Re: "Ideographic" writing systems for the Millions
| From: | Nokta Kanto <red5_2@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, August 9, 2004, 5:29 |
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On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 00:03:57 -0500, Patrick Dunn <pdunn@...> wrote:
>Has anyone made a serious effort to create a writing system like Chinese
>or Hieroglyphs for one of their conlangs?
Chinese or Hieroglyphics? They don't have a lot in common, those two. You
are thinking of something pictographic, perhaps? Chinese used to be much
pictographic before it got simplified.
> I have toyed it with, on and off,
>but the major problem is bookkeeping, of course. Any technical solutions
to
>that problem?
I keep a list of characters with their translations. They are organized by
stroke count, but otherwise arbitrary; not as organized as Shannon's LOTEP.
On the other hand, I don't have to worry about not having a line in my
dictionary to insert a new character...
>Also, I have a penchant for very analytic languages, like Indonesian,
which aren't
>popular it seems among conlangers in general -- which may be another
reason
>other than the practical why logographic writing systems also aren't
popular. Still --
>are there any synthetic natlangs that use a logographic writing system?
(well,
>with the exception of course of ancient Egyptian, which was about as
analytic
>as Hebrew, I believe) It almost seems that logographic and analytic go
together
>well -- I'm not sure why.
As words are added to logographic languages, their spelling reflects how
they were derived from preexisting words. Such details get forgotten,
sometimes quickly, in languages where spelling is phonetic.
<a href="http://www.pleasewipeyourfeet.com/noktakanto/">Harpelan</a> is
ideographic. I don't update the website nearly as quickly as I should...
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