Re: Optimum number of symbols

> > My friend Jeff's new alphabet thing (I think it's syllabic, but I'm not
> > really sure) has characters for possessives and plurals and such, but he
> > only ever uses his to write in English.
>
> So, would he write "man-plural" for "men"?
>
That's a good question. I doubt it, though, as he explicitly explained to me
that this was the posessive 's', this is the plural 's', this is the past
tense 'ed'...
Actually, he says 'use either.' It would probably make more sense in a
language where this is wholly regular, though off the top of my head, I can
only think of a few irregular plural words in english (men, women,
children.) I think the reason he added it is the fact that when reading
Tiri'n, it's impossible to tell posessive 's' from plural 's' until you get
to the next word....which may or may not be frustrating for beginning
readers. I can read quickly enough that i don't get lost now. ;)

(snipped my butchering)

> Well, actually, there is no /o/ in Uatakassi, but different dialects
> would spell things differently.  For example, a change present in most
> dialects of Low Uatakassi changes /l/ to /w/ after /a/, so that "book"
> would be "uifkau", that would be written U-If-KA-U, if you were to write
> in dialect.  Of course, writing in dialect is considered ignorant, but
> there are a lot of people who do, simply because they can write, but
> they don't know the standard dialect.  :-)  And, I'm sure there'd be
> some hypercorrection, like someone writing what should be _au_ in the
> standard dialect as _al_.
Haha, my mistake; Okay, that answers my question. :)  Thanks for humoring
me. :)

> A scan of the syllabry can be found here:
> http://Nik_Taylor.tripod.com/Conlang/Syllabry.html
Oh, fancy! It looks like it's meant to be cursive?
How did you come up with the symbols (I don't know what you call syllabic
'letters')? Did it start as ideograms and evolve, or did you just have fun
with it? :)

The only writing systems I've ever invented have looked obviously
constructed, though I suppose I can't be too hard on myself for inventing
secret code when I was like, six. :)

-Kendra
http://www.refrigeratedcake.com
http://www.refrigeratedcake.com/other/theatre -- Vade Mecum (comic)

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