Re: Ideographic Conlangs

John Cowan writes:
 > Tim May scripsit:
 >
 > > (there have been attempts* to _construct_ ideographic
 > > scripts, but I don't think any of them have achieved completion, let
 > > alone been widely adopted).
 >
 > Blissymbolics is definitely functional for its community, and it has
 > no phonetic component whatever.  It's primarily used by people who are
 > cognitively and/or physically impaired and don't have spoken language.
 >
 > Bliss has two computer encodings, an existing one called ISO-IR-169,
 > which encodes every standard Bliss *word* separately, and a proposed one
 > that will probably form part of the Unicode Standard when it is finalized,
 > which encodes the individual ideographs of Bliss.
 >
 > For example, the ideograph for "pizza" is a circle cut into six equal parts
 > by straight lines, and is proposed for encoding as Unicode character U+12281.
 > However, the *word* "pizza" is written as U+122A2 U+12281, where U+122A2 is
 > the ideograph for "food", essentially a small circle with an underbar.
 > In ISO-IR-169, the 16-bit code 3F40 directly represents the word "pizza".
 >

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?

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