Rotational confusion and septaglyph encoding

[PlasticCup]

I was just fantasizing about different ways to use/write septaglyphs and I came across a problem with the writing; rotation.

As you know (if you don't first learn how septaglyphs work by reading the stickied thread) septaglyphs rely heavily on the position of each "letter" in the septagon. If one were to rotate a septaglyph it would mean something else entirely! This is a big disadvantage of the language, a single word is very easily confused this way; you have no way of telling which way is "up". If one imagines a land where Sarus is the main language, and septaglyphs are the way to write them, how would one hand out pamphlets with a one-word slogan on them? Hand them out upside down and the message doesn't come across.

My solution (of course, Adam, feel free to incorporate this or solve this issue in some other way) is similar to the way people using the Arabic numeral system (it's the one used in Western society, those little numbers above the letters on your keyboard are actually Arabic in origin, if you didn't know ) solve the issue of showing the difference between a 6 and a 9. If these two numbers could be confused (because something would be easily held upside down), we write a little dot to the lower right of the number, so if you see a 9 with a little dot near the top left corner you now know it actually is a 6. I propose that the "d" corner in the septagon would be dotted in the same way. This also solves the issue for whole sentences (which could also be read upside down) by making a line connecting all the (invisible) d's in the sentence.

This (now solved) potential problem also provides something very useful; encoding Sarus messages by means of rotation. If you and a friend decide to rotate all your septaglyphs by the same amount, you can very easily obscure the true meaning of these messages. An example:



However, this isn't limited to simply rotating all septaglyphs by the same amount, one could use a "password" to denote the value of the top corner of the septaglyph. For any sentences with more words than there are letters in the password, just "loop" the password around, starting again at the first letter (the earlier method could be seen as this method using a single-letter password). An example with the actual meaning of the top letter shown:



This doesn't really hold much value in real life (Sarus right now is obscure enough to be a secret language in itself) but I still think it's a cool idea, and is something you would expect to be developed in a fictional setting where Sarus is the main language.

[chluaid]

uhm... dude. You think rotation is a problem? Are you saying that if I hand you a pamphlet written in English upside-down it's indecipherable?

First up, remember always give humans credit for their ability to interpret language in context. If someone's reading a newspaper, they instantly recognise when it's upside-down, sideways or reversed. Likewise, when you know Sarus well enough, it only takes a few words to identify whether there's a problem.  For example if you start reading Sarus from a piece of paper (assuming there's no other markings on the page to indicate which way is up, like page numbers, date, headings, illustrations), you would know after a few words whether it makes any sense.

Unless you're reading from a circle of paper with no up, down or sides, this isn't some kind of frustrating dilemma. After reading something like "f lmf mm dls tdm mss" you'd only read three words and realise it makes no sense.

Secondly, remember that septaglyphs are drawn at angles of 51½° from each other. This means that D is the only syllable that points directly up. Rotate a rectangular page of Sarus by 90° and none of the septaglyphs have a syllable that points directly up. Rotate it another 90° and still, nothing pointing up. The beauty of 7, you see

Now, if I were to write something in the sand (or on any other surface with no obvious direction) then yes, I would put an "up" indicator on the glyph, but rotation isn't a disadvantage, it's a quirk of the language. Seriously, how efficient that you learn a septaglyph, then simply rotate it for 7 different meanings! I love that aspect.

btw, I mentioned encoding Sarus with rotation a few years back. Probably back on the old forum or perhaps in some early B525 lessons.

[PlasticCup]

First of all, I had completely forgotten to account for the 7-sidedness, as you said. Maybe due to it being somewhere between 4 and 6 am on my end.

However, I disagree with the comparison with English you're making, as English (and the Roman alphabet in general) has very little letters that have another meaning when rotated, so when you see a single letter it's immediately obvious which way is up. As for the assumption that you could see it from a sentence (a sentence wouldn't make sense if read wrong), I disagree there too, because if you just woke up, and are reading your newspaper, it may take a while to dawn on you that the sentence not making sense is a problem with the (rotation of the) sentence, not the state of your brain. If you have to read a sentence, rotate the page, and repeat that process until it makes sense it's not unthinkable that there would be some kind of system developed to denote which way is up.

