Re: Ancient Egyptian Orthography (Was: Conlang orthographies [was Re: Latin grammar])

En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

>
> That's way to weird. I suggest simply tagging a numeral onto the end of
> the
> homophones, à la how they're distinguished in lexica. A bit of
> unexpected
> and unhelpful rationalism could only do Maggel good.
>
I could use the traditional numbers instead of the Arabic numbers ;)) . Like
Ancient Greek, Maggel uses letters (or ligatures, since with 17 letters it's
difficult to manage a base-20 system ;))) . And even with the ligatures the
system stays strange :))) ) for figures. To recognise them from normal letters,
it uses diacritics on them (and in this case on all letters in a number). They
use a diacritic which looks like an acute accent for simple figures and a
diacritic that looks like a Hungarian umlaut for figures 20 times bigger. Of
course there must be exceptions ;)) . And the exceptions are 1, 20 and 400. 1
is written |g'| (g-acute), but 20 is |o'|, not *|g''|. And 400 is based on 20,
so it's |o''| (and of course, unlike the Greeks they didn't use their alphabet
order to order the numbers ;)) . Instead, they generally used the first letter
of the number, and filled randomly the cases where it was not possible to do
it ;)) ). As for the order, it's the same as how it's pronounced: units first,
scores and four-hundreds after, multipliers after the multiplied. The system is
complicated by the fact that those letters still ligature when they get next to
each other, and the accents collapse above the ligature (which can thus look a
single letter with a triple acute accent on it ;)) ). Moreover, it's limited to
numbers until 159999 (which is written |rr'''o''rr'''|, the two |rr'''| being
two r-r ligatures, the first one with a single accent, the second one with a
Hungarian-like one. But since spoken numbers are limited to 7999 themselves
(above, they use true nouns), it's not so bad :)) . Since the traditional
system is not used nowadays for calculations (it's mostly used to number items
in lists, or to write the age of a person on a birthday card), it's largely
enough for the usual purposes.

But now you give me a good idea: use the traditional numbers (without accents,
so that they are normal letters again) to distinguish between homonyms. Since
they are normal letters, it would look again like one of those irregularities
of Maggel, but behind, there would be some regular principle :)) .

I'll think about the idea. I find it pretty nice!

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.