Re: Ideographic Conlangs

From: "lblissett" <blissett@...>

>         My main conlang is phonetic and grammatical, but it also has a
> mostly-obsolete "formal" style of writing which is ideographic. These
> "glyphs" can't be spoken, or even read, only interpreted, since the shape
of
> the lines, the auxiliary symbols, and the direction certain shapes seem to
> be "moving in" are only supposed to make sense when taken as a whole. That
> is, it's (supposed to be) a nonlinear representation of a whole concept.
>
>         I've had a lot of trouble with it, because they take a long time
to
> draw, and the list of "mini-meanings" I have is small and I don't really
> have the time to develop it, unless I come up with some systematic
approach
> for doing so. Also, it's hard to know how to space things out, you have to
> sort of know what it's supposed to look like beforehand, otherwise I don't
> have the room to construct it properly, and getting an "image" like that
> becomes very difficult for an idea of any significant complexity.
>
>          I have no idea what yours looks like or how it's made, so maybe
> this isn't very helpful.
First of all, my apologies for not saying so the first time, but welcome to
the list Nokta! And pardon my confusion of the terms "ideographic" and
"logographic", since I don't know of any truly ideographic natural language,
and I am aware of Blissymbolics (very impressive work!)

In the future -- after I get a lot of other stuff made up -- my elven
race-nation I call Techia (incarnated spiritual beings much like angels or
djinn) probably had an ideographic-type writing system many millennia ago,
then later adopted various phonetic scripts, whether Latin or Cyrillic or
Aramaic or Arabic, when it became necessary to integrate more into human
society. The model I want to use is based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, which
unfortunately I haven't gotten around to really studying. In very ancient
times, the Techians didn't really write stuff down except for artistic,
spiritual, memorial and other purposes, so they would need a
hieroglyphic-type writing system and not hieratic or demotic, and the
pictographs would be fundamentally ideographic, but logography and even
phonography can be used if necessary.

By the way, these are the "aliens" who built the pyramids, if you're into
conspiracy theories, which I kinda am... ;) But this is fiction, not
speculation on the real world.

Part of this work is going to require an extensive study of Egyptian,
Semitic and their relationship within the Afro-Asiatic family.

Another type of script I might work on later, which is totally phonetic (and
a true alphabet since it includes different forms for what would be written
alif-fatha, alif-damma and alif-kasra in Arabic, i.e. initial short vowels),
which would be used primarily for love letters -- that is, an erotography
(or a pornograhy if you're into that sorta thing :P). The model I want to
use is Tifinagh, or Berber script, which is mostly used for love letters and
casual notes anyway.

BTW -- Nokta sounds a lot like the Persian word for "dot", _nokteh_....

~Danny~