Type study · two scripts from one pen
Two typefaces where the shape of writing carries meaning as well as sound.
Weft is English you can read, where the writing reacts to context: common words become marks, affixes shrink, related words are threaded together. Radix is a script for ideas, built in a square from meaning primitives the way Chinese characters are built from radicals.
“idea” = LIGHT over MIND, in Radix Kai · same word in Weft Square as a seal
Sources
Every mechanism below exists in a living or historical script. Neither font invents a new trick. They combine old ones that were never used together.
| Script | Mechanism | Used in |
|---|---|---|
| Arabic | Initial, medial, final and isolated letter forms; kashida stretches joins to justify a line. | Weft joins and justification |
| Devanagari | The shirorekha headline ties a word’s letters into one hanging unit. | Weft phrase-lines, one headline per noun phrase |
| Egyptian | Silent determinatives mark a word’s semantic class, such as walking legs after verbs of motion. | Weft determinatives |
| Medieval Latin | Scribal suspensions and Tironian ⁊ write predictable words in fewer strokes. | Weft logograms for function words |
| Gregg shorthand | “Brief forms” give the commonest words a single stroke. | Weft logograms |
| Hangul | Featural letters packed into square syllable blocks. | Weft Square mode, Radix blocks |
| Xu Bing | Square Word Calligraphy writes English words as Chinese-looking squares. | Weft Square mode |
| Chinese | Radical plus component; five registers from seal to grass script. | Radix composition and its three registers |
| 永, the Eternal | Eight basic strokes taught through one character. | Radix: each stroke type is a relation |
| Cree syllabics | Rotating one shape changes the vowel. | Radix: mirroring flips direction (past ↔ future) |
| Maya | Signs infixed and fused inside one glyph block. | Radix enclosure and overlay |
| Blissymbolics | About 900 meaning primitives, used today for non-speaking people. | Radix primitive set |
| Unicode IDS | ⿰ ⿱ ⿴ describe any CJK character as a tree of parts. | Radix stored as plain text |
Script one
Readers recognise words through their letters, not their outline. So Weft never changes a letter. Meaning goes into everything around the letters: the joins, small silent marks, the headline, and the space under the line. In weaving, the weft is the thread that crosses and binds the warp. Here the letters are the warp and meaning is the weft.
Logograms · the 14 commonest function words
Determinatives · silent marks for meaning
Coloured arcs under the line join words from the same field of meaning. A small knot marks a thread that continues on another line. A red wave above a word replaces “not” or “never”. The prototype uses a small word list instead of a language model, so it will miss words and sometimes mark the wrong ones.
Each word is packed into a square, read left to right and top to bottom, as in Hangul or Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy. English then looks like a column of characters and still reads letter by letter once you know the rule. Reading is slower, so this mode suits titles, seals and monograms.
Script two
A Radix glyph is a picture of a definition. It is built in a square from a small set of meaning primitives, based on the semantic primes that linguists find in every language (THINK, FEEL, BEFORE, NOT, PEOPLE...) plus concrete radicals like WATER, TREE and HOUSE. Chinese places components partly by convention. Radix makes position the grammar.
Where a part sits says what it does
An enclosure means scope (“within, about”). An overlay means tension or negation. The larger part is the more important one. A finished glyph can shrink and become a part of a bigger one.
Strokes as relations · after 永
Mirroring a part reverses its direction, as rotation does in Cree syllabics: PAST mirrored is FUTURE.
Type a formula or tap primitives. A|B puts A left of B, A/B puts A over B, A[B] puts B inside A, A+B overlays them, ~A mirrors A, and parentheses group.
Stored as plain text (Unicode ideographic description sequence)
From sketch to font
Full notes, sources and risks are in meaning_fonts.md.