Re: CONLANG Digest
| From: | Shreyas Sampat <nsampat@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, May 9, 2000, 23:47 |
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I haven't seen such a creative script in awhile, though I do have the gripe that
it's got that Tolkienish dyslexia thing - a lot of the stems are very similar
visually. The compounds are fairly unique, but I've the feeling that new readers
would have to learn the script as one vast, dizzying syllabary (which could have
been your intention, I don't know.), with the addition of the final consonant
affixes, which can probably be thought of as diacritics. I feel if you had more
variety of component shapes making up your letterforms, they'd be less similar and
easier to scan.
Alanali-rišuli doesn't have a satisfactory script as of yet, as for myself, though
I'm playing with various concepts. Bouncing back and forth between an Indic-style
'alphabary', one of these popular Araby verticals, and something totally
different, like one of those artificial systems that used to be in fashion which
tried to show the phonetic features of phonemes in the letterforms, or a script
where certain grammatical features are marked by orthographic convention rather
than spelling - color-coded verbal mood's one of the concepts I like, though it's
wildly impractical except in the context of a society which places a lot of
importance on color symbolism, and set up its script long after color symbolism
was firmly in place.
> Betascript, the script in which Nova ought to be written took years
> of trial and error. My first plan was for a strictly alphabetic system
> but then I decided I wanted one that would let me truly exploit
> the nuances of the language. Having decided that it should be syllabic,
> alphabetic, and morphographic (1 symbol=1 morpheme) it became a matter
> of how to achieve all those in one package. The current format is
> fairly stable or at least has been. I am once again unhappy with the
> shapes and will probably fiddle with it again.
> A crude and now slightly outdated version of it may be found at
>
http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/everquest/624/betascrt.htm
>
> --
> Brad Coon
> bcoon@imt.net
>
> Somedays when you wake up, its just not worth chewing through
> the leather straps.