Your mention of _Arrival_ throws my mind back to _Contact_. Where they first
receive the message from the aliens in the form of several pictures which must
be assembled to for the whole message, and they finally figure out the pictures
form a three dimensional structure.

	This then reminds me of the Cesar cypher. Take a strip of paper one character
wide and wind it as a spiral around cylinder. The message is then written down
the length of the cylinder (one character per cycle). The paper is then
unspooled from the cylinder. The message than is cyphered until you wrapped
around a same size of cylinder.

	The other interesting idea to borrow more from _Arrival_ is to have the
ideograph modify itself through time. So a glyph would modify person -> building
-> child (a teacher).

On 5/8/2021 5:11 PM, Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson at port.ac.uk (via
tml list) wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> Thomas has beaten me to mentioning alphabetic vs ideographic and I'm afraid I'm
> so far past tired I can't face switching to the other computer to look up
> Jotting #7 to see if it was in that.
>
> The other thing I was going to suggest was: is there a place for mentioning the
> 'circular' (not spiral) writing found in the film _Arrival_?  (Of course, you
> may or may not wish to mention/expand upon the time aspects of the language!).
>
> I suppose that makes me wonder if there mightn't be other alien approaches that
> aren't simply left/right or up/down which we've not seen on Earth.  I'm not
> immediately thinking of any except for my attempt at aliens in the recent Amber
> Zone competition (https://amber.zone/2021/04/22/amber-zone-spindrift/
> <https://amber.zone/2021/04/22/amber-zone-spindrift/>) where I had cephalopods
> communicating via touch [1] and when needing to keeping records using seaweed quipu.
>
> That leads me onto thinking about how sign languages are written down
> (illustrated?) - I bought my wife a British Sign Language dictionary when she
> started learning - and how choreography is written down for posterity.  I'm no
> expert but I *think* these would be separate from ideographic representations of
> language.  They don't just contain 'signs' but also movement and "placement" in
> 3d space which is important.  (as well as, in sign language at least, facial
> expressions).
>
> How about aliens obsessed with cubes (or other polyhedrons) - I can't imagine
> what they might do with them!!  Perhaps they write on the surfaces of those with
> rules about order.
>
> How about crossed writing (not quite palimpsest)?
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossed_letter
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossed_letter>)
>
> How about flower/fan/etc language?  THough I appreciate we're getting away from
> 'writing systems' somewhat.
>
> Ciphers where zigzags might be used?  (Or writing on cylinders like scytales)
>
> OK, must go to bed and I'm just rambling.
>
> HTH
>
> tc
>
>
>
>
> [1]  It was some weeks after submitting this that it occurred to me I'd come up
> with aliens communicating via touch (which may not be unique in Traveller but I
> can't think of other examples) after a year of lockdown/working-from-home!  I
> can't help feeling my subconscious may have been at work there!
>
> It's probably not worth the effort of clicking on the link but back in January I
> attempted this piece of {poetry} (for want of a better word):
> https://twitter.com/timpaa/status/1350358747265249281
> <https://twitter.com/timpaa/status/1350358747265249281>
>
>
> On Sat, 8 May 2021 at 11:25, Thomas Jones-Low <xxxxxx@gmail.com
> <mailto:xxxxxx@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Sorry, hit send before completing the thoughts.
>
>     You overlook the differences between the alphabetic languages vs the
>     ideographic
>     languages. The glyphs of several far east languages represent whole words or
>     ideas at a time. So the (theoretical) more compact nature of the ideographic
>     writing allow more flexibility of the layout of the scripts.
>
>     And while most languages have a defined order of glyph layout (Left to right or
>     right to left for example), there are many artistic uses of altering this.
>     Usually the intent of the artist is to challenge the assumptions of the
>     readers.
>     This shows up in some ConLang designs. The examples of the ConLang you provide
>     an an excellent example of this.
>
>     Which glyphs are used for writing and their ordering is, like the languages
>     themselves, the subject to the history and evolution of the language. The
>     manner
>     of writing a language evolves as the language evolves. This may be the subject
>     of another whole article.
>
>
>     On 5/7/2021 10:05 PM, Jeff Zeitlin wrote:
>      > Comments desired, please, plus any other ideas you think should be
>      > incorporated.
>      >
>      >
>      >
>      >
>      > Jotting #12: Writing Systems II
>      >
>      > In Jotting #7, I discussed the various types of writing systems that a
>      > language could use, and mentioned some languages that used each, for
