Re: Harpilan examples (vocab 2.2)

> Reminds me of Chinese (and for the record, I know exactly _this_much_
>about Chinese, so don't laugh when you tell me they look nothing alike).
Well, the only thing they really have in common is lots of straight lines
that tend to cross at right angles. They look nothing alike. :)

>I'd like to see a neater example of the writing, perhaps after the same
>sentence being practices several times to get it right?
In two weeks or so. Of course, it's hard to do it neatly, because the
funny angles and curves are necessary for it to look nice.

>Why does it have to be written only, though?  Is it just that you don't
>feel like doing the phonology of it?  How are you going about deciding
what
>symbol represents what?  Are they a priori or iconic?  I'd certainly like
>to see more about this writing-language!
The words do not come in sequence. Harpilan lends itself to a style of
writing which is not easily spoken. Each word can serve as the topic for
another sentence, making harpilan paragraphs come out in a tree rather
than a string of ideas. A more complicated statement in harpilan might
come out like this:

Manuel (he wanted a pet for a long time (like Adnesle, the beautiful
tiger-striped cat (his neightbors owned her)), but his mother (she always
said pets were a nuisance and they made a mess) wouldn't allow it) bought
a cat (it had black and orange-brown stripes (they reminded him of another
cat he used to know (but this cat was more laid-back than she was))) after
he moved into his own apartment.

A mess, but it's much easier to read and understand when written in
harpilan. (Sapir-Whorf, anyone? ;) That's why I call writings "paragraphs"
rather than "sentences".

Harpilan characters are a priori. I made a list of characters and slowly
assigned meanings to them.

There is a distinction between the characters that have a line going
straight through them and those that don't. It sounds funny, but it makes
sense visually: you can ignore the characters that don't break the line on
the first reading (like the intentional mood marker, or the possessive in
the second example), and then come back and see what information they add.
It's hard to do that for the other characters. (That's something that I
figured out just a few days ago.) There is also a distinction between the
characters that are only meaning, and those that also serve for structure.
Finally, some symbols are more like punctuation than words; the sentence
marker (which appears once in both examples) is like that.

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