Re: Hi, I'm a new guy... not in the face!

En réponse à "Hiro M." <hiro_m_2k@...>:

> I'm trying to design a language for a race of people
> in a fantasy story I'm working on, and I've run into
> some
> problems, so I
> thought I'd come to the people who know... that's you
> guys, by the way.
>
Or so they say :)) .

>
> In Hangul, the characters are put together to form
> syllables; vowels
> are vertical or horizontal lines so you know where
> they go, and
> consonants are basically whatever. In my language, I
> can't arrange
> them like that, because each character already
> represents a syllable,
> and they are put together in block format to create
> words. So how
> could I design a basic set of rules to determine what
> can and what
> can't go where in order to form orderly blocks?
>
Well, the problem with this idea is that words can be of a awful lot of
syllables, making the whole one-block-per-word idea a little difficult IMHO.
Unless your language doesn't allow words of, say, four syllables, you're gonna
run into trouble.

My idea is that you should allow blocks of until four syllables. If a word is
made of one syllable, use the character for this syllable with the size of a
block. If it's two syllables, put two characters to form one block. Have them
one above the other, or one at the side of the other, and stretch them in the
other direction to have still the block shape and size. Choose the order you
want (do you want the first syllable on top, bottom, left or right of the
second syllable?). For words of three syllables, put two syllables together,
and one alone (you can choose whatever you want), thus you'll have for instance
two characters on top of the block, and one bigger on the bottom, thus keeping
the block shape. Try to make it consistent with two-syllable blocks. For
instance, if two-syllable blocks are with the first syllable on top of the
second, it would be logical to have three-syllable blocks with the first two
syllables on top of the third one, but it would be strange to have the first
two syllables under the third one (but you could well decide to put the first
two syllables at the left of the third one. Look how Korean does things). And
for words of four syllables, you make a block out of four characters, keeping
if possible (and if you want) consistency with the previous two kinds of
blocks. For longer words though, you'll be obliged to cut them in two blocks or
more. But longer words wouldn't be that frequent would they?

Anyway, just an idea so that you can start as you wish.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.