Re: An alphabet of faces?!

Tim May <butsuri@...> writes:

> I think you're mistaken.  Rob is probably referring to Pablo Flores'
> Shkanshej Facial Script:
> http://www.angelfire.com/ego/pdf/ng/lng/shkan_writing.html#facial
I'm over here! I caught this thread late, and then I was trying
to remember whether I had stolen this from Mark Rosenfelder --
which I didn't, mainly because it'd be so shamelessly obvious. ;)
We came up with the two systems on our own and I don't think I had
read about M.R.'s one.

For Shkanshej I wanted a featural code that was innovative, and
that was created to help people read. And I thought, why not use
facial features? (If English had had a different word for the
patterns in a human face, I would've probably missed the chance.)
Shkanshej's system is much simpler than the Elkarîl one, but then
it was supposed to; and I didn't use it much later, which would've
tempted me to use shortcuts as M.R. does.

The story goes that Shkanshej used an ideographic system that most
people could never read, especially women (because they were mostly
locked up in their homes and it was deemed inappropriate for them
to participate in academic activities, politics, journalism, and
so on). So a young mother, with some help from his husband, invented
a system of her own (from scratch, using only her natural linguistic
intuition) and taught it to her children. Later one of these was
chosen as a wife by the ruling king, who was indignant at first, and
then interested (because HE couldn't manage the old ideograms himself),
and finally ordered the Facial Script to be revised and published, to
be adopted in the whole kingdom.


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/scifi2/nyh/index.html

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