1 Comment

Computer programmers care intensely about all things punctuation! I (for one) am going to certainly use and abuse the nested parenthetical notes convention.

My first typewriter was this Japanese thing that could do Chinese and a few other language so I have warped expectations for typesetting, particularly when it comes to Thai language which is even weirder. There are no spaces between words. No periods, spaces are used to separate sentences. Words are constructed from 44 consonants and 22 vowels which are pretty phonetic since the written script was codified by one of the kings only a few centuries ago. Each syllable of a word would have one or two consonants at the center, and the vowels would decorate them with different vowel sounds placed in front, behind, above, or below the consonant, sometimes working in pairs or triples to modify the sound. In this way texts could be written fairly compactly without spaces, just look for the next set of consonants and take in the vowels its wearing as a word or word fragment.

Not the most straightforward way to serialize text, but it works and makes one wonder what other writing styles could make sense. At least it drove one of my friends at Microsoft who had worked on the Thai typesetting way back when slightly mad with its complexity, which I take as a win.

Expand full comment