Models for Cognition: Belief vs Connectionism; links on writing style

There's an interesting article about the consequences of connectionist models for the theory of beliefs. I think it's interesting that one counterexample is taken as a proof for the non-existence of beliefs, whereas a lot of further contraints (for biological and evolutionary reasons) might apply to require the construction to be more uniform/unique.

Another set of links regarding style of writing papers/thesis: Nine cirlces of latex hell, essential guide to latex and a rant on Strunk's Elements of Style.

Reading Speed: Chinese vs English

I always wondered about mankind's languages and writing systems, one of the reasons I looked into Lojban (quite) a while ago. In an earlier post about writing systems I expressed my fascination about non-linear systems. But even with linear systems, we have alphabetic, syllabic and logographic systems. But it turns out the our systems are optimal in the sense that our cognitive abilities won't let us process more optimized systems, at least that is indicated by a study on reading speed with Chinese vs English - two major examples of logographic and alphabetic writing systems.

Writing systems and non-linearity

Some time ago I posted some links, one of them pointing to a non-linear, graph like writing system called Ouwi; meanwhile I spent some time reading up on the topic of writing systems and have some more pointers:

Pinuyo is a pictorial language which indicates grammatical function of the ideograms by placement and surrounding symbols.

I also found a long, but sometimes deviating thread on 2-dimensional writing systems on the conlang mailing list archive. Unfortunatelly many of the links are now dead, the thread is from 2005.

Omniglot is a nice website about alphabets, writing systems and languages. It contains some constructed systems, like block script, a sylabic alphabet for the english language which combines letters to blocks (like the korean script for example). Most of them are linear ones.

I'm still wondering if there are some languages/alphabets optimized for reading speed. Most are either evolved, natural languages, which certainly are a compromise between reading and writing and the constructed ones optimized for speed like the morse code or shorthand.

In an edit, let me just add a few more links, somewhat related:

Láadan, a feminist language designed for countering male-centering of natural languages.
The gripping language, not spoken but transmitted by touching of the hands.

Some pointers to articles

Some pointers to articles, already old:

The Ouwi writing system (http://ouwi.org/writing.html):

This describes, besides an artistic invented language, a non-linear, two-dimensional writing system. It has ten letters made up of four different atomar symbols. The only relevace for identifying a letter is the order of the atomar symbols they're made of, meaning letters can be flipped, rotated or bent at the joints. Letter cannot only be connected horizontally or vertically like in Roman, Arabic and Chinese systems, but also be intersected or be the source of radiation of letters in different directions. It reminded me of the Ilkash writing system which also uses a non-linear 2d system to add more information into symbols and the flow of text (in Ithkuil, the probably non-speakable 'predecessor' of Ilkash, even characters can morph). In contrast to the last two mentioned systems, the Ouwi system is ment to be easily learnt and remembered.


Google's go programming language (http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/googles_new_language_go.php) and concurrency in go (http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/the_go_i_forgot_concurrency_an.php) for a quick overview, in case you don't already have an overview.