On Efficiency

Some notes about constructed scripts and goals for them.

Natural writing systems are extremely filtered things, derived over centuries of careful adjustments and developments, tuned to select for what makes the most efficient writing, learning, and reading. My beloved long s (or long ſ, if you will) effectively disappeared because, obviously, it was too easy to confuse with an f. Almost all scribal abbreviations have died because they were too much to remember, ambiguous by their very nature (i.e., many scribal marks represent 'a nasal' and could very well be n, m, or ŋ (ng).) French is a notable exception, of course, where the abbreviations were canonised as part of orthography. We only have a few real surviving cases in English: e.g. & (stylised ligature of et), and viz. (in which the z should actually be more like a ȝ or ʒ, actually means "et" of all things, and the whole word is actually "videlicet"—"to wit")

There are very real and good reasons that these modifications to the Latin alphabet have died out while others have not. To understand these best, we have to look at the impacts, both direct and inadvertent, of each alteration. It is important to note that few of the changes which writing systems undergo are per se natural, as throughout most of history it has been scribal fashion to create a distinctive style to represent the identity of the scribe—often defined through aristocracy, sensibility, nationality, or perhaps a reaction to the same. As such, there has always been a drive for scribes and authors to synthesise something that was distinctly theirs, just as architecture evolved, even undergoing periods of revivalism in various areas. Each letter in the modern Latin alphabet is a copy of a copy of a copy ... of some stylisation of a Roman original, which can be traced even further back if the need arises.

All of this information has a great deal of importance to someone looking to design a new writing system, for a fantasy language or otherwise, if a significant degree of realism is desired. The Latin alphabet is the most extensively used in the world, presently and throughout most of written history, and as such has undergone almost every alteration and style imaginable, providing ample potential for lessons for the garage con-linguist.

The first part of this article will discuss the merits and disadvantages of various alterations to the Latin alphabet since its appearance in Roman epigraphy to modern digital typography. The second half will then proceed on to a more general evaluation of what to consider when building a constructed writing system, considering these lessons and general observations I've garnered from the hundred or so writing systems I've designed and experimented upon. I make no claims of being a real authority on the subject of what I'm speaking about; I've got no relevant credentials. But I am passionate about it, I suppose, and hopefully this will have something in it worth reading.

Part 1: Lessons from Latin

Mediterranean alphabetic writing systems were originally designed to be cut, either in stone, wood, or bone, much like runic writing systems, and so in their initial form displayed many traits peculiar to those media: a general avoidance of line patterns which might cause cracking, avoidance of using both horizontal and vertical lines (because of wood grain), and designs that didn't pay much care to keeping down the

Part 2: What to do

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