While vacationing, idle random thoughts on the potential influence of Unicode on 'alphabet soup'

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/12/25 10:16 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/12/25/6857659.aspx

If you are easily offended then please stop reading now....

I talk a lot.

And people who know me will verify this.

In fact, there are only four things I know of that will [ever] shut me up:

• When I am asleep (and then I might snore; luckily I don't tend to sleep much);
• When I am sick (like feverish sick -- this is also incredibly rare);
• When I am really, really uncomfortable in a situation;
• When someone says one of those rare things that stuns me, momentarily making me speechless;

And so it goes -- if I am very quiet, people assume I am sick, though usually it is just that I am uncomfortable.

Every once in a while one of those rare comments comes across that tends to delight friends, and they know they have left me with nothing to say.

And then yesterday someone managed to do it in the Suggestion Box!

You see, rita (and yes, her name linked to the same place in her comment) asked over in the Suggestion Box:

how do techniques like "alphabet soup" work for other scripts in unicode? have you ever done anything like it?

When I saw it, I was stunned. There were no words.

I realized that there was probably no way to explicitly cover it. Maybe the other Sorting It All Out might have been able to do it, but given where I am hosted and all it just seems inappropriate.

I mean, I have teenagers reading here, and have to be careful. Therefore, I will speak in euphemism and avoid contributing too heavily to the delinquency of readers like Dean....

Now the purpose of "alphabet soup" style techniques is to provide a methodlogy for focusing coverage to a small area (the area in which one could fit a letter) in a way that allows for variety. By "drawing" the alphabet, someone without a clear idea on the best way achieve adequate coverage (or the creativity to inspire variety) has an easy (for lack of a better term) "color by numbers" method to obtain both.

I know people who swear by it as a (for lack of a better term) "teaching technique".

There is also an interesting benefit that I will explain via a segue into a brief story, for which I will push the stack for a moment so as to not (for lack of a better term) lose our place (also an important technique!):

In my early 20's when I was living in Connecticut, I was driving home one night after the bar we were all hanging out (called The Penalty Box, as I have mentioned before). I was stopped at a checkpoint where they were literally stopping everyone and giving sobriety tests, as part of a crackdown on drunk drivers.

Two of the things the cop asked me to do were: (a) say the alphabet without singing the song, and (b) say the alphabet backwards. The former is (according to him) difficult to do when one is intoxicate, and the latter is (again according to him) always difficult to do but people who are intoxicated are the one most likely to try and to reveal intoxication behaviors while doing so.

As a side note, I passed the first test 100% but for the second test was able to say the alphabet backwards, very quickly. The stunned police officer was himself speechless but I explained that I was working with elementary school aged kids and tricks like that helped to fuel young imaginations. Quite amused, he let me go home shortly after finishing all the tests -- they had a bunch of other drivers to get through this checkpoint....

Popping the stack back to "alphabet soup" one of the biggest potential drawbacks to the basic technique is that most partners would not be happy to know what was actually behind this (for lack of a better term) "directed meandering" so it is (a) best to not be singing or humming the song while doing it and (b) best not to have them recognize the actual letters, unless one shifts the game to spell specific (for lack of a better word) "fun" words -- perhaps ones that repeat (for lack of a better word) "fun" letters like M, O, and Z? -- and not the plain old alphabet.

Though even while I say this, I have at least one friend who claims that she even hearing the song has an impact on her because of extended "alphabet soup" time and a (for lack of a better word) Pavlovian response, which I guess proves that every rule has its exceptions.

And now, finally, we get to rita and the original question regarding Unicode and how it might fit here...

Now the many characters of Unicode do not specifically help, since Unicode has no real information about drawing the various letters. And the whole point of "alphabet soup" is largely about (for lack of a better term) "drawing the letters".

Perhaps one could develop some skill at taking advantage of the letters in some scripts, but the (for lack of a better word) "fluid" nature of "alphabet soup" is really suggestive a more calligraphic type of skill with letter forms (for lack of a better term) flowing naturally. This is something that knowledge of Unicode would likely not be specifically helpful with, other than choosing individual letters and (if there is no other way) teaching oneself how to draw them. While this could work, in general one needs to be able to concentrate more on applying the knowledge of drawing the letters that one already has, which can tend the limit of trying to seek out new letters one does not know, such as random letters that sponsor random blogs here.

However, there are specific potential advantages to using other scripts if you do know how to draw the letters of another language, for two reasons:

• it lowers the risk of people being able to identify letters (which is usually a benefit)
• several scripts have letters that are more (for lack of a better word) "expressive"

If you ask, I will deny any personal knowledge of what I am about suggest, but if you are thinking in this direction and you know some Japanese then considering slow Hiragana eventually transitioning into slightly more rapid Katakana, in iroha order if you can manage it (again, without reciting the poem!) for reasons that are very complicated to get into but if you look at the orders you might have some hints, really can inspire miracles. Similar effects are possible with most "curvy" scripts (e.g. the handwritten form of Hebrew, Tamil, Telugu, Georgian) moving into less curvy ones (e.g. Armenian, Bengali, Devanagari); the Latin alphabet really seems less suited to the whole effect though if you know no other alphabets then lowercase to uppercase and maybe sans-serif to serif might have the (for lack of a better word) "appropriate" impact....

Now that I'm done, to misquote a conversation between Ross and Chandler or Friends for a moment, if you don't know which authors you are in the mood to read more of now -- D.H. Lawrence or Peter T. Daniels/William Bright -- then please stay the hell away from my bookshelf!

Okay, I think I managed to work through my discomfort here.

If you are shocked that I posted this then welcome to the club. I think we are going to get jackets. :-)

This post brought to you by ৡ and ৠ (U+09e1 and U+09e0, aka BENGALI LETTER VOCALIC LL and BENGALI LETTER VOCALIC RR)

(these two letters fought all odds to fly home from Grand Cayman when they heard rumor of this post. Because no one loves "alphabet soup" more than intricate letters!)

All of the other characters in Unicode have taken off for Grand Cayman for the Christmas holiday weekend
(they are staying at the Marriott Grand Cayman Beach Hotel in case you are there and are curious at all the characters hanging out by the pool!)

# John Cowan on 25 Dec 2007 12:19 PM:

# orcmid on 25 Dec 2007 12:22 PM:

# rita on 25 Dec 2007 1:42 PM:

# Mihai on 25 Dec 2007 3:56 PM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 25 Dec 2007 4:08 PM:

# a.c. on 25 Dec 2007 8:20 PM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 25 Dec 2007 10:24 PM:

# Ian Boyd on 26 Dec 2007 2:00 PM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 26 Dec 2007 4:18 PM:

# Ian Boyd on 27 Dec 2007 7:45 AM:

# dean on 28 Dec 2007 5:29 AM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 28 Dec 2007 1:29 PM:

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