Re: Ideographic Conlangs

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".

--
John Cowan   <jcowan@...>   http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
"One time I called in to the central system and started working on a big
thick 'sed' and 'awk' heavy duty data bashing script.  One of the geologists
came by, looked over my shoulder and said 'Oh, that happens to me too.
Try hanging up and phoning in again.'"  --Beverly Erlebacher

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