I just read an article with some conjectures about the cultural significance of the rise and fall of katakana amongst Japanese writing systems. Hey, gimme a break, I'm waiting for a slow download, I'm going to read weird stuff. But the interesting part was when he pointed out that in Japanese semaphore code, it takes more than one, uhm, stance to encode each symbol. It takes a variable number, from one to three. In many cases, the stances are supposed to suggest the strokes of the katakana syllable.
Oh now I want a big pile of Japanese text that's been parsed into syllables so I can measure the frequencies, maybe come up with a simple huffman encoding. Oh, my download finished, never mind.
Labels: flags of all nations, puzzle scene