Blotched Ink

A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication. There are about 4,000 languages that make use of an established writing system.

All writing systems require:

at least one set of defined base elements or symbols, individually termed signs and collectively called a script;

at least one set of rules and conventions (orthography) understood and shared by a community, which assigns meaning to the base elements (graphemes), their ordering and relations to one another;

at least one language (generally spoken) whose constructions are represented and can be recalled by the interpretation of these elements and rules;

some physical means of distinctly representing the symbols by application to a permanent or semi-permanent medium, so they may be interpreted (usually visually, but tactile systems have also been devised).

Generally, threre are three major types of writing systems: alphabets, syllabaries, and logographies. There are a number of subdivisions of each type, and there are different classifications of writing systems in different sources.

Alphabets use a standard set of letters representing the consonants and vowels of a spoken language. The correspondence is almost never one-to-one. Usually several different letters represent one phoneme and/or several phonemes are represented by the same letter. Alternately, a sequence of two or more letters can represent a single phoneme. Abjads differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, and in abugidas or alphasyllabaries each character represents a consonant-vowel pairing.

Syllabaries consist of symbols that represent syllables (which are considered to be a basic building block of the words).

Logographies use characters corresponding to words, morphemes or other semantic units.

Alphabets typically use a set of less than 100 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have several hundred, and logographies can have thousands of symbols.

Segmental systems

A segmental script has graphemes which represent the phonemes (basic unit of sound) of a language.

Alphabets

Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters that represent consonants and vowels. The word “alphabet” is derived from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet.

Alphabets currently in use include Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian (Mkhedruli), Greek, Korean (hangŭl), Latin/Roman, N’Ko, and Tifinagh.

Abjads

The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from other alphabets in that they have characters only for consonantal sounds, although vocalization is used in specific contexts, such as in religious books and children’s books. The term “abjad” takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet’s consonants ‘alif, bā’, jīm, and dāl.

Arabic, Hebrew and Thaana are the only abjads currently in use, but Samaritan and Syriac are used to a limited extent.

Abugidas

An abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. The graphic similarity of most abugidas comes from the fact that they are derived from abjads, and the consonants make up the symbols with the inherent vowel and the new vowel symbols are markings added on to the base symbol. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ge'ez script used in some contexts.

Abugidas that are currently in use include Bengali, Burmese/Myanmar, Cree (Nêhiyaw), Dehong Dai (Tai Le), Devanāgarī, Fraser, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), Gujarāti, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Inuktitut, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Naskapi (Innu Aimun), Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), Odia, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan. 

The ones used to a limited extent are Balinese, Batak, Bilang-bilang, Blackfoot (Siksika), Buhid, Carrier (Dulkw’ahke), Chakma, Cham, Dhurwa, Ditema, Gondi, Grantha, Hanifi, Hanuno’o, Hmong, Javanese, Jenticha, Kaithi, Kerinci, Khoiki, Kirat Rai, Kulitan, Lampung, Lanna, Lepcha (Róng-Ríng), Limbu/Kirati, Lontara, Lota Ende, Manipuri (Meetei Mayek), Mon, Mwangwego, New Tai Lue, Ranjana, Rejang, Sasak, Satera Jontal, Saurashtra, Shan, Sharda, Siddham, Sorang Sompeng, Soyombo, Sundanese, Syloti Nagri, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tikamuli, Tolong Siki, Tigalari, and Varang Kshiti.

Syllabic systems

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words.

Syllabaries currently in use include Cherokee (Tsalagi), Hiragana (Japanese), Katakana (Japanese), and Yi (Nosu).

Logographic systems

The symbols used in logographic systems often represent both sound and meaning. These scripts can also be called semanto-phonetic, logophonetic, morphoprhonemic, or logosyllabic.

They may include the following types of symbol:

Pictograms and logograms

Pictograms or pictographs resemble the things they represent. Logograms are symbols that represent parts of words or whole words.

Ideograms

Ideograms or ideographs are symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas.

Compound characters

Compound characters include a semantic element, which represents or hints at their meaning, and a phonetic element, which shows or hints at their pronunciation.

The semanto-phonetic writing systems currently in use are Chinese (Zhōngwén) and Japanese (Nihongo), while Naxi is used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes.

Directionality

Scripts are also graphically characterized by the direction in which they are written. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left.

The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally (side to side), or vertically (up or down). Prior to standardization, alphabetical writing was done both left-to-right and right-to-left.

The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, came to be written right-to-left. Scripts that incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the page, but nowadays are frequently written left-to-right, top-to-bottom, due to Western influence.

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Marian: fuck off

Sal: fuck you, pay me

Kent: fuck me

Glipix: What pollinators are operating on this horrible planet? Did you see one? I need to speak with them if you did.

—Marian is 46 and spent her 20s and early 30s as a mad max style motorcycle gang member. ‘Misery Marian’ was her moniker while she was LEADING one of these gangs.

—Sal and Kent are somehow unaware of this.

—Sal’s apocalypse is capitalism. Also Godzilla.