Loroi writing

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bunnyboy
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Loroi writing

Post by bunnyboy »

Those letters look quite complex for their purposes as they need to have only 16 shapes.
As usually the speed of writing is evolving the writing into simplified letters.
So, here couple of theories:

1. It waste of education to teach 30 000 plus more pictograms for soldier.
A. Loroi changed only recently from pictogram per concept to letter per sound.
B. There is more advanced systems for learned castes.

2. The letters use loroi version of "fraktur" font as their "art noveau" design.
A. The "brute" and functional design needed of war makes loroi use decoration where it wont use extra resources.
B. New loroi ships and uniforms aren't as decorated and stylished as old ones due prolonged war.

3. The loroi letters are evolved from hand gestures.
A. They prefer gestures to speech when communicating with sanzai-mute members.
B. They already had gesture sensing machines when they started developing their own written language.

4. Loroi wont use pens and pencils.
A. Brushes are still used for calligraphy, but loroi prefer shortening of their messages and poets, like LOL, ETC.
B. Duh. Loroi won't write at all. They got keyboards. The letters can look anything they want.
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icekatze
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Re: Loroi writing

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

From the insider:
The Trade Language is the interstellar language of communication between the various races of the Outsider galaxy. It has been the formal language of trade and diplomacy among the spacefaring races for thousands of years in the current era, but it is much older even than this. It is a leftover from an ancient era preceding the current one, when the last great empire (the Soia) was in control of the local region.

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Re: Loroi writing

Post by CF2 »

The unifying nature of a modern society prevents the evolution of written characters, and the need to maintain clear communication between varied civilizations, together have cemented the written characters into their current form. Barring the rise of a new galactic empire, none of the existing entities have the control or influence needed to install a new written language throughout the region.
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Absalom
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Re: Loroi writing

Post by Absalom »

Some of the characters are a bit "verbose", but it doesn't look too bad. Every character looks like it can't be easily confused with the others, which is presumably intentional. Compare with not only 'b' and 'd', but also "I" and "l", which in some styles are indistinguishable, or 'Z' and 'N' which can only be distinguished if you already know which way "up" is.

Edited in:
CF2 wrote:The unifying nature of a modern society prevents the evolution of written characters, and the need to maintain clear communication between varied civilizations, together have cemented the written characters into their current form.
Technically, I disagree. Characters usually change slowly instead of quickly, since quick change mostly indicates that something doesn't work well, resulting in fixes being experimented with. More important in the Trade case is the existence of relics with the same script, thereby establishing a baseline standard that in the case of Earth languages just doesn't exist. Even then, the Loroi characters probably don't quite look like those: more likely what we've been seeing is a modern font commissioned for and standardized within the Loroi military. The other races (and civilians, and during peace time even the military in informal situations) likely have their own versions.
CF2 wrote:Barring the rise of a new galactic empire, none of the existing entities have the control or influence needed to install a new written language throughout the region.
As European history shows, you don't really need an empire, just a need and sufficient interchange to support it. Multiple scripts were used in the middle ages for specialized fields, and several idioms and modern writing quirks apparently arose originally in them before passing over to the writing system we're familiar with today. Additionally, the integral sign and German's 'ß' (oversimplification) are both versions of 's', with the solidification of the "normal" form in English only really starting in the 1790s. The form of cursive script (where still taught at all) varies over time too, with decrees by actual standardization groups. As long as the resulting form isn't too much of a departure from the old, it's fairly simple; it's just that there usually isn't enough reason to bother.

Also, it likely wouldn't be a new language by any reasonable standard, just a new "font".

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Re: Loroi writing

Post by CF2 »

Absalom wrote:As European history shows, you don't really need an empire, just a need and sufficient interchange to support it. Multiple scripts were used in the middle ages for specialized fields, and several idioms and modern writing quirks apparently arose originally in them before passing over to the writing system we're familiar with today. Additionally, the integral sign and German's 'ß' (oversimplification) are both versions of 's', with the solidification of the "normal" form in English only really starting in the 1790s. The form of cursive script (where still taught at all) varies over time too, with decrees by actual standardization groups.
I think the key here is the fact that these varied scripts and linguistic changes happened prior to industrialization and any semblance of a modern interconnected world. As soon as you enter into a society that has some standardized education, or simply live under a government that enforces certain writing standards, then you get formalized writing. It is similar to speciation in evolution; you can find variation in a population that is isolated, but if the isolation ends and the sub-species merges back with the main population then their unique characteristics are blended back into the greater whole.

