Re: Ideographic Conlangs

Wow, so much response in so short a time :)

It's good to see that there are a few other languages with interesting
layouts and concepts. Elephant's memory is deceptively elegant. Rikchik has
an interesting fusion of root and modifiers. However, I didn't see one with
quite my layout paradigm.

I took Jan's advice and created a <a
href="http://www.geocities.com/noktakanto">crappy webpage</a> to display
some sample text. It's at http://www.geocities.com/noktakanto and it has
three short examples with translation. Check it out.

One thing that dogs me is that it's so hard to come up with new characters,
and thus to add vocabulary. Here's something I came up with recently that
might help those of you who are working on ideographic languages. Radicals
in my orthography don't mix as well as they do in chinese; I find in
practice that it's confusing to the eye to string together two characters to
generate an unrelated root. (as if having words splay out in 3 different
directions were not confusing...) I have about 150 characters that I'm
trying to stretch as far as I can. I did come up with one method of
generating new characters, involving an enclosing symbol and an enclosed
symbol, that can more or less double my limited set of roots. The pronouns
in the examples are unrelated characters with two strokes added to the
beginning.

blisset: The text spacing issue does come up in my language, but because the
lines connecting characters are variable in length, it's not such a big
problem -- just extend the lines. Also, the general downward flow of text helps.

Replies