
A phonetic writing system based on cellular automata (2011) - breck
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2011/06/phonetic-writing-system-based-on.html
======
XaspR8d
Initial concerns:

\- Is it guaranteed that the ruleset can produce any sequence of collisions?

\- Seems like the vast majority of possible states would represent words with
concurrent phonemes, which is pretty much undefined behavior for the human
mouth. I guess you don't want the ideograms to be _too_ informationally-dense,
but that's a pretty sparse encoding.

\- Example table only does CV syllables and it's not immediately obvious to me
how to extend it to more syllable types. (especially crazy consonant-dense
clusters like "twelfths") You could have ∅ entries in each vector, but then
you start to lose some of the natural "timing" analogy if some collisions
don't represent syllables.

\- Not a lot of visual distinction between different words (e.g. "like" and
"site" are just 1 step vertically transposed from each other).

\- Each word has many many possible ideograms, not just because each collision
can be generated multiple ways, but also since you can create non-colliding
"noise" cells in unused areas.

I guess you could leverage the expressiveness somehow, like tending to use
certain collision types or cell states implies something about the context /
pragmatics.

I do really like the out-of-the-box thinking that inspired this, but I also
like seeing it taken to the rational extreme. How can you get the dynamic
nature of the cellular automata shine in your system? What distinguishes it
from using the same table, but just putting numbers in the cells for when each
combination occurs?

~~~
WorldMaker
Good list of concerns. I'd also add that the slower pace of writing system
changes versus direct phonetics is more often a feature rather than a bug. For
instance, despite some rather huge shifts in phonetics over centuries and
distributed across a large variety of accents, written English is relatively
stable, allowing people to read Middle English and sometimes even Old English
documents with relatively more ease than had they followed more strictly
phonetic renderings.

------
LyndsySimon
I’m trying hard to understand this, but am having trouble.

If someone wouldn’t mind drawing an example of this freehand, with a two-
syllable English word, I’d appreciate it.

------
taberiand
Maybe I'm missing some insight here, but this doesn't look useful at all.

It seems to just overcomplicate things.

