem by a well-known author. I've used the letter "i" for consonantal y when necessary, and the rest of the vowels are exactly as in the original poem.

See if you can figure out what poem it is. Leave a comment if you can find the title and author. :)

Shapeshifting and the Fourth Dimension

Earlier in the summer, I was talking (well, emailing) with one of my friends about a possible scientific explanation for lycanthropy or shapeshifting, using a fourth spatial dimension.

As you probably know, the world we live in already has four dimensions - 0 is time, 1 is forwards-backwards, 2 is left-right, and 3 is up-down. (I'm going to ignore time from now on, since I'm talking specifically about spatial dimensions.)

However, there's been research done on additional dimensions, with string theory saying that there might be nine or more. Obviously we can't see any more dimensions, but people have come up with metaphors for explaining this. One of the most famous is the book "Flatland", narrated by a square living in a supposedly two-dimensional universe. People are polygons, the higher classes having more sides, and buildings are made of several line segments in a pattern.

A square from Flatland and his house, as seen from above by a three-dimensional observer.

When a three-dimensional person comes to the narrator's house, he's able to use that additional dimension to move through walls by stepping over them, and can become "invisible" by just being above the world, or somehow seal a door shut by putting a nail through from top to bottom.

He can even create "portals" for them, by literally folding the world and pushing them through what's now empty space. This was one explanation for how neutrinos seemed to move faster than light - they moved at their normal speed, but took a "shortcut" through a higher dimension.

This is also how the teleportation works in "A Wrinkle In Time".

A four-dimensional being would theoretically be able to do the same things in our world as we could in Flatland. However, there are other interesting ways that the fourth dimension could apply.

What if the fourth dimension did exist, but nobody could directly affect it or move through it? We might actually be four-dimensional, just like A. Square might actually be a cube in the third dimension, but unaware of it. But we might not be the same at each "cross-section"...

This was my original "explanation" for how it might work, using the two-dimensional metaphor.

In this example, a 3-dimensional shape has a square at one cross-section and a triangle at another. If something forced it to shift one way or another, it would seem to everyone in Flatland that it was changing shape. At the bottom, there's a sketch for what would happen if it had an infinite number of forms. It would appear as a long rod stretching out to infinity in both directions, and every few inches along the length it might have a different cross-section.

[Click the image if it isn't animating]

If that were true for people, in the fourth dimension, then it would be possible (by some mysterious force...) to change shape, by shifting through the fourth dimension to a different three-dimensional "cross-section". This could also allow teleportation and invisibility of a sort, as explained before.

Ridiculously improbable, of course, but mathematically possible.

pןɹoʍ oןןǝɥ

Hello everyone!

I just started this blog, so I don't know what my typical posts are going to be like, but I plan to post about interesting things that I do and ideas that I have. Hopefully it will be interesting to read.

If you're wondering about the upside-down title, when I was really young I thought it was interesting to look at writing in different ways, and I taught myself to read and write upside down, mirrored, and reversed. Obviously given the limited alphabet of the English language it's difficult to type upside down, but the International Phonetic Alphabet includes several letters that resemble inverted versions of Roman lowercase letters. For example, the inverted v in the title represents the vowel in the word "cut", the inverted e or schwa is the short vowel in the first syllable of "about", and the inverted r is the English "r" sound (as opposed to a capital R for the French uvular trill, or a normal lowercase r for the Spanish and Italian alveolar trill). When I was trying to think of a good title for the blog, I had an IPA chart open in one of my browser tabs, and I noticed that the letter ʌ closely resembled an inverted v (although it's supposed to be a small A without a crossbar). I saw that several other letters could be "turned" like that, such as using u for n and ı (Turkish dotless i) for i, and I had the idea for the title.

(TL;DR: the title of the blog uses IPA letters to resemble inverted Latin letters.)

Anyway, as you can see, I can sometimes wall-of-text when writing about a topic, and I'll try not to do that too much. I do a lot of science, math, linguistics, and programming stuff, but hopefully my posts won't get too technical.

I hope you find my future writing to be interesting!