Pamrelfya a'Eoio

[Prrton]

Well, have you tried 'Eoio at 10 points on Windows XP? The font hints are not very good, so XP's hinting makes some of the lines disproportionately big and the others disappear.

Certainly I've seen screenshots from others and even English looks atrocious to me on Windows XP. I readily admit that I'm spoiled by the text handling in OS X on the Mac. I simply wanted to point out that as a blanket statement "'Eoio takes up a lot of space and is hard to read at small sizes."; I don't agree. That is not MY experience using the font. I imagine (I've never asked him specifically) that Kemaweyan auto-hinted Eoio. There must be some hinting in place, because Safari does a fine job with it at very small sizes. I have no idea how .TTF and .OTF fonts must be custom-hinted to work in an optimal fashion on XP, but I do know that a different typographer hinted Georgia than the glyph artist.

I'm not trying to bash 'Eoio here, sorry if I was misunderstood. As for whether Famrel/FamrelaWin is a reverse abugida, I suggest you look at Tibetan script. The vowels in the abugida are always put above and below the consonant as big diacritics like Famrel.

I'm quite familiar with how Tibetan works (thought the actual archaic spelling conventions baffle me even more than Irish Gaelic). The vowels do come only above and below the consonants, but in lo (technically blo), for example,

   

the o precedes the bl in the logic of the way the sounds of Famrel flow. This is common in all the abugidas that I am familiar with. The brain processes the mapping of the vowels to their relationship to the consonants "out of order" in a way that is counterintuitive to a strictly linear flow of speech. I agree wholeheartedly that Famrel is much more abugida-like than the Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek alphabets, and that 'Eoio is more similar to those than it is to a generic abugida, but it also has parallels to Korean—which while an alphabet—is quite different than Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek.

And for Chinese cursive script, the most cursive forms are for calligraphy, not reading. Nobody is supposed to be able to read them at any appreciable speed, and writing them in fact requires lots of training and is not fast at all:

I am born in China and I read and write Chinese characters all day but I still wouldn't imagine that those two messes are "草书"!

I am certainly not Chinese. But I have studied your language and easily recognize the differences between the traditional forms and the ones that you likely use every day. (In saying "likely" I'm basing my impression largely off of your having given the example of 草书 over 草書.) I can actually read the 2nd character above very easily because I might write it that way myself in Japanese. The simplification example of 草 that you provide above is quite alien to me in that form. In Japanese it goes easily to:



though the untrained eye cannot read the second readily. It's overly simplified for a non-literary context.

书 is simply a highly heuristic from of 書 reinterpreted and recontextualized (via cursive (simplified) handwriting standards that are still very common in Taiwan and Hong Kong) as the new standard form mandated by Beijing known as "Simplified" in English. I can think of no better example of how dramatic this difference can be than in 個 vs. 个. There is very little need/reason to even consider simplifying 个 any further—though as written by hand below, it only requires one lifting of the writing implement:

     

That's a very natural efficiency from 3 strokes to just 2 (pragmatically speaking).

I think that a cursive form that uses simplified forms (like the Cyrillic cursive) clearly written would be better than trying to capture all the details of the glyphs in fast-moving brush strokes.

I don't disagree with this approach at all, but we'd need to exchange examples of what the results of that simplification process would be and there would need to be some agreement. One particular area that comes to mind regarding the potential for dangerous ambiguity is 'Eoio's use of more-or-less triangular forms in:

   r l rr ll

This could easily be confused in a non-standardized handwriting context with something involving the vowel

   a

when its shoulders are not overtly extend the way they are in this stand-alone form, which is very intentionally a different glyph than the a of

   fwa

I would LOVE to see your suggestion for how you would transform lu, for example, above into handwriting. I'd love to see the entire sentence in your interpretation or interpretations.

The more this is a collaborative process, the more valuable it is to me personally.

BTW, your English is stunningly good. I am envious of your mastery (especially in the face of my Mandarin, which is the most scrawny pile of bare bones imaginable these days). How did/do you tame English so perfectly? /offtopic

[Prrton]

Can anyone read this without an explanation?

