Re: Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?

Staving Ray brown:
>On Thursday, May 27, 2004, at 09:59 AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>
>>Staving Ray Brown:
>>>On Wednesday, May 26, 2004, at 09:50 AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>[snip]
>
>>>>I've got an idea for a six-case system
>>>>Sentence-initial
>>>>Word-initial
>>>>Medial
>>>>Word-final
>>>>Sentence-final
>>>>Proper Names.
>>>
>>>Yikes - no paragraph-initial and no paragraph-final cases!! You'll have
>>>to
>>>use white space!
>>>
>>>Yep - what gain is there in this except that you'll be able to write
>>>whole
>>>paragraphs without white spaces? But IMO it's main effect will be to
>>>increase the burden on learners of the language (and possibly make
>>>reading
>>>more difficult).
>>
>>The purpose is to make the writing system as cursive as possible. It's
>>written boustrophedon on wax tablets with a stylus, and one only lifts the
>>stylus from the tablet at the end of the paragraph.
>
>Right - so we're really talking about positional variants as in the
>cursive Arabic writing, rather than upper-case ~ lower-case systems (whose
>rules of usage differ arbitrarily from language to language).
>
>>It's intended for yagh
>>tyalpy tyubvul, an isolating language.
>
>Right - so not meant to be a sort of general purpose writing system, but
>rather for a specific language - fair enough.
>
>>I do not inflict my writing systems
>>with such auxlangy design criteria as ease of learning!
>
>I don't think ease of learning as regards writing and orthography is
>particularly auxlangish; it's surely just common sense. Most (all?) of the
>writing systems devised in the last two or three centuries for different
>natlangs do just that. Where we have complicated systems like English,
>French, Japanese etc. it's for historic reasons. If these languages were
>newly discovered and had not be committed to writing, there can surely be
>little doubt they'd be given a phonemic script.
>
>If one endows a conlang with a complicated or irregular (and I'm _not_
>suggesting that yours is irregular) then it seems to me there should be a
>conhistory for the script.
The twenty-seven clans of the Jade Mountains has not writing until they
were conquered by the Empire of Yimegan. At the time, the Empire used a
logographic writing system. The clans were impressed by the idea of written
language, but did not find Early Imperial Pictograms suitable. Instead,
they devised an alphabet of their own, based on simplified forms of some of
the pictograms. They decided to keep writing one word as a unit, and so a
cursive style was adopted. They found writing continuously without lifting
the stylus to their liking, so they developed different letter forms as a
sort of punctuation to enable them to avoid breaking the line. They also
retained two logograms, one for the topic-marker, and one for the topic
reference pronoun.

The Empire noticed this development with interest. They liked the idea of
an alphabetic script, but found the yagh tyalpy tyubvul system unsuitable
for Magikimnaz - yagh tyalpy tyubvul had a very different phonology, and
the glyphs were almost unrecognizable form their original forms. The
Imperial scribes therefore found it easier to devise an alphabet of their
own, still based.

Pete