Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly.<p>(And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.)<p>Thinking about it-- you increase your bandwidth immediately. You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Use the extra bits to add in the more confusing vowels sounds, and appropriate current digraphs where they aren't confusing.<p>Chording becomes your standard input device; just press every sound that's in the word at once and move on. Anyone would be able to type as fast as they could talk, at least, and read far faster. Text to speech and vice versa would be much easier. Machine translation would make you perfectly legible to the non-phonetically-literate, and the vastly improved typing speed would more than make up for any minor hiccups. It would be much, much easier to teach English to children and non-natives, so much so that we'd stop using letters for everyday writing. Alphabetic English would be bizarrely unintelligible within a couple generations, but again, thanks to machine translation, perfectly readable.<p>Of course you get all of this just from having a phonetic alphabet; a concise binary representation is just icing on the cake. If your goal is to get people to read different, why not go for the grand prize?

I really like this approach (even if I'm still not entirely convinced about the benefits of dotsies).<p>For a while, I've had this idea of a book that starts in standard English, and gradually alters the grammar and introduces new words - so that halfway-through it's written in somewhat of a pidgin/creole language, and by the end you're reading a completely different language (e.g. French or Japanese). I'm not aware of such a thing existing, or even being feasible for that matter, but I think it would be interesting.

Not sure if this is worth the effort, but brilliant approach to learning. I've often had fun playing with inventing my own alphabets and stuff -- if you could actually learn to read this font at a decent speed, it would be fun to click a bookmarklet anytime you wanted some privacy :)<p>I love reading, and I read pretty fast - I've often thought that the existing approach in most textbooks where they give you a short (5-10 line text) with tons of new words and grammar, and then when you're done working through that, give you a new one with a ton of new words, is non-ideal. Once I'm done learning all the new words, you should give me five pages with text that only uses the words I've already learnt, to "fix" it - and to give me a feeling of mastery...

This reminds me of Elian Script[1]. It is not particularly optimized for reading but it is extremely easy to learn and become proficient in.<p>The usual habit to develop ones own handwriting style when using this, makes it something rather unique to each individual. This also improves writing speed because you optimize the letters to suit your own writing style. We both (friend and me) use it as a form of poor-man's-cryptography for diaries and stuff we write in public (trains, buses, etc).<p>My friend's Elian compared to mine is almost unrecognisable at first glance. But if you understand the few basic rules for the writing system, you can read either of our versions very effectively in only a short amount of time. And those rules are preposterously simple. You do not have to memorize different shapes for each letter of the alphabet. That's a definite plus.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.ccelian.com/concepca.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ccelian.com/concepca.html</a>

This seems like one of those things that will push something useful out of my head if I learn it.

Why not stack Morse code horizontally? At least Morse code is somewhat designed to take advantage of the frequency distribution of letters (e.g., e is a single dot.)

Here's a shorter one. The first one is a bit long:<p><a href="http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple.html" rel="nofollow">http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple.html</a><p>If you have any preferences for any stories from gutenberg.org I can add those too.

I couldn't read anything past the title.

In my opinion, it would make more sense to read braille by looking at it. However, it would be cool if this were some sort of alien language/hidden language in a video game or something.

I can see this being applied in labels etc. for computer vision. Some kind of control/orientation character could make it similar to a QR code but actually readable by humans.<p>Generally, though, if something's going to be read by both, you may as well just have a label with plain English + a QR code. No reason why it has to be readable by both.

Reminds me of Marain, the language and alphabet invented by Iain M. Banks for the Culture: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Language" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Language</a><p>There's even a least one font available: <a href="http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.fr/2010/09/free-font-marain-script.html" rel="nofollow">http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.fr/2010/09/free-font-marain-...</a>

I've always wondered what Conway's Game of Life was trying to tell me...

So... if I want the single letter 'B' by itself, it looks exactly the same as the letters A, C, D or E?<p>In other words, 'DE' look exactly the same, without any reference, as 'AB', and there is a haphazard set of similar combinations?<p>I'm not doing that. Learn Braille instead.

What about diacritical marks? Without them it's restricted to English.

Last time your project came up, I wanted to ask if you've done any research into the various already existing shorthand writing systems ?<p>When I tried to find out more about those 10 years ago, a lot of sources were old and hard to find, but with a bit of persistence I found some PDFs and websites on a system called "Gregg Shorthand". Fortunately today it's right there on Wikipedia for you: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand</a>

This reminds me a great deal of Mark Twain's plan for the improvement of English Spelling:<p><a href="http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html</a>

For non-native english speakers, the text on the home (<a href="http://dotsies.org/" rel="nofollow">http://dotsies.org/</a>) is a bit easier to grasp.

I haven't put in the time to become fluent in reading Dotsies (Dotsie?) yet, but find it fascinating. I can imagine a multitouch keyboard made for Dotsies, that could be quite a bit more efficient once learned.<p>Has any research been done on optimizing graphemes and common words for multitouch typing?

This seems flawed in that it arbitrarily translates regular symbols into what looks like a graphic error soup. I feel like letter and di/tri-graph frequencies should have been considered, as well as conventional expectations (m looks thicker than i, f.i.).

The end of the story looks like 'space invaders', and I have the urge to shoot the letters.

And what about UTF-8 letters (for example ā, ž, š)? How can you make them by using dotsies?

I want to be able to read QR code by naked eye. Lets see how far I get.

Interesting learning paradigm but on the "optimized for reading" side, we already have the Chinese alphabet which is probably at least as dense as dotsies.

genious.. my favorite part of the day is to come home and read some dotsies since i discovered it..

This is a very cool effort and method to teach a very silly font/language idea.

This is super sweet. I just did the whole thing, now I can read Dotsie!

It is fuckin' cool, I really liked that.

the density reminds me of chinese

For what purpose?