Re: notelangs

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003 03:30:28 -0800, Sarah Marie Parker-Allen
<lloannna@...> wrote:

>I have a question about alphabets... it seems to me that there's nothing new
>under the sun when it comes to alphabets and even writing systems in
>general, and it's rather depressing.  I've given up temporarily on writing
>my own scripts because the best I can do is (apparently) reinvent either
>Arabic or Korean.  I suspect if I weren't so dead-set against using things
>that look like English or Latin, I'd have reinvented the Roman alphabet as
>well.  Does anyone have any suggestions for new or exotic ways of thinking
>about writing systems, beyond the poring over dictionary and encyclopedia
>entries that I've already done?
>
Some suggestions:

Try alphabets that incorporate aspects of the phonetic structure of the
language, or the syntactic structure of the language. I suspect you've done
some of the former from your mention of Korean. The latter includes, for (a
weak) example, the japanese character 'wo' which is only used with direct
objects; anywhere else, the same sound is represented by 'o'. You might
extend this, for example, to change the first character of a word based on
some aspect of the sentence grammar (c.f. capitalization in English).

Also, think about scripts that are written using different tools. Chinese
and arabic were written with brushes, although each bears different results
of that writing source: arabic is flowing and cursive, while chinese makes
shapes that tend to generate positive space. Cuneiform was scratched into
wet clay, and celtic runes were carved into wood; both are composed of
entirely straight lines for that reason. Some indic scripts are written with
a calligraphic pen/brush, and they make use of the link between line angle
and line thickness. What if a culture wrote with a poke-tool rather than a
stroke-tool? The tool affects the way the script will look.

Indic scripts also break some of the rules I tend to follow when creating
scripts: don't cross more than two lines at the same place, mix curved and
straight shapes with caution, don't leave big loops hanging off one side of
a character, distribute features across the entire space so that characters
don't look side-heavy; yet such scripts are beautiful nonetheless. They have
given me some new ideas for inventing scripts; you might find them useful as
well.

----
"Everyone's different, except me." --Noktakanto

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