propagation into new regions.

[lifftchi]

A gesture to indicate uppercase letters: extend three fingers toward your listener and traverse the hand with extended fingers across your body spanwise. (The derivation, of course, is from the copyeditor's triple line. A corresponding mark for lowercase follows naturally

Comments

[lifftchi]

Japanese has katakana, which read somewhat like italics. Useful for emphasis. (Or to indicate phonetic spelling, or that you're from the Heian period. I may have made up that last one.)

I'm not sure. I generally read uppercase as shouting, right? Most people do. Shouting is pretty universal. Some languages don't have a written representation of it, but I'd argue that it's a useful thing to have. It would be nice to have a way of indicating that you're speaking loudly without the actual inconvenience of raising one's voice.

Yeah, that sounds a little ridiculous. I'm not standing behind this proposal with any degree of seriousness. On the other hand, it's not as if I'm doing anything useful gesture-wise in conversation anyway, so why not make up more signs and use it as an additional channel?

I also think that most language-based ideas will tend to sound ridiculous except to people who grew up with them (for example, grammatical gender), which means that I have no way of knowing which are interesting, and which silly.