I think the parent is maybe referring to something else, that I also heard in a documentary: that all writing systems with a "reduced" alphabet descend from the same source.
I guess the japanese case is a counterexample to this, but the idea was, iirc, that writing systems appeared at different places, and followed this pattern:
* At first, people just draw representations of whatever they want to refer to.
* These evolve to symbols.
* Then, using the "rébus principle", you use the _sounds_ of each symbol to be able to represent things for which you had no symbols.
This is the step where, say, the chinese and mayan systems are.
* Then, and this is the "reduced" part I'm referring to: you simply forget the original meaning of your symbol, and only take it for a basic sound.
If I understand correctly, this happened when some people wanted to adapt hieroglyphs to their (spoken) language: they dropped the hieroglyph as symbolic representations, and only used them for their sound.
The documentary I watched seemed to imply that all alphabets with this property (symbols have no meaning) descend from this moment.
It does sound a bit much.
I may be totally misunderstanding it all, so any correction is more than welcome!
> Then, and this is the "reduced" part I'm referring to: you simply forget the original meaning of your symbol, and only take it for a basic sound.
This is usually known as the ‘acrophonic principle’, and indeed, all alphabetic scripts — and most of the other ones as well — are descended from Proto-Sinaitic, the first script to utilise the acrophonic principle.
* It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true? It would intuitively seem to me that a written language is easier to organize into clean rules and principles, contrasted to a spoken language. Did "putting things in writing" help formalize such languages, or did it have no impact?
> It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true?
I must admit to being confused as to what you’re asking here. What exactly do you mean by ‘appearing independently’, and writing systems being ‘subdued to the spoken language’?
> Did "putting things in writing" help formalize such languages, or did it have no impact?
Hmm… not sure. I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘formalise’, and even then this isn’t really an area I’ve looked into. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the presence of a writing system assists in the preservation of archaic forms (not that this affects the rate of language change, mind you).
> Any good reference on these questions?
For writing systems in general, a good place to start is Omniglot (https://www.omniglot.com/), but I can’t think of anything more relevant to your specific questions.
>> It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true?
>I must admit to being confused as to what you’re asking here. What exactly do you mean by ‘appearing independently’, and writing systems being ‘subdued to the spoken language’?
I meant that the writing system appeared at first, not as a way to "write down" spoken language, but as a language of its own (hence independent) with no relation to the already present spoken language.
By "subdued", I meant that (again, from what I understood), the Rébus principle is the first "interaction" between the spoken and written language, and the "acrophonic principle" goes a step further in a sense, so that the written language is not anymore an independent system, but a symbolic representation of the spoken language (sounds -> symbols).
This is quite counter-intuitive to me, hence my asking about it.
> I meant that the writing system appeared at first, not as a way to "write down" spoken language, but as a language of its own (hence independent) with no relation to the already present spoken language.
This is incorrect, though an easy mistake to make. Though the symbols for words had no relation to pronunciation in the very first logographic scripts, written language was always connected to spoken language. At the very least, written language always utilised the same grammar as the spoken language: the written form of a spoken sentence was formed by taking each spoken word (or morpheme, if you prefer) and writing down the corresponding symbol(s) in turn.
Also, you seem to think that the rebus principle was a rather late invention. In fact, all known logographic writing systems utilise this principle. (You could even make the case that any writing system which does not use the rebus principle is not a ‘true’ writing system, in the sense that it cannot represent all words.) Even the earliest proto-cuneiform Sumerian texts utilised rebuses to some extent (https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/...):
> Phonetic writings generated via the rebus principle played a remarkably minor role in proto-cuneiform. More certain examples of phonetic writings include: the writing of the name of the moon god, Nanna, which is written URI₃+NA, where NA is the phonetic complement with the value na indicating that the graph URI₃ is to be pronounced nanna; PIRIG+NUNUZ, where the complement NUNUZ, has the value za, indicating that the composite graph has the phonetic value az(a); the aforementioned sign designating a reed, GI₄, pronounced gi, is used to express the homophonous verb gi “to return”; and the syllabic, that is phonetic, spellings of the city names Ša₃-bu and Gir₂-su (Englund 2009, pp. 9–10; Krebernik 2007, p. 43).
I'm confused about your quote though: is "remarkably minor" meant to mean "less important than expected"? Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play? If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"?
> I'm confused about your quote though: is "remarkably minor" meant to mean "less important than expected"?
Yes.
> Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play?
At the time that quote was talking about? No, since at that time, proto-cuneiform (as they call it) would have been the only writing system in existence. Go forward a bit, though, and several forms of “phonetic writing” begin to appear frequently: rebuses (as in the quote), syllabic characters (e.g. [baʼugeš] was written BA-UG₇-GE, Edzard 2003), and characters for individual consonants (unattested in Sumerian, but Egyptian used them extensively).
> If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"?
Exactly. (Even my earlier quote has examples of that.)
I feel like linuxfr.org also deserves a mention: had pretty thorough articles on lots of subject, as far as I could judge them (and knowledgeable members!).
