“redundancy is a feature, not a bug”

So…

It has been suggested here that this looks like my scripts.

No.

All I see here is blocks, lines and dots…and no sample…no attempt at a handwritten version…none of which is a horrible problem, but those are all things I try to include with every script I make.

While I am aware that many of my scripts have a certain flavor of redundancy, it should be clear that all scripts have that same flavor, to varying degrees. Let’s look at a few of the most used natscripts:

Arabic: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm The Arabic script only has 19 distinct letter forms to distinguish more than two dozen sounds…more if we include the adaptations for Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, etc.

Chinese: http://www.omniglot.com/chinese/written.htm Chinese Hanzi has characters so similar they are distinguished by one stroke, or dot. Never mind the fact that there are thousands of characters. Some of the distinctions are as subtle as brush stroke order.

Japanese: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_katakana.htm Perhaps not as widely used, but still difficult for non-natives to learn quickly given that “shi” & “tsu”, “so” & “-n” are as similar as possible without being exactly the same. Keep in mind that these are mixed with Hiragana and Kanji (Chinese hanzi used for Japanese).

Even the Latin alphabet has extremely similar letters; “p” & “q”, “b” & “d”, “n” & “m” & “u” & “w”, etc.

The counter to this is that these similar characters appear together infrequently enough that confusion is not an issue. That is certainly true in many cases. However, the problem here is that the passive script enthusiast sees a presentation image, and maybe one or two samples. They rarely see a full text, or several texts. Another issue is that learnability has very little to do with aesthetics or rotated characters. Readability and legibility is much more related to cognition and aptitude. Dyslexia is a neural disorder and has almost nothing to do with the writing system in question. There have been studies that suggest alphabetic systems (especially English and related languages) are more prone to dyslexic issues because of irregular spellings and word changes, whereas a language like Hindi is less prone to such issues because of regular spelling and word changes. Unfortunately, studies concerning logographic orthographies, such as Chinese, are virtually non-existent.

Finally, let’s try to remember that style and aesthetics are important to a truly great writing system…just as much as functionality. Tengwar, even with all of its silly flipped letters and similar symbols has a style that has inspired thousands of people to take up Quenya or other Tolkien langs. That makes it a feature of his writing, not a bug.