Re: Mandombe

----- Original Message -----
From: Antonielly Garcia Rodrigues <antonielly@...>

> On 1/10/07, Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...> wrote:
> >
> > Sinceit was created only in the 1970's rather than by 'natural
> > evolution' it may qualify as a conscript! :-)
There are very many other "nat" conscripts, the most famous being
Hangul, but Pollard, UCAS,
Cherokee, Vai, Khitan (plausibly), Yi (plausibly), and others show the
phenomenon is unusual but not
unheardof.

> There are of course naturally evolved languages. Are there naturally
> evolved scripts? I thought all existing human script systems were
> artificial.
I consider the situation with "naturally evolved" scripts a close
analog to the evolution from Pidgin
to Creole to Natlang (and indeed most theories of natural evolution
and language evolution).

Take the case of the Levantine scripts, the largest stock of writing
systems. There was a progenitor
script (quite plausibly describable as a conscript, though it appears
to be based on synchronic local
writing systems to some extent), but from it have evolved a wide and
deep family tree of distinct
natscripts (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac,
and Mongolian, as well as
probably Brahmi and Karosthi, and via them Devanagari and the local
scripts of India, Tibet, and the
majority of South East Asia, as well as maybe Tifinagh), all of which
show the long, gradual
development expected of a "natural" phenomenon.

Many other writing systems are indeed "stand alone" entities, but
Chinese spawned the Japanese Kana
(and Kanji, if you consider it distinct (along with Korean and
Vietnamese use of Hanzi)), and
Bopomofo, and certainly inspired the Khitan scripts. Mayan seems to be
an evolution of central/south
American pictographic pre-writing systems, and indeed Aztec could be
regarded as ideo- and even logo-
graphic in parts. The Egyptian Heiroglyphic script grew over thousands
of years from pre-writing,
then evolved into Heiratic and Demotic, and left its legacy in Coptic.



Paul

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