History of sanokí

Hi folks,

I've written up some historical notes for sanokí, the Ebisédian writing
system, at:

http://conlang.eusebeia.dyndns.org/ferochromon/ebisedian/sanoki-history.html

Perhaps people who got scared by the immense number of letterforms[1] in
sanokí may find this lighter-hearted page more interesting (what with
scribes who poke fun at philosophers with letter shapes, etc.). :-)


T

[1] Each of the 9 vowels has 5 forms: medial, word-final, sentence-final,
paragraph-final, and diacritical. That's 45 forms. Each of the 27
consonants has 4 forms (everything except diacritical), which is 108
forms. That's 111 forms including the 3 diacritical forms of _r_. Then
there are 5-6 auxilliary diacritical marks, making a whopping grand total
of 144 different glyphs.[2] Though it pales in comparison with, say,
Mandarin characters, that's still a lot of glyphs to remember.

[2] Actually, this is probably an overestimate. Roughly 1/3 of the forms
are trivially derived from the others (i.e., the word-final forms, which
are just dotted medial forms; and the paragraph-final forms, which are
just underlined or barred sentence-final forms). So a more correct count
is 27 + 54 + 3 + 6 = 90 base glyphs. Not your average 52 letters of the
alphabet (upper and lowercase forms counted separately), but still in the
same ballpark, really.

--
Long, long ago, the ancient Chinese invented a device that lets them see
through walls. It was called the "window".