What would be the ultimate non-dyslexic orthography? Taking the opposites of the list below, it would:
1. Have very different shaped letters2. Have phonetic spelling
3. Result in short words
4. Result in graphs that facilitate whole-word recognition
5. Be written top-down
It would seem to me that Korean addresses all of these issues – except, perhaps, the first. Each graph represents a syllable, which would tend to shorten words. But the graphs can be sounded-out – they are constructed from phonetic elements. The arrangement of the elements within the graph is two-dimensional, creating a kind of picture that capitalizes on spatial perception (as opposed to putting the characters in a single line, which is one-dimensional). Finally, Korean can be written top-down, avoiding potential left-right problems.
I wonder if there are fewer Korean dyslexics?
I wonder if a Korean-like writing system can be devised which corrects its one problem, the similarity of many of the graph elements?
It would then be no problem to write a program to display any English text in this orthography. In fact, it can be encoded as a font and use existing software!
Posted by David Boxenhorn at June 27, 2004 01:03 AM