A conlang idea rolling around in my head
From: | Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, December 2, 2003, 21:25 |
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."
Having been utterly fascinated by language for as long
as I can remember, I quite naturally became an
engineer. (huh?) Oh well, I enjoy engineering too.
But now, as I approach retirement, I look forward to
revisiting my interest in conlangs.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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