Also, if one were to come up with a fictional writing system which isn't simply putting words next to each other in a left-right, right-left, top-bottom or bottom-top order but in an order in which it was unclear which of the 7 directions was up, the rotation could be confusing again. I know this isn't realistic, but hey, just saying it for the sake of the argument

Also, what about only putting a dot on the first word of the sentence, then you immediately have a very simple way of denoting the beginning of a sentence (I searched for punctuation but found nothing). Also, using any of the "rectangular" reading patterns (left-right, right-left, top-bottom or bottom-top) you can immediately see which corner to start; it's the one with the word with the dot.

[chluaid]

All I was saying is that context is underestimated. The example of upside-down english wasn't a comparison, it was to illustrate the point that once you know a language, you intuitively know when something is out of place. Did you know that the modern trend for teaching kids to read is now all about recognising whole words, rather than the phonetic structure? Instead of reading the sounds of C-A-T and putting them together, the new way is to recognise CAT as a single symbol. All I'm saying is: this is how good the human brain is at instantly recognising and interpreting symbols AND strings of symbols.

So when you get a septaglyph that's rotated the wrong way, sure you may be momentarily confused but who cares? Find me a situation in which the translation of Sarus is such a matter of life and death that the trivialities of paper shape will have some dire consequences. With an upside-down newspaper, you don't frown, curse and cut yourself. You turn it so it looks right. In your brain this recognition takes mere nanoseconds.

Finally, I've said this too many times before, but regardless of how realistic anyone wants Sarus to be, you have to realise that it's a simple cipher - not even a language - designed for very limited use in my series. I've created lessons and made it a part of the community for one simple reason: so fans of Brackenwood movies have the option of understanding some Yuyu voices, hidden colour/glyph secrets, etc. Septaglyphs and various rules and quirks of Sarus were added later as an extra dimension for the community to have fun with it.

Over the years many people (language scholars, musicologists, conlang enthusiasts) have come along saying, "OK let's put this in and change that and make this realistic." Sometimes I say "ok tell me what you've got", but usually I either switch off or react defensively. Why? Because it's mine. I saw Sudré's SolReSol and thought 'hey, I can do something like this for Brackenwood'. I didn't say "I'm going to make an open-source universal language that will become the new global tongue". Whenever someone wants Sarus to be a full-featured language with indefinite articles, punctuation, etc, I suggest they invent their own conlang.

</defensive rant>

btw, yes you would only use an "up" indicator on the first glyph. Having it on all of them would be silly.

[PlasticCup]

I get it completely, but the language has so many cool concepts I just automatically start philosophising about it and can't stop myself from thinking things like "what if you did this? how would this work? hey, this is pretty nifty".

[Laroon]

Okay with a newspaper (real world concept idea here, so hold tight) there are things called "pictures" and "headlines" and "formatting" to help those early-morning risers get their bearings on orientation before that first cup of coffee...

Further along the bunny trail, we can see that many texts, even if you don't know the scripture it's written in, is easy to orient. I have friends that I've handed a document in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, what have you, and they're able to tell AT LEAST which way is up. And no, they don't speak the languages before hand or even have that much experience with them.

With this language, I daresay you probably won't be writing it much at all personally (or any of you for that matter) much more than writing notes to your friends in class. Anything else that you publish will be on your computers for cyberspace. The glorious part of cyberspace is that everything is generally oriented so the top of the document is at the top of the page! So no beef there either.

If on the off chance you're so eager to write a book that is written solely in Sarus, I believe you'd just copy your mother tongue and use the same rules (left to right, top to bottom as in English).

For the record, POOP and dOOd look relatively the same, just flipped. qooq and boob are the same case.

If you really want to make your stuff look fancy schmancy, you could do what they do in the old texts and make your first septaglyph look all elaborate (but make it readable of course) like they do with the first letter of the first word in a medieval document.

[chluaid]

I can see PlasticCup's point in the case of say, a single septaglyph written on a scrap of paper, carved into a stone, painted on a floor or perhaps even written in the sky somehow. These cases where there's no immediately obvious up or down would certainly require some kind of indicator. But like Laroon said (welcome back man!) those cases may be quite rare but I love the idea of elaborating the first glyph for orientation.