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

@NextToLastPostByPrrton

XP doesn't obey hints for .OTF files. Change it to .TTF and it looks very readable, but it excessively hints and makes the characters' edges squarey at small sizes.

In actuality I work most with Ubuntu. Ubuntu's FreeType library actually renders better than Safari does  kind of like Mac-style hinting with Windows-style ClearType.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

By the way, I'm going to write some cursive 'Eoio, Famrel, and FamrelaWin and scan it and post it here.

Regarding my "good" English, well from ages 2.5 to 8 I was in Canada and I'm a Canadian citizen, so I used to mostly speak English for quite some time. Now I rarely *speak* English, but the vaaaast majority of things I write are in English - English writing assignments, English e-mails, and of course English LN posts.

[Prrton]

By the way, I'm going to write some cursive 'Eoio, Famrel, and FamrelaWin and scan it and post it here.

I'm very much looking forward to it.

Regarding my "good" English, well from ages 2.5 to 8 I was in Canada and I'm a Canadian citizen, so I used to mostly speak English for quite some time. Now I rarely *speak* English, but the vaaaast majority of things I write are in English - English writing assignments, English e-mails, and of course English LN posts.

I suspected that you might have lived abroad or that one or both of your parents might be native speakers of English. 你写英文写的完美。

I'm including this image below to point out that anything that ends up being a new style that is focused on handwriting is likely to require some kind of education, at least for most people. Around the world there are different standards and conventions for modifying the printed word into handwriting. I find this sample particularly attractive, visually. But it is also a bit of a challenge for me to read it. The t is particularly odd to me, though not unattractive. It very well may be easier for a Northern European to read it than for a North American. I don't know. But I do know that anything like this is on a perceptual continuum and very few will be able to intuit all of the features of a new system without at least some explicit guidance.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

你写英文写的得完美。

[Prrton]

你写英文写的得完美。

得 ‹‹‹ Yes. Of course! 

你的英文比我的中文非常好。谢谢。

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

你写英文写的得完美。

得 ‹‹‹ Yes. Of course! 
你的英文比我的中文非常好得很。谢谢。

Anyway, here are the scanned copies of the handwritten cursive Na'vi:

'Eoio:


Famrel aKì'ong:


Famrel aWin:


They are all of my name. I discover that Famrel aKì'ong is the best for cursive and Famrel aWin is the worst - straight lines do not convert to cursive easily. As for 'Eoio, cursive looks great but could be hard to read.

[Prrton]

你的英文比我的中文非常好得很。谢谢。

Clearly I need a refresher in Mandarin. Irayo nìmun.

Anyway, here are the scanned copies of the handwritten cursive Na'vi:

Spoiler: Pxerel letsim

'Eoio:


Famrel aKì'ong:


Famrel aWin:

They are all of my name. I discover that Famrel aKì'ong is the best for cursive and Famrel aWin is the worst - straight lines do not convert to cursive easily. As for 'Eoio, cursive looks great but could be hard to read.

These are all fascinating. I can of course read the 'Eoio much more easily than the Famrel. This is due to familiarity, and nothing more, in my opinion. I see where you've made stroke order decisions regarding your writing 'Eoio by hand and that's very interesting to me. That is precisely the kind of decision making that will need to happen to formalize a handwriting convention. I feel strongly that like for this example from Cyrillic, some of those end up seeming quite arbitrary in the end (especially to the under-educated (like me in the case of Cyrillic)):



I would very much like to see you write out a much longer sample in both 'Eoio and Famrel—something that is a pangram, but even longer so that there is more contact between letter pairs. I would then like to duplicate that in the way I would write it and explore a synthesis (actually separate syntheses—one for one and one for the other) via a formal artwork process to see what glyphs and glyph variations might emerge. Unfortunately, I cannot commit to any specific timing on my side because as of today I'm quite busy with work through Monday evening and then I'm traveling for family matters and again for work soon after that through early April.

