Re: A conlang idea rolling around in my head

On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 01:24:59PM -0800, Gary Shannon 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."
Many of us thought that way until we found this list. :-)

[snip]
> 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.  The odd thing was that I couldn't
> read it aloud because I had no idea what the words
> sounded like, only what they looked like.  The
> language started out as a symbolic relexification of
> English, but over a few years of use began to develop
> a mind of its own and a grammar quite different from
> English.  It was a uniquely strange sensation reading
> something non-verbally!  (It made me wonder if a
> person deaf from birth also reads without "hearing"
> word sounds in his mind's ear.  He must, having no
> concept of the "sound" of a word.)
I did something similar when I was young. In fact, I had at least 3
symbolic relexes of English, the last of which had somewhat non-English
features such as a distinction between singular and plural 2nd person
pronouns. Unfortunately, I haven't been using it very much recently, and
I've slowly forgotten its more tricky aspects. Nevertheless, you can see
two samples of it here:
        http://quickfur.ath.cx:8080/~hsteoh/img/script-sample-1.gif
        http://quickfur.ath.cx:8080/~hsteoh/img/script-sample-2.gif

> Then I forgot about it for a long time, and, later
> still, all the written documentation was lost when the
> aparment building I was living in burned down.  Now
> thinking back to it I can only recall about a dozen of
> the glyphs and none of the grammar.  So I was thinking
> of redesigning it from scratch.
I never had any real written notes about my script; it was intended to be
a "secret code" and the only thing written about it is an incomplete table
of symbols written in terms of an older "secret code" (which,
incidentally, I had forgotten myself, so now I'm left with only memory for
these symbols).

> 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?
Inflections doesn't have to be dropped just because you use pictographs.
See Korean/Japanese, for example. Also, inflectional morphemes can always
be represented as special diacritics or ligatures that makes them easy to
write.

> Oh, and a PS on the pictographs: I had a method where
> any pictograph could be mentally converted into a
> five-digit number literally at a glance, and this
> numerical key was the cannonical order for the glyph
> dictionary.
That's neat.


T

--
It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters. -- Lucius Annaeus
Seneca

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