Re: NATLANG/Learning : Sanskrit

Quoting Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>:

> >Just F.Y.I.: The term "ideograph" is currently deprecated. The
> >preferred term today is "logogram."
>
> Anyhone here ever develop a ideographic/logographic written form for his/her
> conlang?
> I thought of this for my Laafaah, but then rejected it as too difficult for
> the PCs in my RPG campaign.
Yargish has a part alphabetic, part ideographic/logogrammatic
writing system, altho "morphograph" is probably the ideal term here - it's
common for the root morpheme of a word to be written with a such, and various
affixes (incl derivational ones) written with alphabetic signs.

F'rinstance, _nayarga_ "warriors (erg)" would be written as |naXga|, where
|n|, |a| and |g| are plain ol' boring alphabetic signs, and |X| is a
morphograph denoting the root _yar_, which refers to war and fighting. The
actual shape of |X| is much like a sans-serif Latin "x" - it's in origin a
depiction of two crossed swords. Notice that _nayarga_ breaks down
morphemically as _na-yarg-a_ "pl-warrior-erg".

(There's little point in asking for more examples or for texts written this
way - I've not done much work on it yet.)

BTW, is there an accepted way of indicating that something's a morpheme,
analoguous to // for phonemes and [] for phones?

                                                       Andreas

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