On Tuesday, December 2, 2003, at 09:24 PM, Gary Shannon wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been conlanging off an on for nearly 50 years,
Almost as long as me :)
> 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 - it's been going on for centuries.
> Having been utterly fascinated by language for as long
> as I can remember,
Moi aussi!
> I quite naturally became an
> engineer. (huh?) Oh well, I enjoy engineering too.
Whereas I took up teaching Latin & Greek, before migrating to
computer science.
> But now, as I approach retirement, I look forward to
> revisiting my interest in conlangs.
My interest was revisited, so to speak, a few years ago when
I discovered Conlang. But, like you, I'm looking forward to
retirement :)
> 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.
Wow!
> 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.
Languages have a habit of doing that - the darn things can lead
you into all sorts of strange paths.
> 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 guess that must be the case - there must be some learned
research on this somewhere.
> 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.
:=(
What a loss - it sounded such an interesting and unusual
project.
> 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.
Probably all you can do, and hope that maybe some of does
come back.
[snip]
> 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?
Or languages written in syllabaries, or 'mophemograms' or
mixed, like ancient Egyptian.
> Obviously inflections are
> not an option,
Why not?
I suppose the two most pictoral scripts are the Egyptian and
the Mayan hieroglyphics. The Egyptians were certainly to
represent inflections and I believe the same is true of Mayan.
and
[snip]
> 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,
Did each yield a _unique_ 5 digit number?
> and this
> numerical key was the cannonical order for the glyph
> dictionary.
What a pity your pictolang got incinerated! This time
you'll be able to save it all electronically and remember
to keep backups ;)
Ray
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