Applied Anarchy Part III: The Design Phase

[Six-month update. The project is alive. To see what it looks like now, scroll down.]

[Update: There is now a reasonable bitmap font that hints of brush calligraphy; the chart and the sample below have been updated. The sample now shows stressed vowels as elongated.]

[Update: By popular demand, I included a little poem at the end, so that it's clear what text looks like, and for your deciphering pleasure. Please note that font design is yet to be done.]

If you have been following along for the last two weeks, you probably have some idea of what happens next; if not, you will need to catch up: here is a description of why English spelling a problem, and here is an explanation of what can be done about it. In short, English has the world's worst orthographic system that happens to be in common use, and it causes a great deal of damage. Just the cost of the several extra years of schooling needed to learn English spelling (much of it to no avail), together with the opportunity cost of not learning something more useful, runs into many billions of dollars a year. The economic damage caused by widespread functional illiteracy is harder to quantify.

There has been a lot of discussion since I published these two posts, along with numerous expressions of support. Several software developers who are also linguists stepped forward with offers of help. Given this level of interest, I intend to push forward with this project.

The task at hand is to create a new, better way of writing and reading English (of the General American variety)—one that is entirely regular and represents each psychologically real speech sound (phoneme) with exactly one symbol (glyph) and, unlike the current system, takes a minimal amount of time to learn for either a native speaker or a student of English. The goal is to design and write software that will provide an alternative way of rendering English text and to make it available for web sites, electronic books and electronic documents of all kinds.

The task at hand is not to reform English spelling. Nor is it to indulge people who want to waste time discussing such futile endeavors. It is to create an alternative, not a replacement.

The task at hand is not to create a new way of writing English using the Latin alphabet, since that's already been done, in spots and in stripes. It's called Lolcat. If that is of interest to you, o hai, blessinz of teh Ceiling Cat be apwn yu, srsly. nuf sed. Kthbye!

The task at hand is not to scare up the requisite number of random squiggles and doodles, either from foreign alphabets, or from previous failed experiments at phoneticizing English, such as Shavian. This has to be an original design.

* * *

The process of coming up with something out of nothing is always a mystery. Be that as it may, what appears to work best is a process that starts with setting forth a set of requirements, followed by a very strange period of time during which nothing productive seems to be happening. This can take a long time, and if there happen to be project managers wandering about asking futile questions like “How long do you think it will take?” or “When do you think it will be done?” then it can take forever, because that is how long it can take to calculate what is incalculable. This period of time ends either with a design that fulfills the requirements, or with failure. In the worst case scenario, the design is done by a committee, it is agreed that failure is not an option and that furthermore we are out of time, and next thing you know there is an unspeakable horror of a design scampering about demanding to know why mommy doesn't love it. Given how many such horrors have come to inhabit our world, I have come to view design failure as just a special kind of success.

The Requirements

1. A set of unique symbols for each of 35 generalized phonemes of General American English.

2. Must not have interference effects with Latin or produce unwanted associations with English spelling.

3. Must not resemble the writing of any known foreign or artificial language, dead or alive, any existing decorative style, motif or esthetic, and must be as free of pre-existing associations as possible.

4. Must be easy to read and to write. Must not pose a problem for dyslexics, people with limited manual dexterity or people who have learning disabilities. Must not require superior penmanship to produce perfectly legible, professional-looking results by hand.

5. Must be easy to learn: Related sounds must be represented by related shapes and make use of Latin cognates when possible.

6. Must be optimized for mobile devices. Must allow easy text entry using numerical keypads, touch pads and multitouch screens. Must not require a keyboard layout. Must not degrade visually when rendered using a minimum number of pixels.

7. Must work well for multiple applications such as carving in wood or stone, rendering on paper using calligraphy brushes and pens and on walls using spray paint. Must not require breaking up symbols into sections when making stencils, which, by the way, are becoming an increasingly important form of public art.

Kill the state within yourself

8. Must be able to represent stress (since English has lexical stress) and intonation (since English has fixed word order and uses tone for topicalization) without requiring additional symbols such as accents or other diacritics.

9. The design must be sufficiently general, and at the same time sufficiently highly constrained, to allow for a wide variety of artistic renderings without causing ambiguity or loss of legibility.

10. Must employ a minimum number of distinguishing features in specific configurations, to allow it to be directly mapped to fingertip-readable Braille-like patterns, Morse code-like sequences, bugle calls, drum beats, semaphore signals, dance steps (with or without pompoms) and so on without requiring one to memorize a separate code table in each case. A business card-sized laminated card of easy-to-follow instructions should be all that is necessary in each case.