>      > illustrative purposes. When creating writing systems for world building,
>      > you might also want to consider how the glyphs from your writing system go
>      > together on the page.
>      >
>      > Writing is, fundamentally, one-dimensional - that is, the glyphs are
>      > written and read in sequence, and the order in which they are read
>      > determines the words and their meanings that are communicated. But how that
>      > sequence is placed on a two-dimensional surface can vary.
>      >
>      > Most languages known to be in use at present are read and written left to
>      > right and top to bottom. That is, one starts at the top of the page, reads
>      > across along the first line of text from left to right, and then returns to
>      > the left side of the page to read the second line, and so on. This appears
>      > to be by far the most common way of doing things; languages that use all of
>      > the types of writing systems mentioned in Jotting #7 are written this way.
>      > Some languages, most notably languages written with variations on the
>      > Arabic and Hebrew abjads, are written right to left and top to bottom.
>      >
>      > Many of the languages of the Far East are classically written in vertical
>      > columns, read top to bottom and right to left. It is increasingly common to
>      > see these languages written left to right and top to bottom, perhaps under
>      > the influence of early computerization (modern computers can handle
>      > vertically-written text). An exception can be found in Mongolian; the
>      > classical script is written top to bottom and left to right.
>      >
>      > While comparatively rare, there are known examples - some in limited but
>      > current use - of languages that are traditionally written and read from
>      > bottom to top. It is common, however, for these languages to be written
>      > left to right and top to bottom.
>      >
>      > There are (historical) examples of scripts written as boustrophedons - that
>      > is, alternate lines are left to right and right to left. In most, but not
>      > all, known examples, the individual glyphs are mirrored on alternate lines.
>      >
>      > The text of the Phaistos Disc is undeciphered, but those who have studied
>      > it generally believe that it is written spiraling inward in a clockwise
>      > direction. (One notable thing about the Phaistos Disc is that it is the
>      > earliest known certain example of the use of movable type for printing.)
>      > The pre-European-contact Mayan language was written as pairs of
>      > side-by-side glyphs stacked vertically. Columns were read left to right.
>      > This pattern was also used in other mesoAmerican languages.
>      >
>      > Several present-day languages (most notably Thai and Lao, and most
>      > languages derived from written Chinese ideograms/logograms) are written as
>      > scriptio continua, or without spaces or punctuation; often, language that
>      > now use spaces and punctuation were also originally written scriptio
>      > continua.
>      >
>      > In C.J. Cherryh's Chanur novels, one race, the T'ca, are so alien that
>      > their messages can only be represented in Hani [using English as a
>      > stand-in] as a 6×6 matrix of words, and one supposedly must read said
>      > matrix in all directions to understand the message. While an interesting
>      > idea, Cherryh does not carry it off well; the examples provided in the
>      > story are not difficult to interpret simply reading down the columns.
>      >
>      > The Vulcan tanaf-kitaun script at korsaya.org <http://korsaya.org> can
>     actually be written in
>      > any direction; a text starts with a symbol that unambiguously indicates the
>      > direction of writing.
>      >
>      > Most (but not all) scripts derived from the Latin and Greek alphabets
>      > (including the Cyrillic script) include two forms of each letter, generally
>      > called "upper case", "capitals", or "majuscules", and "lower case",
>      > "small", or "minuscules", and there are grammatical and orthographic rules
>      > governing when each is used. Letters in scripts based on the Arabic abjad
>      > have varying forms based on the surrounding glyphs, rather than a "case"
>      > distinction. Other scripts generally have only a single form for each glyph
>      > ("monocase"). Constructed scripts are often, but not exclusively, monocase.
>      >
>      > ®Traveller is a registered trademark of
>      > Far Future Enterprises, 1977-2020. Use of
>      > the trademark in this notice and in the
>      > referenced materials is not intended to
>      > infringe or devalue the trademark.
>      >
>
>
>     --
>               Thomas Jones-Low
>     Work: xxxxxx@softstart.com <mailto:xxxxxx@softstart.com>
>     Home: xxxxxx@gmail.com <mailto:xxxxxx@gmail.com>
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> Timothy Collinson
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--
         Thomas Jones-Low
Work:	xxxxxx@softstart.com
Home:   xxxxxx@gmail.com