You haven't been at many game designer conventions, where a lot of 'household-invented' games are deriatives of Risk, Monopoly, Chess, Game of Life and current mechanism of the year.
They are still bad though.
Exactly. And one that they can get away with making because it's not quantifiable. You can't measure creativity.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they're not truly viewing the whole indie landscape. For every truly innovative, well balanced game, there may be another 100 failed kickstarter clones of existing games, or just plain bad games
Yeah, there are so many criteria on which to evaluate a board game— a quick look at the board games section on Kickstarter reveals hundreds of games which pitch well— gorgeous art, great premise, but you can tell just by looking at it that the gameplay fundamentals aren't there. Either the mechanics are boring (a reskin of classics like Parcheesi or Uno) or it's a jumble of stuff cribbed from other games with no cohesion ("look here's the deckbuilding part, and over here is worker placement, and look an area control mechanic on a modular board, yay!").
And there's the whole business of how much of a luck factor you want, how much rubber banding there is to keep it competitive, how much your strategy has to adapt in response to what others are doing, etc etc. These are things that pro designers carefully iterate on in the context of hundreds of test plays, often with a community of other designers who are equipped with the necessary experience and context to think deeply about how a game works and will work across multiple playthroughs.
"look here's the deckbuilding part, and over here is worker placement, and look an area control mechanic on a modular board, yay!"
I once listened to a podcast by some board gamers who had gone way too far in this direction. They'd say the name of a game, and describe it as e.g. "it's worker placement with area control", and that was the end of their description and analysis of the game. Seems to me they're missing a fair bit of nuance and more importantly, it doesn't tell me anything about how likely it is I'd enjoy the game. Oh well, to each their own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Look up the “8 kinds of fun” if you haven’t seen it before. It’s a really compelling (I think, at least) framework that explains why looking at games as just collections of mechanics doesn’t communicate whether you’d actually enjoy them.
I feel like a broken record posting something about this on every thread about games, but I really think it’s worth spreading around.
Well, to be fair, the article doesn't say anything about that the chosen set of mechanics (novelty) have to provide fun. Actually, this seems to be the usefulness part of creativity, or as they describe it, how "playable and entertaining" "appropriate observers" perceive the game.
As you already refer to LeBlanc's "8 kinds of fun": he also is one of the authors of the MDA framework - a framework to analyze games - which states, that the mechanics of a game are the only thing game designers can influence.
I would say that the mechanics tags are more of a weak negative signal for me. There are lots of games that I don't enjoy despite them featuring mechanics that I like; for example, I should like Scythe based on what it is, but across about two dozen playthroughs I just don't— the pacing is wrong for me and I'm never satisfied with where I end up.
On the other hand, there are certain mechanics that I either don't enjoy (dice battles) or am sick of (deck building) which if present makes it much less likely that I will enjoy the game as a whole.
Totally, I don’t think any one perspective is complete & sufficient.
What I like about the 8 kinds of fun is it pushes back against an approach I think you see a lot in “serious” board game circles of a kind of “model/view” perspective on games. The mechanics are the model and the only part worth paying serious attention to, and the setting/fluff/etc is the essentially interchangeable view. The “8 kinds” perspective is a reminder that people engage with games in a lot of different ways, many of which really live in the interaction between the model and view.
What's the best way to ventilate an old european house during winter?
I've taken up the habit of letting my bedroom windows (slightly) open at nighttime to have fresh air while sleeping.
I'm unsure this is really wise ecologically since outside air == cold air, but at the same time, there is no other way to get fresh air…
Low tech method: air out heavily for 5-10 minutes, 2-3 times per day, ie. when you get up, when you eat lunch and just before going to bed. Open all windows and all internal doors, really get the air moving. Because you're airing out so intensely for a short period of time, the furniture and walls don't cool down, so the air warms up quickly afterwards.
Personal experience:
I came to like mathematics by way of computer science: so first got an understanding and appreciation for discrete maths, logic, etc, and only later on analysis and “phyisics” related mathematics.
It's hard to say exactly why, but I'd wager it's the following: discrete maths is easy to formalize and axiomatize for first year student, so you quickly get a grasp of the “rules of the game”: what axioms you're allowed to use, how an argument works, etc.
On the contrary, when you learn first year analysis, you see all those theorems talking about this (intuitively very simple but) quite complex object – the reals – of which you don't know the axioms (say linearly ordered field something something).
Thus, when you learn about the basics results, you're faced with a kind of two-faced problem: on the one hand, all the basic results are intuitively obvious, while on the other, you have no idea how to build a proof because you don't know what facts you can safely use.
I don't really know how to phrase all that, but discarding the CS/axiomatic side of maths while praising the intuitive physics-inspired one is not the right approach imo.
which seems promising, from an outsider's perspective.
But I guess it's not the same league, even though it seems olive aims at being professional grade (well, which project doesn't)
And for the international market, probably "swiss" is mostly to be understood as "not american/russian/chinese"