Re: Alphabet

John Laury <jalaur@...> writes:

>
> --- (from SuomenkieliMaa) ---
> So, what sort of alphabet/phonetic system did you
> dabble with?  I, for one, particularly relish
> languages which do not make use of Roman letters.
> -----------------------------
>
> I tried to make something that worked similarly to
> Roman letters, but not exactly the same.  I wanted it
> to look vaguely familiar, such as when an English
> speaker looks at Greek writing.  My "phonetic
> discoveries" consisted of deriving p, b, and m (as well
> as other similar sound relationships) from the same
> basic letter, with a "hard (voiceless)" marker and
> a "don't open your mouth (nasal)" marker to
> differentiate.
I have been messing around with such "feature scripts" (i.e. alphabets
which transparently encode phonetic features in the letter shapes) for
years, and I am still *very* fond of them.  Most of the scripts I
created looked either rather ugly, or way too much like second-rate
Tengwar rip-offs, or both.  Feature scripts tend to end up consisting
of letters that look way too similar to each other and often as if
they were jumbled together from parts that don't fit together.
Designing a feature script is easy; designing a feature script that
looks *good* is a challenge.

I also tend to throw in lots of diacritics because I *love* them.
Other ideas I had but never really worked out were ornamental scripts
which don't look like lettering at all but rather like abstract
adornments (I am not the only one; Sylvia has come up with a superb
example of this with her Kelen lace-writing), or systems where the
colour of the letters encodes some kind of information.  (I am
pondering a system based *entirely* on colour codes - a feature writing
system, of course, and one where only the colours matter, not the
shapes! - for some Elvish language.  They might `write' by stringing
coloured beads, and texts written paper and inscriptions on buildings
and other items resemble purely decorative, perhaps repeating patterns
in seemingly randomly changing colours.)

I have also made more than one attempt to come up with a feature
writing system using digraphs composed of Roman letters for consonants
(one letter indicating place, the other manner of articulation), but
those never went anywhere.

>       I might still try to do something like
> that, but in studying more languages, I've realized
> that (at least to my own knowledge) no writing systems
> in existence actually do that.
Hangul (Korean) comes close at least; a *very* cool system which does
not only use systematic letter shapes, but also combines them neatly in
syllable boxes.  (And it is indeed a conscript.  Anyone here who
doesn't like it?)  Japanese has a diacritic indicating voicing in
hiragana and katakana.  Gaelic uses the letter <h> mainly to indicate
a certain consonant mutation (in the native script, it is not <h>,
but a superscript dot).

> Perhaps I can play historian and have archaic versions
> of the letters that are similar to what I created
> before; and then later, more evolved versions that give
> each letter a more distinctive feel.
Many conlangers emulate the evolution of their languages;
recommendable with writing systems as well.  It is certainly
interesting what time makes of a feature script.

> I see a lot of people discussing ways to write their
> languages using Roman letters.  Do most people here
> tend to create new alphabets or do they stick to
> established writing systems?
I do most of my conlang work in either IPA or some kind of phonemic
transcription in Roman (I have a "standard transcription" system for
such purposes, which I gradually improved over years, though I
sometimes use on-the-spot conventions tailored to the language I am
working on).  As languages exist primarily in spoken form, the issue
of how they are written comes rather late in the design process.

With regard to my current conlang projects, it looks like this:

Germanech is written in Roman letters, as expected from a Romance
language spoken by a predominantly Catholic population.

Nur-ellen was originally meant to be written in Tengwar, but this is
subject to revision.  The British Elves certainly developed a writing
system of their own (and this will be some kind of feature script),
though by today, they probably use Roman letters.

Macaronesian will probably use a related script.

Proto-Quendian (the ancestor of the two languages above) will perhaps
some day get a logographic script with lots of diacritics that represent
inflections.  Logographies, however, are difficult to do because you
need LOTS of shapes.

Vandalic will be written in an adapted form of Arabic, simply because
the Vandals have been Muslims for about 1300 years.

At moment, however, I have no serious script design going on, as
nothing is in the stage to design a script.  The only of my languages
with a sufficiently stable phonology is Germanech (and even there,
some issues are still open), and that one doesn't have a fancy
exotic script anyway.  But I still dabble with letter shapes
occasionally.

>       I suppose that each would
> have its benefits.  Even if I created a beautiful and
> supremely useful new alphabet, I'd still get more
> instight out of looking at my language-to-be in the
> Roman alphabet, which speaks more directly to me.
Yes, simply because it is more familiar.  On the other hand, if you have
a literate conculture and it doesn't make sense that they use Roman
letters, they NEED a conscript.  (Though you could just say, "They have
some kind of writing system, but I am too lazy to work it out".)

...brought to you by the Weeping Elf and the letter "ö"

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