Re: Gwr script

My thanks to Dirk, Teoh, Jan and Christophe for the comments.
 http://cinduworld.tripod.com/gwr_script.htm  (thats
>>"gwr_script").
Yes, there is Hangul influence.  Yes, it is slow to write (at present at
least).  Yes, some of the characters resemble each other too much (tho the
g-N-j resemblance was deliberate.)

Over the weekend it occured to me also to put the vowels above the base
line, though at the moment it doesn't look as good IMO.  Another thought,
use this proposed system but devise different tone marks and put _them_
above the base line.  That would eliminate the potential font problem of
needing two or more sizes of tone marks.  I agree that the present tone
marks are too obvious-- but OTOH the Gwr are terribly clever and scientific
about everything, so it's quite possible they would be straightforward about
such a thing.  Also, it could be relatively recent.......

Reason I'm not yet enamored of it-- it was done rather quickly.  In fact it
slipped my mind that it was supposed to be the basis for Kash script as
well, so there should be a bit more resemblance-- but perhaps the Kash long
ago adapted an "earlier version".

This language is going very slowly.  The problem is that I don't want to
create too many words until I've figured out the history better.  At the
moment it's very complex-- basically Proto *CVCVC, but almost every sequence
of -VCV- develops differently depending on the medial consonant-- voiced,
voiceless, fricative, "laryngeal" (? h), and depending majorly on whether
the penult or ultima was stressed (generally the unstressed syllable is
lost).  Then there's the question of how tones arose......Probably even the
existing 200 or so words will need to be revised.

Dirk wrote:
>I can think of a way to make this work in Fontographer; the vowels
>would be characters which have negative width so that they overlap
>the character to the left. Since each vowel would appear at the right
>edge of the consonant (or a fixed distance from the right edge) this
>would work without too much effort.

Yes-- I think that works in FCP too, now that you mention it.

>The tone arcs would work similarly (negative width), but you might
>need several versions of each to accomodate the varying width of
>consonants.
(Actually in a proper font, the consonant chars. will be pretty much all the
same size-- but the tones (as presently conceived) will have to be variable,
to accomodate (1) finals (at least) and (2) (probably) compound words.

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