Re: To Amber (wasRe: beautiful scripts

sorry, ignore this... I went to reply but hit the send
key!!

--- Amber Adams <amber@...> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 06:35:03AM -0700,
> SuomenkieliMaa wrote:
> > Hi Christophe, Amber,
>
> Hi!
>
> > At the moment, I'm learning Thai "for the fun of
> it."
>
> I'm glad to see other people have the same twisted
> idea of fun as me. :)
>
> > You may know that Thai, albeit a completely
> separate
> > language from Khmer, has imported a large bulk of
> its
> > vocabulary (and customs, it seems) from Cambodia.
>
> Yes, and vice-versa, as Cambodia's influence faded
> and Thailand's grew,
> many words entered Khmer from Thai as well.
>
> > Occasionally, I have glanced over this quite
> consise
> > manual of Khmer hand-writing I picked up this
> summer
> > while on vacation in Phnom Penh -- it does
> resemble
> > Thai in a lot of ways, and Thai, if you ask me, is
> a
> > piece-of-cake to master.
>
> I'd like to know your secret, then. ;)
>
> I've looked at the Thai script, and I couldn't make
> any sense of it,
> due to the similarity of the characters, both in
> their shapes, and in
> that there seem to be multiple characters for the
> same sound.
>
> This bothers me about Khmer, as well.  Because of
> sound changes, the
> 'ka kha ga gha' arrangement of brahmi-spawn has
> become 'ka kha ko kho,'
> with no apparent rhyme or reason (other than
> tradition) as to when to
> write a word with the a-vowel and when to use the
> o-vowel.
>
> > After a couple of weeks focusing on the
> mind-boggling
> > manner in which the Thais write, you do catch on
> > quickly!  Let me tell you that, from the
> perspective
> > of a Westerner, Japanese 3-layered kana/kanji
> script
> > still takes the medal as "most difficult to master
> > reading/writing"!  After nearly 10 yrs (half of
> which
> > I've lived/worked in the country), I'm almost
> ready to
> > comfortably read a newspaper in Japanese...
>
> Aww, Japanese isn't so bad.  Learning the kana
> systems is no worse
> than learning any other foreign system of writing
> really, it takes some
> time but it's not anything horribly painful.  Of
> course, the kanji are
> another matter.  However, in that, I don't think
> that Japanese is any
> worse than Chinese, or any other language that uses
> characters.  Characters
> are just a headache.
>
> > By the way, my half-hearted attempt at my conlang
> > (Vya:a:h) has left me stumped.  The script appears
> a
> > pseudo-Khmer script written in form of Hangul, but
> > also incorporates the Chinese/Japanes system of
> > pictograms for up to the 500 most common concepts.
> > I'm stumped, however, with how to keep the
> > "3-to-an-inverted-triangle-set" concept I want,
>
> I had a thought about this, my inspiration came from
> the way that Chinese
> characters seem to cram in increasingly complicated
> radicals into the same
> space.  Why don't you just squish the characters
> down?
>
> For example, a basic word might just use three
> simple symbols, arranged in
> an inverted triangle.  However, the nice thing about
> inverted triangles is
> that you can make a larger inverted triangle out of
> three smaller ones.
> So what if in the case of a word using 9 symbols,
> you wrote three triangles
> in the same pattern as the basic word, only each one
> was much smaller,
> squashed into the space meant for a single
> character?  That would mean that
> some of your words would be much "denser" than
> others (kind of like the look
> of various Chinese characters on a page) but you
> would preserve the
> look of one triangle for one character.

=====
Matt (suomenkieli@yahoo.co.jp/@yahoo.com)
#205-4-27-4 Izumi, Suginami-ku, Tokyo 168-0063 Japan
Home tel/fax: +81-3-5938-6733

Matthew E.H. Swadener
Nikko Salomon Smith Barney Securities, Ltd.
Work tel: +81-3-5293-7233 (direct)

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