Re: Hairo Script Brainstorming

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Erich Rickheit KSC <rickheit-cnl@N...>
wrote:

> I certainly like the look of these letters. I think they suffer
> from the same problem as do Tolkien's letters, as do many featural
> writing systems.  Letters that represent similar sounds resemble
> each other closely; in your script, the voiced and unvoiced plosives
> differ by a single stroke, for example. It seems to me that this
> would make fast reading and writing more difficult, that little
> slips of the hand or eye could seriously confuse the meaning.
Yes, good point.  I thought the doubling was pretty
eye-catching though; especially if you'd use ink, the letter
weight ought to increase a lot (juxtaposed letters don't get
that near to each other).  It's applied rather consistently
to vowels and stops, though, which might smell suspiciously
of a modern creation.

I'll definitely keep the long vowels the way they are, since
it's plausible for them to have been written as two vowels in
a row before.  Also, the /i:/ being written as an i-diphthong
breaks the pattern a bit.  Similarly, I think I'll keep
"fortified" versions of /r l/ to represent /r_0 l_0/.  I
could dissimulate the stop letters, though.  They are the
ones that look the most Tengwar, and they're likely to have
been regarded as totally separate phonemes rather than strong
and weak variations of each other.



> Of course, I don't know how the language works; if words with similar
> sounds are usually of different classes, there would be less room
> for error (if 'pat' were a verb and 'bat' were a noun, the similarity
> of their written shapes would only confuse the readers eye, not
> their language send.  Alackaday, in English, both these words may
> be noun or verb)
Finally, only voiced stops are allowed.  Initial stops would
be important to keep apart though, especially since I seem
to be favoring a monosyllabic root system lately.  Inflected,
loaned and derived words could still be polysyllabic.



> Of course, I assume prodigously literate people who use writing
> everywhere.  If writing were used more rarely, as only in inscriptions
> and important documents, then reader would be slower and more
> careful, and the similariy of shapes would help them remember the
> meaning of the letters. How do your people use their letters?
Very little is known about pre-Germanic Hairo.  Most of the
corpus dates from the last two millennia.  There's a "house
book" full of recipes, rules, prayers and the like, as well
as a vestigial, far from finished Bible translation from a
monk who wanted to save the poor sinners.  ;-)  The few
inscriptions that have been found from earlier period are as
good as undecypherable, since the language must have changed
dramatically over that time.



-- Christian Thalmann