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Re: Optimum number of symbols

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Monday, May 20, 2002, 1:49
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. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42