Re: Report on Albacon

Sally Caves wrote:

>  I even thought of two new questions along the lines of
>power and control... such as what percentage of us on Conlang prefer to
>invent rather than learn a conlang.
I do! I like to peek into conlangs (and natlangs) in order to get
a feeling of them, a brief taste. If they're not exotic enough (or
too exotic) I leave them. Otherwise I may steal some cool features :-)
But I haven't seriously intended to learn a conlang, mostly because
that doesn't work for me if I have no-one to talk to. (And also, most
conlangs are not documented well enough, or they are overdocumented).


>The second question that was an obvious one to
>ask and I didn't was:  how many of you invented scripts to go with your
>conlang?
I've always tried to invent scripts for each conlang I made. It seems
to me the language is not complete without a culture (or at least a
cultural, geographical and temporal frame), and of course, a culture
includes a writing system (I've never invented a non-written lang).

I've created scripts for Pantato, Drasele'q and Tomoulini Ganmaa.
The first two are alphabets, where the vowels are little signs, unlike
the consonants (this is Tengwar influence). Pantato is written from left
to right, with vowels over the previous consonants (Quenya style, you might
say).

In Drasele'q you write with a system called _eqalar_ ("rope"), from
top to bottom and from left to right, and vowels are usually inserted between
the consonants in suitable spaces (often one on the right, the next one on
the left, etc.). There's a sample at

 <http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/1021/dras_lists.html>

For Tomoulini Ganmaa I created a syllabic featural code with some reminiscences
of the Japanese kana (you lengthen the vowels, add a nasal, or make stops voiced,
by adding little diacritic marks). You can find some material about this at

 <http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/1021/tomoulini.html>

(not the whole syllabary yet).


--Pablo Flores