Mandarin (and the other languages
that use the Chinese characters) and Instrumentation are ideographic
languages. I assume that you are familiar with (or
can
find out
about) the structure of written Chinese. There are
over 4,500 'characters' used by Chinese languages.
Instrumentation uses a single glyph with 33 'elements'. Each element
may be
present or absent. Each combination of elements is called an "Aspect
of
the Glyph" or just an 'aspect'. Each aspect has a specific meaning
called a 'term'. A single Instrumentation glyph has over eight and a
half billion aspects.
Here is an example of a term from the Instrumentation game. The 'not' modifies the
'expeditingly', so this would be translated to "before most
not expeditingly" in English (which means something like "before
things
slowed down the most").
Before things were excessively slowed down
I picked an obscure phrase, because I want to focus on the subtlety
of
the differences between glyphs. If we change the
right
element this
term
becomes "most proposingly before not" ( or "before (someone) decided
to
avoid ever making a proposal"). These terms are quite different,
although they are both
considered aspects of 'doing business' within Instrumentation.
The mnemonic system (based on the I Ching) should help people learn
the
relationship between the aspect and the term, but reading fluency
can
only be achieved when the user can recognize the term automatically,
without thinking about the meanings of the elements.
I believe that people will eventually be able to learn to associate
many terms with
their glyphs, but this will require trained pattern recognition
skills,
just like the Chinese ideograms do. I currently assume that people
who
can already
read other ideographic
languages will have a bit of a head start in this skill.
So I picked Chinese because it represents a group of widely used
languages which require
comparable reading skills. I'm not comparing speaking or listening
skills because Instrumentation is not meant to be spoken.
