New Abbreviations

How to Document The New Abbreviations

4 thoughts
last posted May 31, 2013, 3:38 p.m.
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I had the somewhat obvious idea yesterday of actually just writing out the entire primer to the Abbreviations by hand, and scanning them into a PDF or what have you. The disadvantages are obvious—semantic opacity, non-interactivity, file size—though it might be the most effective way to visual convey what the thing is all about.

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You could even iterate the complexity of the script used to write it in order to match the information that's been conveyed thus far. So for instance, you start by writing an introduction without any special glyphs at all. Then you introduce a couple simple word signs—"and", "is", for instance—and as they are introduced you start using them in the text. Could be fun.

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What makes this approach compositionally interesting is that the text will have to be tailored to follow the signs that are introduced. For instance, if you introduce the ch glyph, then the next sentence should have one if not two chs in it. Otherwise what's the point?

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And the progressive complexity of the orthography suggests a progressive shift in literary style as well; from the simple and instructional to the more gnomic, abstruse, poetic. This would accompany the orthography but also simply fulfill the necessity of example text after there's little to explain beyond the symbols themselves.