[Blog Post] Spatial Spread And Conditional Character Entropy Reduction

[Koen G]

Yes, it's an interesting idea that I hadn't considered before. You kind of separate glyphs within a word in two sets, like when oil and water are mixed.

One issue is, if I'm not mistaken, that this would account for certain glyphs strongly preferring the company of others, but not necessarily for positional rigidity. For example, if [i] is part of the front set, why does is so often follow [a] and rarely if ever precede it? And if it is part of the second set, why do we always get [in] and not [ni]?

You could say that some of these glyphs are markers, but then which ones would it be? If "n" is a marker, these words would simply end in "ai" and the problem would remain the same.

Alternatively, you could say that there are more than two groups, but then there is a bigger issue. The more groups you introduce, the closer the system gets to sorting alphabetically and losing all positional information. This would require more markers, and hence even fewer glyphs that hold phonetic information.