Re: Kamakawi Orthography

2008/3/22, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>:
> BPJ:
>
> << Ahem, look here too:
>
>  <http://wiki.frath.net/Kijeb_writing/syllabary>
>   >>
>
>
>  Very nice! Let me ask: How did you create that image? It
>  seems like I have a hundred different image
>  creation/manipulation programs, and I have to use them
>  all together to try to approximate what PC people seem to
>  create with relative ease.
I guess they have Adobe Illustrator, which can open MS Word
files, which is very handy. I alas can't afford
Illustrator, so I used free software which should be
available to you as well:

1. Created font with Gary Shannon's Glyphmaker and an
   ancient Fontographer, inspired by mesolithic European
   glyphs reproduced by Gimbutas.
    - You seem to have what it takes to make a font and/or
      draw and scan nice glyphs. Otherwise a combo of
      Fontforge (which I run on Cygwin!) and potrace is the
      best game today.
2. Wrote a Perl program for transliterating between Kidjeb
   romanization and glyphs. Combined that with another Perl
   script which created a tab-separated textfile
   corresponding to the table.
3. Opened the textfile in MS Word or OpenOffice and did all
   the fancy formatting.
4. Printed[^1] or saved that to a Postscript of PDF file.
5. Converted that to SVG with pstoedit.
    - Today one needs to pay money for a licence to
      convert to SVG with pstoedit, so last time I did
      something similar I
         i) converted the PS/PDF from (4) into a > 300dpi
            BMP file with Ghostscript/GSView.
        ii) traced the bitmap image yo SVG with potrace.
6. Touched up the SVG file with Inkscape.
    - This was actually easier with a potrace-traced bitmap
      Vorlage than with a pstoedit-converted file, since
      the former preserved black fills in the proper
      places. With pstoedit I had to restore fills by hand.
      This may have been due to ignorant handling of
      pstoedit on my part.
7. Uploaded the SVG to the wiki, taking advantage of
   Mediawiki's SVG handling capabilities.
    - Otherwise Inkscape can export to PNG, which can then
      be opened and fiddled with/converted in GIMP, or
      Photoshop if you're rich.

>  Some correspondences:
>
>  -The logogram for "king" is a grammatical glyph for the
>  diminutive in Kamakawi. (!)
Ha! So _Giwri Duzbaximu_ was a midget. No wondewr he built
huge monuments to himself!


>  -Kijeb /sus/ = Van Halen's logo. :)
Indeed! <sus> and <si> are the prime candidates for <sV>
in a later version of the script, which is intended to
work like Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (qv Wikipedia)
where the vowels are /a i u @/ and the <C@> glyphs can
also stand for <C>.

>
>  Seriously, though, I'm surprised at how few overlapping
>  glyphs there are. My favorites are the little man wearing
>  a hat (/rat/), and the cactus in the desert beneath the
>  moon (/ran/).
The 'moon' is of course the diacritic for syllable-final
/n/, which may have been called _ñukwa_ /Nukp)a/ 'spark',
since a visually similar but functionally different
diacritic in the later alphabet was so called (_nog_ or _ob_
depending on 'dialect').

--
/ BP