Number-Colour-Phoneme Associations: From IBM CGA Colours to Mnemonic Systems(susam.net)
29 pointsby susam8 days ago5 comments
  • 2mlWQbCK6 days ago
    Screenshot shows program in GW-BASIC 3.23 from 1988. I tried it in GW-BASIC 1.0 (the version Microsoft released with a free license a few years ago) and it worked as expected. It also worked well in PC-BASIC.

    https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC

    https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ (or just pip install pcbasic)

    The debug-commands seemed to work fine with the debug included by default in DOSBox-X, but I was too lazy to input all of the digits. I never had any idea how to use debug, so I learned something new here in addition to some more things about mnemonics.

    • susam6 days ago
      The DEBUG.EXE example in my post demonstrates using the E command to enter bytes directly into video memory. While that's certainly one way to use DEBUG.EXE, I'd say it's not the most typical use case.

      Back in the day, I primarily used DEBUG.EXE to disassemble existing executables or assemble small programs from scratch. It almost felt like "scripting" in assembly language. If you're curious, I wrote a couple of blog posts in 2002–2003 documenting how I used to do this:

      * https://susam.net/programming-with-dos-debugger.html

      * https://susam.net/editing-binaries-in-dos.html

      I'd love to know if others have similar experiences!

  • watersb6 days ago
    I used to have an association between screen colors and numbers from another Microsoft Basic, for the Tandy Color Computer.

    Long since forgotten them. There weren't that many.

    I love the mnemonic devices, though.

    A friend of mine changed the way she teaches English sounds to non-native speakers; she and a partner developed the Color Vowel Chart.

    https://www.colorvowel.com/interactive-chart

    I don't know if that is relevant to this neat article, but I do enjoy the use of color to reinforce conceptual mappings.

  • alwa6 days ago
    This delights me.

    I’ve worked with Soundex, which uses a rather different set of digit/consonant associations, but the “major system” Susam uses was new to me. Apparently [0] it has centuries of pedigree—with the specific pattern Harry Lorayne used dating to the turn of the 19th century, laid out by a delightfully named Mr. Von Feinaigle.

    [0] https://artofmemory.com/blog/history-of-the-major-system/

  • bitwize6 days ago
    Sounds like a great way to get induced synaesthesia. What a neat little system. Playing with ideas in the purest sense.
  • n_plus_1_acc5 days ago
    Very interesting. I can See that you haven't assigned /w/, /j/ and /h/, is that intentional? Also, what happens when a word only has vowel phonemes, like 'eye'?
    • susam5 days ago
      The phoneme-number assignment is something I learnt from a book. That system was developed by several people over several hundred years. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system for more details about it.

      Indeed /w/, /j/, and /h/ are not assigned any numbers in this system. I believe the intention was to omit sounds that are phonetically too similar to vowel sounds.

      A word composed entirely of vowel sounds are not used in this system.

      • schlauerfox5 days ago
        Yeah, I leaned from an old "Bruno Furst" memory course, but it's fairly widespread to use the same system, because you can create visual mental pictures from combinations of the sounds into a word dictionary that links to numbers. The phonetics are fairly loose and designed to be adapted as you need it. You just insert vowels as you need to make words mental pictures vivid. Once you have a 'library' it becomes a hook system.