Re: Optimum number of symbols

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).