The Design Process

The process of coming up with something new is, by definition, ill-defined; if you know what it is you are looking for, then it is, by definition, not new. All of the most important human activities, such as coming up with scientific discoveries, mathematical proofs, artistic breakthroughs and the like fall into this category. There are just two broad, sweeping generalizations that apply to them. One is that broad, sweeping generalizations do not apply to them.

The other broad, sweeping generalization (that doesn't apply to them either) is that people like to have an explanation for how something came about, and find it deeply unsatisfying to think that all the great new things are, in fact, accidents. This usually makes it necessary to retrofit an explanation for how something new came about before people will leave you alone about it.

And so, to indulge this very general penchant for wanting to know the details of something about which no detailed information exists, here, for your enjoyment, is a story of how I came up with this particular set of symbols (glyphs) to represent the sound system of English.

* * *

Some things are immediately obvious just by looking at the requirements. For example, the need to be able to make stencils without breaking up the shapes means that there can be no closed geometries such as circles. The need to be able to easily and accurately render the symbols using pens, brushes and chisels, together with the need to limit the number of distinguishing features, indicates the use of strokes within a largely rectilinear pattern. The need for easy numerical keypad and touchpad entry limits the number of basic elements to what fits on a numerical keypad. But how to put it all together?

Aboard the No. 49 bus

In search of inspiration, I took the No. 49 bus to the Russian Museum. It has a huge art collection spanning many centuries. The older works are mainly portraits of dead Russian aristocrats. Many of them look like somebody took a toilet plunger to their faces, and I find that amusing but not inspiring.

The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

There are also large collections of works by some of my favorite painters, including Repin, Levitan and Aivazovsky. But it is the modern art exhibited in the Benois Wing that is capable of inspiring an abstract design of the sort needed. Of that, the Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich turned out to provide just the right foundation for this project.

Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square

Malevich came from humble beginnings (his father, a Polish immigrant, worked at a provincial sugar factory). He was largely self-taught, and rose to international prominence during the heady period around the Russian revolution during which Russian avant-garde art took the world by storm. He was the founder of the Suprematist movement, which sought to succeed the Constructivist movement by liberating art from any physical or social constraints.

Kazimir Malevich, Self-Portrait

Malevich contended that true art existed in the realm of pure feeling, of form and color unrelated to physical objects and freed from utilitarian demands. His Suprematist works were wildly successful. Writing in 1915, the establishment art critic Alexandre Benois, brother of the one who architected the Benois Wing, had this to say about his masterpiece The Black Square:

This is not a simple joke, not a simple challenge, not an accident or a small, insignificant episode... this is one of the acts of self-assertion of a new direction, which leads to filth and squalor, and which boasts that, through pride, through arrogance, through trampling all that is lovely and tender, it will lead us all to perdition.”

I believe Malevich's work stood on its own merits, but such lavish praise certainly couldn't have hurt. If your art opening serves up perdition, you can safely skimp on the wine and the cheese and crackers. Needless to say, his art languished during Stalin's reign, when the artistic dictate from the very top was to adhere to Socialist Realism—art in the service of the people—which is just the sort of utilitarianism and attachment to social convention and physical form that Malevich despised. In later years his masterpieces were again exhibited, although rumor has it that The Black Square, in an affront to all that is good and decent in this world, was for a time exhibited upside-down.

There is much to say about The Black Square that I hardly know where to begin. I suppose it may be hard to tell what it is you are looking at from an image on a web page, but when viewing it directly the normal reaction is along the lines of “Oh my God, there it is, that's the one!”—for you have now seen it. Note the definite article “the”—it is there for a reason. What painter would ever paint another black square? (An ironic one, I suppose, and call it “Yet Another Black Square”—but that would be so derivative.) In an infinite universe of black squares, Malevich has achieved what amounts to a singularity. Look at it another way: note that The Black Square signifies itself and only itself. Is it not the textbook definition of a black square? And is it not also a painting of one? It is denotation and connotation rolled into one. It does not exist in contrast or in opposition to anything else. Its only relationship is to you, the person standing in front of it at the Russian Museum, thinking “Oh my God, there it is!” and in this sense it is not the black square at all; it is your experience of it. Or, rather, your lack thereof, because, after all, what is there to experience? After all, it's just a bloody black square, isn't it? And so maybe you are not experiencing it; maybe it is experiencing you. To paraphrase Nietzche, “If you gaze long at the black square, the black square also gazes at you.” Magic, isn't it?

