Re: Ideographic Conlangs

Nokta Kanto wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I'm new here, I've been looking through the archives a bit.  I've been
> working on an artistic conlang for a while, and mine seems to diverge
> quite
> radically from most of the constructed languages I've found.  It looks
> like most constructed languages start with phonology and grammar. My
> language is entirely written (the language has no associated sounds), is
> made of ideographs, and lays out words on the page according to their
> relationships rather than queueing them with prepositions and
> inflections to mark case. It is (approximately, since words are not in a
> true sequence) a VSO language. So far, I haven't found any conlangs like
> this. Does anyone here know of any similar conlangs?
Whoa! Brainshare!

I just decided to do an ideographic-script language about three days
ago. At the same time I thought of this, I was wondering about my
(not-well-developed) ocean race, and wondering what sort of script they
would use if they had a sign language only--and then I decided that they
would just adopt the language of the [Insert Name Here] for writing. So,
I guess that qualifies as an ideographic language  with no phonetic
component.

And I'm also using non-strict VSO word order. Agent and patient will be
distinguished by pragmatics--that is, the agent is by default the more
"topic-worthy" constituent. So, for example, the following sentences
would all mean "I hit him":
Hit me him.
Hit him me.
Me hit him.
Him hit me.
Me him hit.
Him me hit.

If you wanted to have the less topic-worthy constituent be the agent
("He hit me"), you'd have to use before the patient the preposition I'll
just gloss as "to" for the moment, giving interlinear "Hit him to me."
(Or "Hit to me him" or "Him hit to me" or any of those.)

At the moment, I'm worrying more about the ideographs than the spoken
language. As such, I don't actually have a Romanization yet. I *do* have
a phonology (and a rather weird one at that--was inspired by my recent
thread to include both bidental and bilabial percussives), which will
evolve in a couple different directions to produce a result similar to
the Chinese dialects.

- Ian Maxwell
--
C'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est la pomme de terre.

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