Earth Language Project P&L: -6 (≃ -53 USD)
Earth Language project, is a project conceived of by Yoshiko McFarland, as a result of the times of war between Japan and the U.S., inspired by harmony in nature, the hope for a more peaceful world. Inspired by the success of Chinese characters, and also, by their limitations (being not culturally neutral, and not compatible with a variety of languages of different types), she came up with characters that would be truly culturally neutral, and work well trans-lingually.
Think of it, as an attempt at creating an "esperanto" of the pictographic language. However, the language also has a phonetic code, that is based on the shapes of tongue, as expressed by the geometry of the characters, that can also be used as sign-language through hand-signing. EL works not just as a communication tool, but also as a thinking and imagining tool to explore one's self through the philosophy behind the base symbols of the language.
Other contributors, notably Jo Chen (German), Tomotake Fujita, Mr. Mitsuhiro Saiji, volunteered to create EL-ASCII (zero-width space ASCII font) for typing the characters, allowing to actually use the language in the Internet.
Many other challenges remain, if we wan to have this language learned and used. ^__^
I've added a simple CSS-only chrome extension, to enable anyone to try out talking in EL. This has a limitation of mixing in English though, and a JS-based solution may be needed as a further improvement.
A very real use-case of this language would be to overcome subvocalization, and become a speed reader.
[carolina_carvalho], welcome to site~! ^_^ You can open the flashcards created using Anki: https://apps.ankiweb.net. ;)
I love this! Want to collaborate, still doing a lot of reading on the Earth Language website, because I just discovered it today. Quick question, what should I use to open the flashcards (this format is entirely new to me as well)?
In my understanding, the working hypothesis is that -- while Chinese language was successful in uniting various tribes and nations in the mainland, it has failed to become a global language, because of phonetic radicals mixed in, making the language not truly only conceptual, not truly speech-independent, so it can't serve as a neutral international language, the basic premise that with creation of shared language we can create a cooperative civilization, may be true.
A technical issue with enabling the font in the web is, that in order to display EL correctly, the font of particular letters being typed need to be changed "on the fly" (between traditional font and EL-ASCII) after or between particular escape characters. However, it seem to be only possible with a continually run rewrite process, that would have to scan all the texts in the browser, identify the escape characters, and styling those places with custom
<span>tags. Moreover, it is not readily possible to have multiple fonts in a traditional input field, therefore, there would need to be an HTML (WYSIWYG) fields activated everywhere, where EL escape characters are found. Due to the computing resources needed to scan such texts, there would be a risk of hanging of the program upon large texts viewed in the browser. Therefore, only the texts with special initializing sequences (like a primer) would have to be scanned. So, we need to come up with the initializing sequence for EL paragraphs or texts, and then escape sequences to embed the El text between normal ASCII text. That is the strategy for how to create a plugin that would enable to read/write Earth Language anywhere on the web.I think, the escape symbols could be custom in such extension, but a nice set of defaults could be: lines that contain EL tokens starting with
0o, and places that need to be substituted with EL formatting starting and ending with double space__.