Barring a dark age for space travel, or the whims of a new empire, there exists no pressure to alter the galactic language that can compete with the enforced standardization as demanded by galactic trade and diplomacy. Regional dialects may arise, but they won't spread beyond their region unless the cause for their variation exists elsewhere.
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Re: Loroi writing

Post by Absalom »

CF2 wrote:I think the key here is the fact that these varied scripts and linguistic changes happened prior to industrialization and any semblance of a modern interconnected world. As soon as you enter into a society that has some standardized education, or simply live under a government that enforces certain writing standards, then you get formalized writing. It is similar to speciation in evolution; you can find variation in a population that is isolated, but if the isolation ends and the sub-species merges back with the main population then their unique characteristics are blended back into the greater whole.

Barring a dark age for space travel, or the whims of a new empire, there exists no pressure to alter the galactic language that can compete with the enforced standardization as demanded by galactic trade and diplomacy. Regional dialects may arise, but they won't spread beyond their region unless the cause for their variation exists elsewhere.
Is that how you explain emoticons? Over the course of 3 decades English has shifted from almost only having letters, to having both letters and pictograms. The majority of them may be up for dispute, but :) , :p , :( , >:( , >:) , and a handful of others are instantly interperable...

...and with no empire or regime to push them into place. They popped up BEFORE Unicode started trying to standardize things like hamburger icons. I expect that in 100 years, several emoticons will probably be used as terminal points along-side periods, exclamation points, and question marks. All without a centralized effort, just due to a meeting of utility, comprehension, and innovation. Enforced standardization, meanwhile, sometimes fails: noone really claims that the usage of English as a 2nd language really quite matches with "correct" English, and supposedly a German standards body (perhaps a dictionary? it's been too long since I ran across that trivia) once tried to come up with a German word for "computer" (some compound word), only for no-one to use it. There's even a new language in Australia called Light Warlpiri, where apparently every speaker is under the age of 35. And all of them are surrounded by people that only speak "pure" languages.


At any point, as far as the scripts go, you missed the point: the scripts in question didn't happen within isolated communities, but instead within distributed groups that were cross-communicating, and thus would actually benefit from a linguistic improvement. For a long period of time there was little innovation within Latin, because even within the Catholic church almost know-one actually knew it. A large number of ancient Bibles are almost completely blank because the only one who would be looking inside was a priest who had both never learned to read Latin, and had further actually memorized what scripture he actually knew. As far as evolution goes: the more the individuals -> the more the mutations -> the more nature tests for advantages -> the more the changes. Changes within isolated populations tend towards pruning instead of simple diversification.


Finally, as I pointed out already, I both disagreed with your point on a technicality, AND expect that any change would be a simple change to the font instead of an actual language change. Consider some of the examples here (particularly zero, and B vs 8): https://www.slant.co/topics/67/~best-programming-fonts

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Re: Loroi writing

Post by CF2 »

Is that how you explain emoticons?
Emoticons are a great example! The rise of emoticon usage I feel follows my point that only a pressure that can overcome enforced standardization can create change, and that because the root cause for the change existed elsewhere it was able to spread. For emoticons, the pressure was a need to more clearly and succinctly communicate body language cues between people who are not face to face. Since this need exists across nations and cultures, emoticon usage has spread. As they are not a regulated part of any language, there are emoticons made from the Latin alphabet and variations in all other major language communities that use the internet. There is some spread of emoticons formed from the characters of different languages, where the speakers of those languages share communities with those who don't -- such is the case with Japanese emoticons and anime/manga communities in the west -- but because of language barriers (and state censorship limiting internet access) there's still a great deal of "speciation" among emoticons.

Enforced standardization can always fail where the pressure to change overcomes it, or the cultural influence of an outside force overrides it. Such is the case, as you pointed out, with many English technology words and terms that have found their way into other languages by virtue of the early dominance of English on the internet, and the rise of many emergent technologies in English speaking nations. However, a change in words and language is different from a change in how characters are written. The shape and appearance of letters or characters is not something that will gradually occur once you have the ultimate standardization tool: the keyboard. Hand written languages may change with time because they are hand written and thus not every letter and character is identical. Yet unless you are using a technology that uses a custom handwriting base, or randomly varies letter/character design as you type, there is a massive standardization with every keystroke.
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Re: Loroi writing

Post by bunnyboy »

Even standards can change. The cursive teached in schools has changed 3 times in my lifetime. The changes were usually for easier and faster to write, but last time it was changed, because some numbers were too similar, which resulted increased number of rejected votes as many numbers in ballot weren't clearly written.
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Re: Loroi writing

Post by Absalom »

