Re: Anth Assignment Conorthography

CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
> 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.
Hah, that sounds similar to some of the classes i've taken here. My world
mythology professor was of the class who believes matriarchal systems are
perfect, and the evil patriarchal ones have ruined everything (note, this
is just from what i'e gathered from what he's said). I tend to get annoyed
by that stuff to, but it's not worthy my time to get worked up over
it......but anyway......

>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?
Well I still like the idea ;). And true, you have to be naturalistic.
>
>
>
>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.
Personally I like the Chinese style, only because i'm often obsessed with
looking at difference characters and learning their meanings (hell I have
a book that talks about the etymology of quite a few of the characters.
But, Egyptian tends to have a formal look to me.

>
>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.
Interesting conhistory behind it.
>
>
>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.
>
Hmm, this goes out to those on the list who know (anyone) but:

I was wondering, would a system like Chinese Hanzi work for highly
inflected languages? I know the Japanese had problems with it, which is
why katakana and hiragana were invented. Or is it just a matter of
creating affixes for the particles/affixes/etc. that would solve the
problems?


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 The rattan basket criticizes the palm leaf basket, still both are full of
holes.