Re: Conlangs in History

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.

But I just wonder... has anybody come up with writing systems
(conlang-related or otherwise) that don't follow a character-based system?

My third English-transliterating system actually uses a rough system of
constructing a single symbol for consonant clusters, and writes the vowels
as "accent marks" over the consonant symbols. I'm actually planning to
extend this system for my current conlang so that every word becomes a
unique symbol constructed from elementary letter-symbols.

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.

> Theoretically I'd like to learn 4-5 languages from different families
> just so I don't get stuck in a rut.
[snip]

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.


T