Re: Optimum number of symbols

Kendra wrote:
> Oh, fancy! It looks like it's meant to be cursive?
No, each character is written separately, there's no connections.  I
think it *might* be possible connect them, but I've never tried it, so
I'm not sure if it would work.  It might be difficult, if you compare
things like _di_ and _fa_, so if it did have a cursive style, it would
probably be closer to Arabic, where not all letters connect, than to
Roman cursive where all lower-case letters connect.

> 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? :)
Well, I started with a set of characters meant for Common Kassi, the
ancestor of Uatakassi, I played around with forms until I found a set I
liked.  At that stage, a lot of the characters were 2 or 3 strokes.
Then I just modified them by writing them over and over again.  The CLV
characters are devised from ligatures, as you may have noticed in their
similarities.  Basically, I just played around with it for a few months
until I found something I liked.

Also, the ancestral form had 6 vowels, and an extra consonant (/q/).
The /i/ and /e/ phonemes merged, as did the /u/ and /o/; when this
happened, there were two symbols for every syllable, and one was
arbitrarily dropped, generally, if one was more complex it was dropped
in favor of the simpler one, or if one was less distinct from others, it
might be dropped.  This could lead to interesting variations between
dialects, if some dialects chose to preserve a different set of symbols
than the standard dialect did.  The standard dialect, incidentally, is
based on that used in the village of Tiandukka, which became the capital
of the Kassi Theocracy, and later the nominal capital of the Kassi
Empire.

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