Re: Q's Re: A conlang idea rolling around in my head

David Peterson wrote:
> All right, those are my questions.  Anyone with any idea, no matter
> how slight, please allow it to come forth!  I'm on a mission!  I NEED
> a pictograph language!
Well, I'd look at things like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese Hanzi.

In Hanzi/Kanji, you have a mixture of origins.  Some characters are
derived from pictures, altho often so stylized over the millennia that
they look essentially arbitrary.  Others are more abstract in origin,
for example, the character for "up/above" looks something like this:

   |
   |
   |---
   |
   |
_________

Still others are combinations of elements.  This is a large majority
(well over 90%).  Some are characters that combine ideas, for example
sun + moon = light, woman + child = good; sometimes rather
culture-dependant and metaphorical, for example roof + pig = house, the
reason being "roof" symbolizes a building, obvious enough, and pig
symbolized leisure (because the pig is the only domestic animal that
neither works nor produces anything, like eggs or milk, during its
lifetime), thus "place of leisure" is the house.  And some are rather
neat, like "snow" comes from rain (in this context, "weather") +
broom-in-hand, thus "weather phenomenon that can be cleared away with a
broom" - which is, therefore, snow.

The majority of combination characters are of the class called
phonetic-semantic, which combines an element suggesting meaning with an
element suggesting sound, for example (I'll be using the on-yomi of
Japanese since I don't know the readings in Mandarin or any other
Chinese language)

Sun (ni(chi)) + Birth/Life (Sei) = Star (Sei)
  That is, something like a sun, pronounced _sei_
Plant + Early/fast (sou) = Grass (sou)
  That is, plant pronounced as _sou_

Because characters were borrowed from different parts of China, and
different periods of time, the phonetic element is sometimes strained,
or even lost, in Japanese.

Still others are characters that originally meant one thing and were
borrowed for homophones.

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