Applying Chinese pen strokes and design principles to English to for a new type of calligraphy

[vasten]

Hi Everyone.

I have designed what can best be described as an "alphabetical puzzle".

Dscript can be thought of as a "form of English cursive writing". It merges Chinese pen strokes and character design principles wit the roman alphabet, allowing English word to come as close as possible to a logographic representation without loosing the actual letters and words(like Chinese characters).

I have put it all online, and reserve no license, royalty, fee rights. Do as you please, just dont claim you invented Dscript itself.

I recently started adding some "Dscript lessons", these are bassicly little sketches where I outline the actual process of the letter combination like in the image below.

dscript.blogdive.com

There is also the full manual (available in online version and pdf download)

www.dscript.ca

This teaches all the basic skills and the letter combinations. It is a guide and index for using Dscript to make symbols and glyphs out of English words.

Learning to write Dscript can produce tons of different styles and looks. Below is a simple example with a basic pen.

Finally there is also a generator, it generates Dscipt text from your input text. There are sooo many possible combinations that I could only put the most common in the generator. It is far from perfect, and much less attractive than human hand written, but it can be fun and shows off the basics of Dscript.

Dscript Generator

www.dscript.ca/genpage.php

It's like a giant puzzle game, the letters are the pieces and they can put together in many ways while always maintaining alphabetical and sequence integrity.

Anyways, hope you find it fun and useful, I would greatly appreciate any feedback,

Kindest regards,

Vatsen

[Shelley]

I can see how this could be fun....for awhile. I am not quite sure what this achieves. maybe its not suppose to achieve anything,if so,then why? Seems to me someone has got too much spare time:) I think I will put my time and effort into chinese and other things I consider more useful.

It seems like I would have to learn english again. No thanks, but good luck. Shelley

[vasten]

This is the Art section isn't

it's fun..

it can be pretty...

that is the purpose...

I don't have too much free time, wish I had more...

it just piles up over the years

[imron]

I'm curious as to how it relates to Chinese pen strokes and character design principles? I'd be interested to hear your reasoning for this, as to be honest, it looks more like electrical circuit diagrams.

[vasten]

Hehe. yes it can take on that appearance.

It will not at all resemble chinese characters.

what I took was the cursive pen strokes.

Not the indexed and very "stiff" brush based system

The modern, "un-documented" hand written scribbles they use in day to day life.

I studied that for years, still cant do it like them, but can read and write very "grassy" script.

By breaking them down into their components i first had an "index" of the quick and easy "mechanical motions",

I had to be creative to find a way to extend this "library" to be over 26 pieces, but managed to do so borrowing from chinese and korean (this influence is very visible to most people familiar with korean)

i then had an set of "strokes", that can be combined, merged, twisted, contorted, written vertically, horizontally, any which way you want. and it is always legible to a reader, the individual symbol are always visible, and their sequence distinguishable.

Think Cursive English, + Chinese penmanship skills

There are of course many influence, but the real big one is "those scribbles they make" , as so mnay people say ;)

[Shelley]

i don't think that it iooks pretty,but art is in the eye of the beholder. circuit diagrams are very different. i use them all the time at work.they have a different kind of beauty . Looks more like shorthand. but just because some people don't like doesen't mean it not good for you. You enjoy it but don't be surprised if not many people agree. Shelley

[vasten]

Don't worry, i won't get my hopes up.

Thanks for the words or encouragement

if anyone is so misguided as to be interested in Dscript. feel free to post here or contact me at maxiu@dscript.ca

Cheers

Matt

[Gharial]

My immediate thought was why not make the script more phonetic/phonemic (e.g. have a different symbol for the s i.e. /s/ in see versus the s i.e. /z/ in choose, and why bother with the "silent e" after that latter s; then the vowel sound in see and the first vowel sound in reason are phonemically the same i.e. /i:/ etc), but I guess the purpose is to retain the "redundancies" of English spelling so as to make for more graphically-complex "glyphs".

The overall impression I realized (when coming back from shopping just now, and before checking if anyone else had answered the original post) is that the vowels are a bit like so many sausages and bits of cheese or fruit or whatever stuck onto the cocktail sticks that are the consonants or consonant clusters.

Anyway, it might not make a bad "prop" writing system for a sci-fi movie or somesuch (Klingon, Predator runes etc), and if you developed a stroke-based indexing system (e.g. the "radical" in each case could be the first symbol in any glyph), I suppose it could give people a vague idea of what looking up Chinese characters is like (except that Chinese characters don't have such immediately obvious aggregate phonetic strokes - as we all know, it's only at the whole non-radical level that one gets to the phonetics in the hanzi). I'm certainly going to try introducing it as a secret code for English to my young niece! So, thanks for the interesting little diversion from Chinese, Vasten!

[vasten]

Glad you like it.. there will be a post appearing above this one. it was written before you posted but is awaiting approval.

I'm always happy when someone likes it.

Yes scifi fantasy guys are almost half of the positive feedback.

the other half is marketers and designers (corp names and acronyms +Dscript = glyphs aka. free logo designs)

I usually get horrible responses in the academics and language related forums for some reason.. go figure

[jbradfor]

Are you familiar with Xu Bing's square word calligraphy? It seems similar to what you are doing, but IMHO better looking.

[vasten]

Yes I have, several people have pointed him out.

xu bings work is great.

but completely different.

He tries to bring English into the Traditional calligraphy.

I am bringing Chinese penmanship into English.

The results are very different.

One of the key difference, is that jhis work require WAY more pen strokes than english, where Dscript requires less.