Re: Ideographic Conlangs

From: "Nokta Kanto" <red5_2@...>

> 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?
VSO and ideographic you say? Try Egyptian! Though we only have the consonant
data of the language and no vowels, and it is an extinct language, except in
the form of the ecclesiastical Coptic language. Also, Egyptian does use
prepositions and other bound morphemes. Do you mean a language that uses
word order and syntax to indicate relationships, like Chinese? (I have been,
off and on, working on an experimental international language, or auxlang,
that uses no bound morphemes -- all words have independent meaning, so that
"by the tree" uses the words for "resting against something" and "tree".)

Other ideographic/logographic systems I can think of right off hand: Mayan,
Sumerian/Akkadian cuneiform, Hittite in cuneiform and hieroglyphic versions,
the undeciphered Indus inscriptions and of course Chinese. I mentioned
before that even Arabic, a very phonetic script, has a lot of ligatures and
special forms with some of them bordering on ideographic (in the way the
ampersand, &, is derived from Latin _et_).

~Danny~

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