Alright, now I have a free moment to try translating an actual form and see where that leads us. It's not going to be perfect, but that's ok. The only bar that we're trying to clear right now is "better than English", which shouldn't be too hard to do. So I'm going to start by attempting one of the most basic forms that I know and seeing what sort of practical problems I encounter. Without further ado then...
I'm going to start with a very basic form that's mostly just blocks and punches. Here's the first movement:
Assume Front Position and bow. Right foot steps out into Horse Stance. Bring arms together vertically, then Knuckle Roll with Dragon Breathes Fire.So what do we need? Well, as discussed in previous posts, we need a concise system of symbols to represent atomic actions: blocks, kicks, punches, etc. The question arises as to whether I should develop a list of symbols or just use one which already exists. I think that if I were to try to develop symbols at this point the effort would be largely fruitless; I have only a vague idea at this point of the problems I'm trying to solve. So it seems that I should use a system which already exists.
And here's where we run into problems, because there's bugger-all in terms of martial-arts dictionaries with both English and Asian character sets. The most likely candidates I've found so far are the Japanese Martial Arts Dictionary and 汉英英汉武术词典, but I don't have access to a copy of either. So, absent any argument to the contrary, I'm just going to use Simplified Chinese.
That being said I should note that I'm not a linguist and don't speak Chinese; I'm relying on Google's translation service. There are undoubtedly much better translations than what I'm going to use; the reader is encouraged to chime in with any suggestions. So, here's how I'm going to render the atoms from the first movement1:
- Front Position: 前线立场
- Bow: 弓
- Horse Stance: 马立场
- Dragon Breathes Fire: 龙呼吸火
What's going on in the form is that the performer transitions from Front Position to Horse Stance; that much can be inferred simply by rendering the motion as "前线立场 弓 马立场". But in performing that transition you can step out with the right or the left; how to render that?
One possible candidate is
We could choose to interpret that as a transition via the right foot. But that, to some degree, defeats the purpose of the dan tien line. Horse stance is fundamentally a movement (specifically, a lowering) of the dan tien, so my instinct is that the glyphs for horse stance should live on the dan tien line.
If we choose to go that route we need some clean way of indicating "by way of the right foot". How about
So what I've done here is to rearrange the relative positioning of the attention and dan tien lines. I originally placed them "on top of" the arm and leg lines, respectively, to mimic their spatial relations. But I don't know that that positioning adds anything. The above, on the other hand, makes it easy to indicate "by way of" using something as simple as a couple of lines. Also, I find that it makes it easier to keep the left and right sides straight, since they've visually separated by another line.
A fair criticism at this point is that the lines indicating transition via the right foot are superfluous; in the system that this particular form comes from you always step out to the right under normal circumstances. My response is that I'm looking to create a more generalizeable system, so its useful to be able to indicate such transitions. If a particular system were to use the notation herein being developed it could certainly decide to make such transitions "silent" by convention.
I find also that, since the action proceeds from left to right, I'm envisioning the hypothetical practitioner facing to the right of the diagram as if I'm looking down on em from above. In that case the left and right sides should swap like so
Thus the final rendering of the first movement is
Compared with the quoted text above I think it conveys just as much, if not more, information in a more concise format. We'll see if this is born out by subsequent movements. That's enough for now; I'll attempt the next movement time permitting.
1 As a side note I recommend BabelPad as a quick-and-dirty way of working with Unicode character sets.
