Re: A conlang idea rolling around in my head

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003 13:24:59 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I've been conlanging off an on for nearly 50 years,
>although until a few years ago when I first discovered
>this list I thought I was the only person in the world
>twisted enough to consider such an activity "fun."
Nah, lots of us are that way :)

>About 25 years ago I designed a conlang that was
>entirely pictographic.  I created about 3,000 to 4,000
>pictographs and became quite fluent in reading and
>writing in this language by using it daily in my
>personal journal.
Cool. It has a consistent and unique look to it. I'd like to see some more.

> The first thing mentioned in a sentence will the thing most affected by
the
> action that takes place in the sentence. For example, in the sentence
"John
> gave me the book." the action of giving caused the book to change hands,
> and so the book is the thing most affected by the "give" action.
>> "Book John give me."
So, if I give John poison (and he dies), would I say "John I give poison"
rather than "Poison I give John"? Interesting, we don't see semantic case
too often... though there have been others mentioned on the list...

>Has anyone else worked on any pictographic conlangs
>that anyone knows of?  I'd be interested in having a
>look .  Also, if I were to design the grammar from
>scratch this time, how do you suppose the grammar for
>a pictographic language would differ from the grammar
>for alphabetic languages?  Obviously inflections are
>not an option, but what other implications might there
>be?
I've done a little work on an ideographic conlang (no pronunciation). One
thing I learned, to my surprise, is that written shapes can be surprisingly
malleable. So far, I have a few outfix words, some agglutinating graphemes,
and some shape changes. Here's a short poem tranlsation: http://
www.geocities.com/noktakanto/samples/salvini.html

One thing about pictographic languages, you're not forced to read them in
sequence like you are with spoken language. The writing will probably find
ways to take advantage of that.

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