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Re: German with Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja?

From:Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
Date:Thursday, July 31, 2008, 13:33
On 31/07/08 22:39:15, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi! > > A few days ago I was discussing with a friend that I want to try > making a Hanzi-based writing system for German. German is not really > suited for this, even much less than Japanese. 'not suited' here > meaning it will probably be fun. :-) > > My idea was to write the stems with Hanzi and the inflection with > some > sort of morphophonological script. I have not decided about > derivational endings, maybe they could be written with Hanzi, too, if > there is some more-or-less clear semantic concept behind it (e.g. > write _-bar_ ('-able') with the Hanzi for _können_ ('be able to/ > can'). > > Dunno whether I should use a fully phonological one for inflection, > however, or whether it would be better to use a morphologically-based > system, and maybe a good mix. > > One question that arose was whether (and if, how) one should mark > umlauts:
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> Or ablauts:
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> There is a combination of ablaut+umlaut, even, in the Past Condition > forms, which are usually umlauted from the past forms (with a few > exceptions, of course):
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> And then, irregular form:
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> Any ideas?
I'm currently throwing up a few ideas with myself for Hanzi for English. My starting-point for it is that it irritates me when people pronounce words as they're spelt because they're spelt like that, so a phonetic spelling reform probably isn't really what I want to do anyway. (Also writing the like the Chinese might have certain advantages.) Anyway, this --- and the application to English, not German --- might mean that my priorities might be a bit different from yours, but this is what I was thinking of: Basically, for umlaut/ablaut/etc, you would simply use the root symbol, with the appropriate inflexional symbol, and voila! you get a word that could as easily be regular as irregular: [dog] -> [dog][pl.] [foot] -> [foot][pl.] Applying this to your German examples, you'd have something like: [Hund] -> [Hund][pl.] [Haus] -> [Haus][pl.] [koch] -> [koch][inf.] [koch][3ps] [koch][past] [koch][pp] [lauf] -> [lauf][inf.] [lauf][3ps] [lauf][past] [lauf][pp] and so on. Note that the ge- prefix is not explicitly written --- but then again, neither is the -t suffix; it's just that I chose to make the [pp] a suffix because it's more regular like that. A parallel phonetic script is probably still necessary for spelling existing proper nouns which would probably be even harder to adapt to the system than in Chinese. I think this is probably the best thing to do if you want to stick largely to the Chinese set of characters. If, however, you merely want to have Chinese-like symbols, you might wish to modify the characters with an additional phonetic component (or entirely replace the current Chinese phonetic components). So perhaps if ['] signifies i-mutation in deyuzi (déyǔ = German language), then: [Hund] -> [Hund](e) [Haus] -> [Haus'](er) or you might even encorporate the full inflexions into the phonetic, using [@] for -e and ['r] for i-mutation + -er: [Hund] -> [Hund@] [Haus] -> [Haus'r]. Of course, this sort of system would be unencodable in standard Unicode, but has the advantage of being mouldable very nicely to the language --- you'd basically start of with the Chinese radicals and diverge from there, only looking to complex Chinese characters for inspiration. -- Tristan.

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