I’ve been using Swype on my phone a lot because a) when it works it’s amazing and saves a lot of time typing long words, b) when it doesn’t work it’s almost always hilarious, and c) I always feel like I writing some mystical rune that means “presumably” or something.
The last part sort of made me think - what if there was a writing system made up of Swype patterns? Like, here is my keyboard:
And here is the Swype pattern for “presumably”:
This has a lot of confusing overlaps that doesn’t make a great glyph, but if you tweak it a bit, you get something like this:
which I think looks pretty good, as a word glyph. I’m not sure how you’d classify this writing system - it has one character per word rather than one character per phoneme (setting aside for the moment the sometimes quasi-phonemic nature of the English alphabet), so it isn’t strictly an alphabet, but the shape is not related to the word meaning at all, so it isn’t a logography or an ideography either. It definitely has an alphabetical componenent, in as much as words that have the same phonemes will probably touch the same parts of the character space, but there’s no shape that corresponds to individual phonemes. There are, however, shapes that correspond to sequences of phonemes, like, for example, every word that ends in -ly is going to end with that same l-y curve that this glyph ends with, more or less. So it’s in terms of representation I think it’s somewhere between alphabetic and syllabic, and works sort of like Hangul except probably in a less well-defined way (since we’re changing the characters slightly).
Note: you don’t necessarily need the QUERTY keyboard and Swype to do something like this, you could lay out the phonemes of your language in any arrangement you wanted to and generate characters using Swype-like mechanics. I’m pretty sure there aren’t natural writing systems that do this, although I’d be interested to know if any conlangs do this.