CF2 wrote:However, a change in words and language is different from a change in how characters are written. The shape and appearance of letters or characters is not something that will gradually occur once you have the ultimate standardization tool: the keyboard. Hand written languages may change with time because they are hand written and thus not every letter and character is identical. Yet unless you are using a technology that uses a custom handwriting base, or randomly varies letter/character design as you type, there is a massive standardization with every keystroke.
And once again, I point out that I expect that font will be where most change is. Go look at that link I provided, and look at dotted-zero vs slash-zero: those are considered the same character. Compare them with both capital and lower-case 'o'. For that matter, go search for font variations online as if you wanted to download some. Professional web designers today usually use MULTIPLE fonts, with several being intentionally very distinct from each other. This isn't just a serif vs sans-serif issue: it's the form of the serif, the constancy of line thickness, angles and rate of their change, whether individual lines are genuinely one line or instead are multiple parallel lines, ornamentation, and any number of other things. For that matter, Mayan script demonstrates that anything that can be an informative replacement for a particular character is for all practical purposes the same as that character: Mayan once seemed more complicated than it is because some characters can be replaced by similar-shaped characters.

You take even one of these things, have a stylistic fad for a generation or two, and let things settle back to a steady-state again, and you have a minor glyph change. Two or three minor glyph changes, and you wind up with a meaningfully distinct system. Japanese katakana and hiragana characters are mostly derived from the same Kanji characters, but very few could be confused with each other, despite the primary difference being stylistic: katakana tends towards points and straight lines, while hiragana tends towards curves. Loroi 'r' and 'o' would look very similar if a style change was made towards curves, at which point one or the other would likely tilt so that the visual distinction was specifically whether a dot or line was used. 'd' and 's' are simple: 'd' could be simplified by removing the upwards line, and 's' by removing the dot and rays, rendering angle of representation as the informative distinction.

Such changes could be used by different fonts in the Loroi Union simultaneously, and yet still be understood. Afterwards, society could drift towards a specific variation, mostly abandoning the others, and you would then have a "new" letter system, simply by the changing of the fad. Two or three such cycles, and you'd have a new system, even if the letters always 'revolved' around the ones on the artifacts.

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Re: Loroi writing

Post by bunnyboy »

Someone talked about webfonts in another thread and my muse belched this to me.
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Re: Loroi writing

Post by Hālian »

bunnyboy wrote:Someone talked about webfonts in another thread and my muse belched this to me.
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That's really nice! :D I will note, however, that the umiak arrange their letters into blocks, like Hangeul does.
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Re: Loroi writing

Post by Sarlith »

Change is harder than you think. We still use the Latin alphabet even though it is entirely unsuited to our language.

Firstly it is worth defining that proper writing encodes sound...you can write things in languages you cannot understand, by spelling phonetically. Pictograms and ideograms encode ideas...you cannot encode a word in another language this way, though someone using another language can read the symbol in their own without knowing the word in your language. If I write "nova" it encodes sound...if you read those sounds in the Spanish language, you just said "don't/doesn't go".

As for our alphabet. Everyone probably knows that we have superfluous letters (C, Q, X). But it's the holes that interest me more. Rather than add letters to the 26 in use, we use conventions to represent the sounds. Sh, Th, Ch are good examples. It's not Suh-Hoot, it's Shoot. It's not Tuh-Hee, it's The. But even within this convention our language bursts at the seams....we use the same TH combo to represent two sounds, for The and Thick, and then say one is 'hard' and the other 'soft' to make ourselves feel better that they are in fact different sounds but we've run out of letters again.

My favorite one is T, which can also be D, or a sound we do not even seem to acknowledge having, the glottal stop. You use it every time you say Batman. You actually say Ba'man...your tongue never touched the top of your mouth, which is what makes a T sound. There's no Tuh in there when you say it. But it doesn't sound like Baman either. The missing sound is a glottal stop.

Don't even get me started on vowels.

Suffice to say we have PLENTY of reasons to change our very simple alphabet, but we don't. Benjamin Franklin tried and failed (clearly), as did many others. We only just recently got around to this notion of "correct spelling", which would be unnecessary if our letters actually encoded sound the way they're supposed to. The fact is, whatever font you're using, this alphabet we're using is well over 2000 years old, and has been fused in place ever since. It is a derivative of the Phoenician alphabet. They only changed the Phoenician alphabet because it had not already caught on...the newborn Latin alphabet, specifically targeted at people speaking Latin, had no competition for its spread. The Cyrilic alphabet was designed to encode Slavic and was released upon an illiterate people...again, no competition. It mutated early on, but stopped and hardened like concrete.

So I do not expect the script to change, though the conventions within it would gyrate wildly. We cannot even bring ourselves to repurpose the superfluous C as a "Chuh" sound. Relearning all those C words with S or K is just too much work, and even if you changed it in one nation there's no guarantee the rest would adopt it, and across multiple species on multiple worlds? No way. If the empire shattered and contact was lost for thousands of years, maybe. It basically requires you to obliterate its common use first.

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