lvxferre

I'm not a native English speaker, I don't have any experience with this ITA crap, nor any emotional investment on it. However I studied enough Linguistics to smell the bullshit from a distance.

I'm sceptic on claims that ITA hindered or helped those people to learn English. It looks like fluff; not specially helpful, but not specially harmful either. At most you could claim it wasted time that could be better spent teaching something else, but that's it.

The hardest part to teach someone to read in an alphabet is not to teach them the value of the letters, but rather the idea behind the alphabet - that those lines in a paper are related to some abstract segments of their speech. And that "idea" is trivial to transpose, if you need to relearn the former; for example, if you're learning a second alphabetic script.

Now look at the personal anecdotes being shared. I'll emphasise some parts:

And then, at A-level, I’ll never forget my English teacher said to me, ‘You’ll never get an A because of your spelling.’ That was crushing. English was the one subject I loved – I felt so aggrieved.”

I know plenty people around her age who can't spell Portuguese for shit. As in, "eçeção" tier. Even with a more transparent spelling system, and no Initial Teaching Alphabet. But just like her, they had shitty teachers really, really eager to put students down.

For Alder, the abrupt transition from ITA to the standard alphabet felt like a betrayal. “It was like they said: ‘Right, we’ve told you a pack of lies for the past two years, now this is how you’re actually meant to read and write.’ My disgust at being lied to, that loss of trust, that stuck with me. I was never interested in English after that.”

"We're going to teach you this, but you'll never be told why."

Is the issue really ITA? Or primitive didactic methods of those times, that treated students as stupid little things instead of rational human beings? I'm betting the later.

Only if I sleep belly up. If I sleep on the side, I don't.

The one actually noticing this was my ex-fiancée, we typically spooned when sleeping and she never complained about snoring, but once I was too tired to wait for her and slept first - belly up - she woke me up, worried because I was snoring.

What I want (for Civ 5; I don't care about Civ 7) is semi-auto exploration: let me tell the scout the rough area I want it to explore, then ask me again once it's done. It's enough to reduce micromanagement, but it allows me to set up my priorities, that might be different from one playthrough to another.

This is amazing - thank you!

You mean Ø? I accidentally inverted it, but it should be easy for people to flip it. Here's a full list of what I've tried to represent:

ABCDEFGHIJ
LMNOPQRST
UVXYZ!?.,"«»
ØİKWYÐÞŁ
БГДЖЗИЛПЦ
ШЩЬЮЯФ
1234567890

I didn't include Ч because it's easy to sub it with 4, Volapuk style.

Mine is simply orthographical. Some are informally transcribing it to the nearest English equivalent, but pronunciations are different, there are different ways to transcribe it, and even the original spelling is influencing it a bit:

• "Uh-Gah Teh Emm-y-El" implies the first /a/ from "agá" (H) got reduced to [ɐ], the last vowel in "ele" is being elided, and the /e/ in "eme" (M) is being lowered to [ɛ]. I bet the -y- is to represent [ɨ], English lacks the sound so it gets tricky to represent it.
• "Agga Teh Emi Eli" implies the ending /e/'s are actually /i/'s. There's some orthographic interference though - the "e" in "eme" (M) is typically [e] for those folks, but the one in "ele" (L) is [ɛ] instead.

Do you have some good examples of that? The more, the merrier - it might help people to get ideas.

I'll repeat a few things I've been saying about this. To keep it ~~short:~~ less verbose:

What people call "toxicity" online relies heavily on irrationality, from the aggressor and/or the target. And politics raises the stakes of everything, so irrationality + political engagement is specially prone to generate catty behaviour, name calling, uncalled combativeness, and all that crap.

Now look at social media. You'll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.

Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.

Ah, that's OK.

As I mentioned in another comment, I'm aware this is not the "only" way to do things. It's more like a starting point - 5x3 letters look decent enough, they're easy to distinguish, and even for the same size you can twist things up a bit (like adding a few pixels to ⟨A⟩, or making the ⟨8⟩ only seven pixels in total).

For example if you have less space you could make most letters 2x3 or 3x2, but it'll look messy.

If you don't mind having a few six pixels tall letters:

Ш (for reference), Щ, Ц (same problem as Щ), and У (it's weird to use Y in its place, but I kind of forgot to add it).

Of course, this will depend on space, plus personal style. I'm not claiming this is the only way to do things, it's just a viable "font" for people struggling with text in the canvas to use as starting point.

(I actually use a similar strategy with diacritics in the Latin alphabet. Specially ⟨Ç⟩.)

Counter argument

What argument are you exactly trying to "counter"?