« bush administration on science |
Main Page
| no such thing as global warming? »
Comments:
symbol project
Posted by dav at 2004 February 19 05:48 PM
File under: Geek
File under: Geek
Here's a cool project I stumbled across today: symbolproject.org.
Symbolproject.org is a multilingual wiki project for collaboratively designing ideographic glyphs, working from our own list of core universalist concepts. The idea, in a nutshell it to borrow heavily from Han Chinese characters, using what is usable, and continually polished each design over time.
If I'm understanding correctly, it's rather like an esperanto-like effort for written script.
Here's some more info from the page where I first found a reference to this:
I thought of this idea while studying Chinese characters -- many are easy to understand like person人, female 女, moon 月, middle 中, sun 日, etc. Simple symbols represent concepts and in combination (like sun+moon 明="brilliant") represent more detailed ideas. In Chinese there arise various distortions, due largely to phonetic uses for characters, like the female+horse 媽="mother" because of the "ma1" (mother) sound of ma3 (horse). There are various other reasons fow why Chinese (as it is) is unsuitable for a universal pictographic language.
Neat!
There's some good comments and criticism of the project here.
Post a new comment:
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
Hi, thank you for the mention, and the link to the c2.com page, which I hadnt seen. I spent some time today dealing with the critics, which is healthy. ;)
~~~
Posted by: KuniShiro on February 27, 2004 03:59 PMKeep the (^),
KuniShiro