Re: Divergent Scripts

Arthaey Angosii sekalge:
>I want one of the scripts to remain alphabetic, but I want the
>second script to be like Chinese
That's difficult. Chinese was pictographic and became a syllabary. I see
only one way to get a syllabary from an alphabet, and then it will be a
pretty logical one. You'd simply mash the characters together and try to
sort out the lines for ease of writing. Still, you'd have to give it a
lot of time. It has been some sixteen hundred years, and the Latin
alphabet has had few additions. Still, there was a considerable body of
scholars who knew Latin until at least the 1800's.

Recently, I have practiced writing in two of the Japanese writing systems
(one of the native scripts and the one for foreign words). I am
exceedingly slow at it. With much practice and teaching, I think I would
be only half as fast with Japanese as with English. Unless the script you
make is very simple, which probably involves a very restrictive syllable
style and probably a few diacritics to help, it won't be fast, it won't
be easy, and it won't be used.

But why do you have to care about plausibility? Perhaps it was a small
but persistant minority of artists who wanted beautiful writing, so they
changed their alphabet into a syllabary and made it prettier and
eventually managed to cram it down their country's collective throat. And
you needn't have even that flimsy an excuse.

Laimes,
Wright.

Replies