Re: Anth Assignment Conorthography

On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 21:25:50 -0700 Barry Garcia
<Barry_Garcia@...> writes:
> Wow, sounds fun! I've been pondering doing something like that, but
> the
> idea just overwhelms me. It's too bad there isn't an anthropology
> course
> at my school like the one at yours. Oh well, I guess i'll have to
> settle
> for the Spanish grammar course I want to take next semester.
.

Well, this is the only "fun" assignment we've gotten.  The professor
teaching the course gives entertaining lectures, although he's very
marxist (he's even in one of our textbooks as an example of marxist
archeology) so it gets on some people's nerves (including me and most of
the people i know in the class) that almost everything always gets
explained in a very marxist, "elites are exploiting the common people"
kind of way.  And, like i said to someone else's message, they're almost
certainly not looking for a detailed in-depth conlang behind the
orthography, although i wouldn't know any other way of doing it :-) .  My
TA said that they're looking for it to be "elegant" and not overly
complicated.....but hey, you've got to be naturalistic, eh?

> Very cool idea to link it to your conlang and conculture. I hope we
> all
> get to see the end result. Will the look of it be more Egyptian or
> more Cuneiform?
.

Well, i'm not going to be writing it with a stylus on a clay tablet, so
not really cuneiform (although that would be cool) so it'll be coming out
in more of an Egyptian or Chinese style.
I figured out more exactly the Rokbeigalmki history of wordsign
orthographic systems:
There were two different clans which had members who tried to invent
writing systems.  One of them started out trying to make it logographic,
and the other started out trying the alphabetic way.  One day, members of
the clans met and realized that they were trying to do the same thing,
and the wordsigners switched over to the alphabetic system-in-development
and took some of their wordsigns with them.

So, for instance, the letters for the single-vowel affixes were
originally symbols for the affixes themselves, before being taken to
signify the sound and not the meaning.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "do not fear night-terror, nor the arrow that flies by day."