recurse day 3
A.M.
I set up this Jekyll instance and retroactively turned my scribbly notes into blog posts.
lunch-o-clock
DeKalb market. Mind blown.
after-noon
I FINALLY START INVESTIGATING HOW TO IMPLEMENT MY PROJECT. My idea: to build a visual generator for well-branched fictional-writing-systems (because I love those), using L-systems (because they seem ideally suited and I miss formal grammars), using Clojure (because I’ve been wanting to learn a functional programming language for at least 8 years and I have no excuses left not to).
If that makes perfect sense to you, you can skip the next section. If it doesn’t, I agree with you that this idea is trippy and bizarre, but below, I will explain why I think it’s exciting.
Project idea backstory & fun linguistics facts
My original RC mini idea was to build an interactive web overview of subtractive synthesis, but then I was informed about Ableton’s version. It is everything I wanted and more and also appears to work flawlessly on mobile, I love it. So I brainstormed some other ideas.
On account of seriously pursuing way too many different hobbies, I am good at free associating. For a while, I’ve been learning Japanese. Japanese kana are syllabaries (phonetic writing systems for phonemes), and are some of the cleanest known natural orthographies. In other words, the phonetic writing system is an almost perfect mapping/representation to the phonemic distinctions within the spoken language (with some pretty consistent known modification rules, and some exceptions for different dialects). English, on the other hand, has a defective orthography, which is a sick linguistics burn for “totally fails to represent the spoken language’s phonemic distinctions.”
Last week while studying 日本語, I took a half hour break to start learning 한글 (Hangeul), the Korean alphabet which was designed 500 years ago to be learnable in one day.
I find both kana and Hangeul extremely satisfying because of aspects of their construction that make them extremely learnable. In general, I am interested in writing systems and encodings, which is not surprising because it’s probably what computer scientists did before computers existed.
Prior work – L-systems in Clojure
I decided to determine the visual branching factor by writing L-systems. L-systems are a formal grammar or string rewriting system commonly used to visualize and encode organic growth, such as generative foliage in video games, or fractals.
I semi-arbitrarily picked Clojure as my intro to functional Lisp-like langs because it had good support for visualization libraries, and because daiyi likes it.
It turns out my entire computational linguistics idea might be somewhere between a master’s and PhD thesis in scope, so I’m not actually expecting to beast it. I’ll be happy if I just get L-systems drawing in Clojure.
Some useful L-system reads:
- from nakkaya
- from brehaut
- from r/Clojure
- last and least, a mostly-shitposting HN thread on google’s
clojure-turtle
Bonus: various Clojure graphics libraries
- rm-hull/turtle
- Quil (web-based REPL here)
Linguistics puzzle club
Vitaly ran a linguistics puzzle club night with some NACLO puzzles, where you solve logic puzzles constructed using obscure or endangered languages that you probably don’t know (on tonight’s puzzle buffet: Apinaye, Manam Pile, and Hmong Daw).
I haven’t tried linguistics puzzles before and am astounded because they intersect so many of my interests in a wondrous way. Thinking about puzzle context in terms of worldbuilding allowed me to step outside preconceived Western notions and frameworks about how the world works, but in a way that related to actual human cultures instead of fictional ones!
I really enjoyed a puzzle where we reverse engineered Shong Lue Yang’s writing system devised for Hmong Daw, given only 8 example translations with the Romanized representation. Both writing systems also encoded tones, but the Romanized version was confusing because it simply repurposed Roman letters to represent different tones. We got to stretch our brains on many different axes of how we thought a script ought to represent phonetic information.