Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: An alphabet of faces?!

From:Pablo David Flores <pablo-flores@...>
Date:Thursday, July 31, 2003, 16:12
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

Reply

Estel Telcontar <estel_telcontar@...>