Friday, May 27, 2016

[ywaspbnp] Scribal abbreviations

Scribal abbreviations made the orthography of Latin character based writing systems as complicated as Chinese characters.  Inspired by the thousands of Tironian notes.

Assume the two examples demonstrate that written language naturally wants to become as complicated as Chinese characters.  A modern example might be the explosion of emoji, including proposals that new emoji be constructed by joining them with zero width joiners.  Can we deduce something deep about how the brain processes language by this tendency toward complexity?  Possibly useful for programming language design.

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