Neo Ideograms

14 Strokes for nose in kanji versus 1 in ids. 14 vs 4 for work, 11 vs 2 for stop–typical savings! Plus ids are devoid of the annoying NONSENSE of kanji– like including the kanji for bean in climb.

Devising ideograms for Japanese kanji is more challenging than I thought it would be because a single kanji can have a multitude of very disparate meanings. Like English, Japanese is a mess– and agglomeration of historical accident and debris, like trash that has accumulated in the bend of a stream, and kanji intensely so. Not only will future writing and ideation be idiographic– icon based, as Timothy Leary prophesied– but languages will be more synthetic, no matter how much George Orwell’s Newspeak stigmatized the idea. The messes will be cleaned up.

I decided to transcribe Toyo kanji as an exercise. Here’s a page of it. Note that the ids are simpler and make more sense.

I try write a page a day. It’s actually a lot of writing, about 1100 words. Always I come up with good id improvements.