The set of symbols I tasked myself with creating is quintessentially Suprematist. They are severed from all social convention or pre-existing esthetic. They are intended to trigger a direct, unmediated response in you, their viewer, and that response is to want to utter phonemes—objects with no physical reality that only exist within your mind. Their function is to create an experience: the experience of visualizing a speech sound as an abstraction. It is the experience of standing before an abstract shape and feeling the /æ/ (as in "cat") or the /ɚ/ (as in "squirrel") rise up inside you—in spite of there being no cats or squirrels or any other objects or words present, depicted, or alluded to. They seek to wire your visual cortex directly to your speech center, bypassing all that could possibly stand between you and the language that resides in your head. The only conventions by which they are constrained are the conventions of the symbols' own geometric shapes. Aside from the need to learn which symbol represents which speech sound, the meaning of each symbol is defined not by anyone else but by your own subjective experience of it—the experience of recognition of something that is already within you: “Oh my God, there it is!”

* * *

But the work I found most germane to the task at hand was not The Black Square but another masterpiece by Malevich, displayed alongside it: The Black Cross. It also is earth-shatteringly, breathtakingly, eye-wateringly obvious, but it gave me so much more to work with. Rather than just one square, it has nine: five black ones, four white ones. Viewed on another level, the image consists of two intersecting strokes: one horizontal, one vertical. And so here is our first symbol:

Kazimir Malevich, The Black Cross

My next steps were obvious as well: fill each of the remaining eight squares with a distinctive pattern of strokes, as few strokes as possible, using the black cross, in the central position, as the seed. Make the strokes flow top to bottom and left to right with a minimum of discontinuity or backtracking. Make the set of symbols look coherent by making sure that they all have an element in common. I chose it to be the lower part of the cross, giving each symbol a convenient mounting point. I also chose the horizontal line of the cross as the baseline that runs through all the symbols, so that all the symbols hang from that line, making them easier to align visually while writing and to scan through quickly while reading. Here are snapshots of my creative process:

These symbols fulfill all of the requirements except one: there aren't enough of them. We need exactly three times as many symbols as this.

* * *

I wandered the exhibition halls in search of an idea that might help me break out of this impasse, and eventually found myself in the museum gift shop. And there I found it!

Troika bearing Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden

It is holiday season, and there were holiday greeting cards on sale. The biggest holiday in Russia is the New Year, and New Year's greeting cards often depict two stock figures of Russian folklore: Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) and Snegurochka (the Snow Maiden), his sexy female side-kick, putatively his granddaughter but let's not pry. Greeting cards often depict this duo riding a sleigh laden with gifts pulled by a troika of horses. Unlike a mythical character like Santa Claus, children have no trouble believing in these two because they do in fact exist: on New Years Eve many thousands of instances of them are spawned and fan out across the landscape, ringing doorbells and distributing presents. The Snow Maiden is particularly popular with the children.

Typical specimens

And then it hit me: hitch each of the nine symbols up to a troika! Nine symbols times three horses gives us 27, and with 8 additional variants that will be created by adding a voicing mark we will reach 35—the exact number we are looking for! Note that all of the nine symbols have a constant element: the foot. This foot can now be made to have three variants: short, medium (with a curve, to symbolize the shaft bow that is part of the harness of the central horse in a troika) and a long one.

With the addition of the troika our set of symbols expands to 27, and my work is almost done:

But how do we distinguish the 8 voiced consonants from their unvoiced counterparts? What will the voicing mark look like? Malevich to the rescue again. Here, we make use of his third masterpiece of the series, which is sometimes called his Triptych: The Black Circle.

Kazimir Malevich, The Black Circle

And here are the eight voiced variants, with the voicing mark inspired, once again, by the great Malevich:

* * *

My last task was to match our new symbols to the 35 phonemes. This I did with the help of a phonemic frequency table, making sure that the most frequent phonemes require the fewest, shortest strokes with the least amount of backtracking. I arranged it so that, when writing, a third of the symbols is rendered using a single unbroken line in a single flowing movement. In addition, I visually distinguished the vowels by mapping all of them to symbols with the short foot, and matched up the five symbols that have obvious Latin cognates (I, F, T, S, J) with their corresponding phonemes. I also made sure that related phonemes (in terms of shared phonological features) mapped to related symbols (in terms of graphical elements); thus, /æ/ is a variant of /a/ and so on.

Stress will be represented by horizontally elongating the vowels, while tone will be shown by shifting the baseline—the horizontal line that runs through most of the symbols—up and down slightly. I believe that this set of symbols (glyphs) fulfills all of the requirements I set out, but please do check for yourself and let me know if you discover anything that is problematic.

And here, for your deciphering pleasure, is a fragment from a poem by Lewis Carroll:

Six-Month Update

After a year of steady refinement, here's what Unspell looks like now

And here are your ABCs unspelled. Sing along! (The ones at the bottom represent English sounds that are missing in Latin1.)