Re: Conlangs in History

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