Re: Ideographic Conlangs

Tim May scripsit:

> Interesting.  It's functional enough to be useful, granted, but is it
> complete in the senes of being able to express anything that could be
> expressed in a spoken language?
Well, no, how could it be?  New lexemes can only come into existence by
the agreement of the users (coordinated by Blissymbolics Communication
International); they aren't necessarily intuitive:  for example, the word
"donkey" is expressed by the ideographs for "horse" and "work" in that
order, which could equally well be interpreted as "draft horse", but aren't.
There is no standard word for "australopithecine", and it will probably
be a while before there is one.

The ISO-IR-169 document, which gives the standard words in alphabetical
(English) order and the corresponding ideographs, is available at
http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/169.pdf (WARNING: 13 megs!).
Michael Everson's Unicode proposal, giving just the ideographs and
their English translations (seemingly in no particular order) is at
http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1866.pdf .



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John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
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