Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Conlangs in History

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Sunday, August 20, 2000, 0:54
On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 19, 2000 at 01:06:42AM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote: > [snip] > > <rueful g> I remember my first conlang with deep embarrassment. It > > wasn't much of a conlang, and it was pretty much cloned lots of elements > > from English/French (I was learning the latter at the time). > > Can't be worse than my first three efforts... which weren't even conlangs > proper, just odd writing systems for transliterating English :-) Actually, > I invented those mainly as a cryptographic system for writing "English > that can't be read". I was somewhat aware of how weak a straight > transliteration would be, so I included several common double-letter > sequences to foil up a simple frequency analysis, as well as several > different symbols representing inter-word spaces.
<excited nod> I did that! I had symbols for "th," "st" and a couple others I don't remember. Some of the characters were taken from runes (not Tolkien's version, but the one I got out of World Book, in which certain characters looked different). Consonants-with-vowels grouped as per Korean, so the system went right-left up-down per syllable. (People familiar with the Korean alphabet probably know what I mean.)
> But I just wonder... has anybody come up with writing systems > (conlang-related or otherwise) that don't follow a character-based system?
I haven't, but I tend to go for simplicity (my version of).
> I know this still somewhat is line-based... I have thought about a > two-dimensional writing system before (two-dimensional as in, non-linear), > but didn't get very far with it. One idea about how a speech, which is > linear, can be written in a non-linear fashion, is to construct the > language and the writing system in such a way that the writing has several > alternative "paths" of reading, but all would yield the same meaning. I've > not been able to develop this much, though.
Orson Scott Card in _Hart's Hope_ mentions a writing system that works as numerals as well, and in which you can read/add across or down, maybe even diagonal, in some very elaborate double-meanings/wordplays. I was fascinated by the concept, though I can't figure out how you'd implement something like that.
> Hmm... I guess I'm lucky to know two Chinese dialects, English, and Malay > (mainly a SOV language but with arguably more inflected verbs than > English), as well as a little classical Greek. It *does* help a lot when > you can invent something in a conlang, and then "shift" to thinking in > another language and see how it looks from that other point of view. Very > often, it reveals unconcious assumptions that you've made.
I shift to French or German (unsatisfactory--they're too similar to English) and Korean (interestingly different), but in that last my lack of knowledge of formal grammar is a considerable handicap. My mom sent me some books on Korean but they're "business Korean" oriented, and I can't extract linguistics out of 'em. YHL