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Re: Optimum number of symbols

From:Barry Garcia <barry_garcia@...>
Date:Monday, May 20, 2002, 4:39
Ray Brown writes:

>I know some artlangers have devised their own scripts. >3. Have such scripts been alphabetic (like JRRT's Tengawr and Dwarvish >runes), or have you used some other system?
Whenever i've invented a script for one of my conlangs, usually it's been an alphasyllabary. I did experiment with an alphabet once, but found it to be too "repetitive" (see below for why)
> >4. Were you motivated by any thoughts of 'optimality' or just doing it for >the fun of creating?
Optimality was more of an afterthought. Mostly i choose alphasyllabaries because i just like how they look. I also think they're fun to play around with, and calligraphically, the diacritics allow for additional design elements. However, they do offer the compactness of a syllabary, with the efficiency of an alphabet. Meaning, because my conlangs are never CV at their basic syllables only, but include CVC combinations, a pure syllabary would be inefficient, and i would have to resort to other measures (such as the Hanunoo way of simply omitting the syllable final consonant). Also, as I said above, when i created an alphabet, my mind would see the repetitions of the vowels, which i dont like. While in my alphasyllabic scripts a word like "dada" is certainly repetitive appearing, a word like daratala does not (to me). In an alphabetic script, the glyphs for a would stand out a lot (with the Latin script not so because i see the words more as a unit, rather than individual elements).