Simbalik - A different way to write

When we read we don't usually notice the individual letters that make up the words. Instead our eye takes in the shape of the word as a whole unit. This is one of the reasons that it's more difficult to read something written in all upper case letters. The letters are too similar in size and shape and there are fewer distinctive shape cues in the word. The presence of ascenders, descenders, short letters, round features, and so on, give each word a distinctive shape. The word "dog", for example, begins high and ends low with a short, round middle. The general contour is similar to that of "bog" but the placement of the first ascender relative to the first circular feature, the round part of the "d" and "b", makes the shapes easily distinguishable.

Even when the shapes of the letters are abstracted, as in figure 1 above, the words are still easy to recognize, and still easy to distinguish from each other.

Since we are looking for the shape of the word, the fact that the letters that make up that shape have phonetic values is incidental. Once the language is learned there is no longer any need for the characters to represent sounds. They could, in fact, be any arbitrary symbols that we learn to associate with the word.

Consider these further abstractions of "dog" and "bog", for example:

The next logical step is to abstract the symbols to the point where they no longer have any phonetic or semantic values and become arbitrary squiggles joined one after another to form equally arbitrary compound squiggles representing words; representing words without representing sounds.

But what would be the point of that? There are actually several advantages to disconnecting an alphabet from the sounds of a particular language. The first is that the abstract Simbalik "spelling" of a word could be used by speakers of any language. If all spoken languages shared the same Simbalik spelling of a word then that would make it easier for people who do not share a language to communicate with each other.

The second advantage is that every combination of symbols could be used to represent some word. In other words, no spellings would go to waste. Using phonetic spelling the vast majority of possible spellings go to waste since they can never be used to spell words. Spellings like "dqpm" and "tdxx" are of no use. Because spelling represents sounds, words have to include vowels and pronounceable combinations of letters, requiring that, on average, they be longer than they would need to be with purely symbolic spelling. With anywhere from 15 to 20 unique Simbalik letters the most common 4,000 to 8,000 words could all be spelled with three letters or less. This would make documents smaller, and reading faster.

Above is an example of what could be the Simbalik "spelling" of "dog" (or "perro", or "hund", since it is no longer phonetic.) The symbol is made up on three keystrokes, which produce the three shapes shown to the right of the compound symbol. Of course actual text would present the symbols much smaller, perhaps more like

which is still easily readable. And a True Type font would be used rather than an image file. Thus Simbalik documents could be produced and edited in any word processor.

The characters in the Simbalik font would be designed to be distinct and easily distinguished from each other. Letters would not share stylistic elements such as similar ascenders or descenders. Instead, each letter would have its own unique features so that shape of any one word would not resemble the shape of any other word.

For Simbalik to be usable as a written auxiliary language there would need to be a simple, easy-to-learn grammar that anyone could pick up quickly, regardless of their native language. The grammar would probably resemble a pidgin grammar more than a natural language grammar.

The advantage of Simbalik is that a large number of unique symbols can be drawn using relatively few individual "characters". But just how many individual characters would be necessary, and how many compound shapes could be drawn with them?

First off, notice that the spelling of "dog" above uses three letters. The first is meant to begin a word. The second works best in the middle of a word, and the final letter works best at the end of a word. If we call those symbols Initials, Medials, and Terminals then we can build words in three ways. The word forms are referred to as IT, IMT, and IMMT. The shortest words, IT, have only an initial and final shape. The middle length words have an initial shape, a medial shape and a final shape. The longest words have an initial shape, two medial shapes, and a final shape.

If there were seven shapes of each type then there could be a total of 2,793 unique spellings. This would cover the basic vocabulary needed for normal day-to-day communication. The alphabet would consist of a total of 21 different letters.

In case more uncommon specialized or technical terms were needed, three additional letters of each type could be added. This would bring the total number of letters to 30, (10 of each type) and would allow for 11,100 unique spellings.

It seems unlikely that the average person would ever need to learn more than the basic seven letters of each. But the expanded set would be available for whatever technical jargon required it.

The sample illustrated below are by no means to be considered the final version, or for that matter, anything resembling a final version. These are some very rough ideas for glyph components just to see how they fit together. The top two rows are components and in the bottom row are some examples of how those components might fit together.