Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: A conlang idea rolling around in my head

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 2, 2003, 22:34
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

Reply

Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>