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Thinking about spelling “cool” with two syllables and walking this one back. Maybe sometimes the uːl sound ɡets articulated as uː.əl but oh well

But like as someone whose continuing interest in Chinese is focused on calligraphy I would definitely be prioritizing writing more than speaking and reading if I were to study again in earnest

Also if people are saying to delay writing now that’s probably related to a general technological shift away from penmanship more than neutral pedagogy? Writing well by hand in any language is very difficult, and with keyboards available for most purposes it’s less important to focus on it

Idk it also sounds like when self studying it’s more important to take the best approach to learn quickly, whereas in a classroom it’s seen as more okay to take a traditional approach even if it takes longer

But it does take a while to actually get through all the foundations like consonants and vowels, tones, stroke order, basic radicals, etc, and it sounds like you know all that

It was about 10 years ago and my memories are not super precise. But I don’t mean we did things entirely in sequence—every day we did some of both speaking and writing, and we would practice stuff we didn’t fully understand every aspect of

About half the class was kids with Taiwanese parents and they were bored out of their minds

Exactly. We spent literal weeks learning enough about stroke order to write “我“. A well run class will have you practicing saying sentences like “我的名字是…” right away but it’s not until like mid semester that they’ve officially taught you enough to write and pronounce it

But I also took some higher level Spanish classes that were like college lit classes but everyone was speaking Spanish

I think it depends on the level. I took one mandarin class that felt like it could have been high school, and it was very basic with as much tones and pinyin and stroke order as actual vocabulary and sentences

Basically I think jewel rhymes with tool and I’m removing the “-uul” rhyme. It’s always “-uu.əl” now

Flow in the ASCII circuitry
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“Gyricon” #222

I’m starting a new explainer thread for my whole deal because the old one is long and filled with unnecessary details and I want people to try it out

And some goals:
1. Alternate styles: I plan to develop a brush style inspired by regular script Han characters
2. Computer encoding: I plan to draw vector glyphs for letters and syllables that can be composed by keyboard
3. More complete and stable spellings of English words

Finally, some caveats:
1. This is a work in progress, all aspects are subject to change
2. I want you to join in! Learn the script and write in it if it sounds fun!
3. It’s phonetic for my way of speaking—spell things in a way that makes sense to you. Maybe that means using more letters, who knows?

dictionary.xlsx

And here’s a dictionary with current official spellings of several common words, including some grammatical suffixes (in Latin letters)

Rook script pangram. In English, the sentence is “The royal youth are measuring out vibes to exchange one more homebound sheep for a good sieve.” Unfortunately, I misspelled the word “exchange” and used a “p” in place of what should be a “k”

And here’s a pangram to show what sentences and paragraphs can look like

The word strengths in English The word “strengths” in Latin letter rook script. The vowel here is written with an a rather than an e The word “strengths” written linearly using rook script letters

The structure of a syllable, with overall stroke order tracing a Z shape

On the left, the word “strengths” written using Latin letter equivalents, with the letters/digraphs placed in the position of a rook script syllable block. On the right, the rook script word “strengths”

Here’s the structure of a syllable with the example word “strengths.” From top to bottom, we have onset (consonants), vowel, and coda (consonants). Consonants are written left to right and vowels right to left, in a big Z

Rook script consonants

Latin letter equivalent consonants

Rook script vowels

Latin letter equivalent vowels

But the rook alphabet is recommended! Here’s the rook and Latin alphabet tables side by side

Table of consonants

Table of vowels

Table of vowel examples, for use in stressed syllables. - The left column contains the rook script Latin letter - The second column contains the IPA pronunciation of that latter - The remaining columns contain examples of words that would be spelled using this letter Note that a vowel’s pronunciation may change depending on the consonant following it

Table of examples of the 3 vowels that may appear in fully unstressed syllables. My dialect does not distinguish between weak vowels in most cases, but there are enough other cases that a couple of spelling rules are necessary. - In the table, each row corresponds to a use case for a letter - The left column is the letter (the Latin letter) - The second column lists example words containing the letter in the given use case - The third column is the IPA pronunciation of the letter in this use case - The last column defines the use case

Each letter has a Latin letter equivalent. Here’s a table of all the Latin letters, with examples to clarify what sounds each vowels makes. You can write rook script entirely using Latin letters, using periods as syllable delimiters

I made a new writing system for English! It’s called rook script and it’s a phonetic syllabic alphabet. There are 37 letters that clump together to form syllable blocks (kind of like Hangul)

I’m starting a new explainer thread for my whole deal because the old one is long and filled with unnecessary details and I want people to try it out

Mitosis

Scrolling through ink flower’s work and I’m humbled… this has no poetry at all it’s just a bird that’s important to me

秃鼻乌鸦 (bald nosed crow) in seal script

That is next level! Something I’ve wanted to see as a seal is 秃鼻乌鸦 but I only have this low res machine generated image

When will we ever learn

When I see italicized serif text I find myself looking for the o. There it is! Thank you Carol Twombly

Now that I know this was design choice was made hundreds of years ago by one guy and is now seen mainly in only one font family from 1990 I think it’s quite pretty. Fucked up how that works