Latin has seen better days

Now it is quite rare that I find something on the World Wide Web that is worth looking at and today I am writing about one of them. So, someone, I follow on Twitter discovered a new interesting project called “Dotsies” and after having a look at it – I have to say that I am very impressed. The idea behind the thing is simply to look at replacing the Latin script for reading. As you may know that the Latin script is now over 1000 years old and it has served its time well.

Having originally been designed to allow people to easily write, it takes up too much space today when devices are getting smaller and smaller. Dotsies are a little different to how the Arabic numbering system replaced the old roman numeral (such as how we write 12345 and not MMMMMMMMMMMMCCCXLV).


The main change as I am sure you have seen in the image above is that each letter has now been changed into dots (and a further small dot for capital letters). As I am sure you will see this ends up allowing more text to be displayed at any given time which is again useful for small devices. I am going to show you in a minute some sample text but remember that this is read exactly the same as English – nothing changes other than what is used to write the letter in the first place so all you need to learn is what dot is what which is something you could learn in 30 minutes if you put your mind to it.

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