Your FamrelaKì'ong example is particularly interesting and I feel is deserving of further exploration. I do wonder how important the Tibetan tseg-inspried element is to you though. As a simple dot in the handwriting, it seems it would have a tendency to get confused with other dots that distinguish meaning. The tseg in u-mé Tibetan script is intentionally elongated into a full stroke and it defines discrete syllables as opposed to words. Is there a reason over "exoticism" that you prefer it over a simple blank space?

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

Yeah. Perhaps I could change the tseg in Famrel to something like a little circle. This way it would be unique.

The reason why I used a dot instead of just a space is because I need to have something to separate the words (Na'vi with no word separators is very unreadable) and I do not need to separate the syllables because it is one glyph+diacritics = one syllable. Using a dot IMO is also a way to save space because a dot takes much less space than a character-width space, and spaces need to be big in order to be obvious.

[Prrton]

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

By the way, I cannot but notice how uniform your cursive glyphs look (same letters same shape). Did you make a cursive 'Eoio font? Or did you draw everything in Illustrator? I can't imagine actually writing cursive script Bezier curves with a mouse...

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

Could you please give me an example of a short pangram? I tried at first to write a whole lot of stuff, but I haven't memorized 'Eoio yet so I need to copy slowly from screen and make tons of mistakes. So here is just the short sentence Faylì'u lu mì pxefamrelfya: 'Eoio, Famrel aKì'ong, sì Famrel aWin.

[Prrton]

By the way, I cannot but notice how uniform your cursive glyphs look (same letters same shape). Did you make a cursive 'Eoio font? Or did you draw everything in Illustrator? I can't imagine actually writing cursive script Bezier curves with a mouse...

I am guilty of using Illustrator. I have a Wacom Bamboo tablet as well.

I also CAN create things directly with a mouse or track-pad, but it's much easier to work with letterforms that emulate handwriting with the tablet. I have been using the bézier (pen) tool in Illustrator for much more time than you have been alive (according to your age in your profile).  That's part of why I can do that.

[Prrton]

Spoiler: pxerel letsim

Could you please give me an example of a short pangram? I tried at first to write a whole lot of stuff, but I haven't memorized 'Eoio yet so I need to copy slowly from screen and make tons of mistakes. So here is just the short sentence Faylì'u lu mì pxefamrelfya: 'Eoio, Famrel aKì'ong, sì Famrel aWin.

I will find or write a pangram for this purpose, but unfortunately not in the next couple of day. I'm just too busy with other things.

Thank you in advance for your patience.

['Oma Tirea]

More proof that, because Famrel is a (reverse) abugida, it takes up less space than 'Eoio, even when handwritten.

On the other hand, Famrel does lack some natural quirks to it...

Quite the discussion.  Also, about the "marketing" thing, I'm pretty sure UTS didn't mean it that way (kefyak?), ha mawey livu.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

Well, that depends on the phrase. Try writing "'Eoioa meoauniaeaeo oe 'ieia" (credits to you of course) in Famrel vs 'Eoio...

[eejmensenikbenhet]

Googleing for something entirely different, I found this: http://skyknowledge.com/nav.htm
Someone created a round and a Roman-inspired font to write Na'vi, might be interesting to look at?

[Plumps]

Googleing for something entirely different, I found this: http://skyknowledge.com/nav.htm
Someone created a round and a Roman-inspired font to write Na'vi, might be interesting to look at?

Great find.
It is indeed! I find that script very beautiful, kind of flowing... At first glance it has a Thai feel, if I'm not mistaken. Wonder if there's a font for that

[Prrton]

Googleing for something entirely different, I found this: http://skyknowledge.com/nav.htm
Someone created a round and a Roman-inspired font to write Na'vi, might be interesting to look at?

Great find.
It is indeed! I find that script very beautiful, kind of flowing... At first glance it has a Thai feel, if I'm not mistaken. Wonder if there's a font for that

I don't think Ian ever completed his system. It doesn't account for diphthongs, etc.

He's told me he's not interested in the language, per se.