Re: notelangs

From: "Sarah Marie Parker-Allen" <lloannna@...>


> That's an idea I hadn't considered when I was designing my own informal
> "ohmygosh in college the professors talk VERY fast" speedwriting system.
> There are about a half dozen characters that I write faster in Cyrillic
than
> any Roman characters.  If I ever get to grad school I'll have to keep that
> idea in my head.
I just learned the Armenian alphabet, if anybody cares. :P I always thought
it looked like mangled Latin.

I've thought of using Cyrillic letters like |che| and |sha| as replacements
for the digraphs "ch" and "sh", and I've had this idea of re-introducing eth
and thorn into English (thus "the" is written as "ðe" and "think" becomes
"þink"). I doubt that'll catch on in the Burgers-'n'-Beer culture here in
America.

> 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?
Forgot to mention in a previous post -- I've also toyed with modified Arabic
and Syriac scripts as shorthand. The right-to-left writing might be a
problem for beginners, but if I could get the hang of it, I'm sure anybody
can....

For Arabic, the Ruq'ah script is best for handwriting, since it's simple yet
legible, and groups of two or three dots are merged into strokes (the merged
three-dot marks over thaa and shin resemble circumflexes). And that tedious
sin/shin letter with its three humps can be simplied to just a wide stroke,
at least in non-medial positions.

But Syriac would have to be likewise simplified and cursified, and I'll say
based more on Estrangelo than modern Nestorian. At least you can use a
tilde-like mark for additional consonants. And Jacobite vowels (which are
based on Greek) work pretty well, if you want to vocalize the text; they're
easier to recognize for Western language-speakers.

Of course, Korean is good because it's a form of "visual speech", which
happens to have become the standard, and was invented centuries ago by
Sejong, who happened to be king. I did come up with a Hangulization of
English and other languages I called Segul (or Segeul), from the Korean
words |se| "world" and |hangu^l| "Korean writing". Konglish anyone? ~Danny~

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