Re: 107 glyphs!

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Barry Garcia wrote:

> I was doing the calligraphic style of kuraw tonight by hand and wow, i
> counted 111 known glyphs of the script, both simple and complex conjunct
> characters. My hand hurts, it's such a task to do the calligraphic
> variant, i can see why the Saalangal only use it for very special
> purposes! It's very pretty though. Imagine being a child and expected to
> know all 107 glyphs, plus the vowel and diphthong diacritics, and the
> accent and vowel killer (Virama), that's about 117 different marks to
> know, AND you have to know them in the three major forms, each one being a
> bit different from each other.
Reminds me of the native Etabnanni script (the etabveng /ra_Lbme_L/).
Apart from being etabnannic, which, it is true, isn't such a hurdle,
there's three forms of each glyph depending on whether it's at the
beginning, middle or end of an orthographic syllable (which can correspond
to half, one or two spoken syllables), and is heavily ligated. As an added
bonus, there's about 20 ideograms thrown on the side for good luck, though
they're quite common so probably aren't much harder than &, % and $.

I once upon a time calculated the amount of glyphs there'd be, but I've
long since forgotten the number, and never drew them all---but it was a
few hundred at least.

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still
be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
                -- Snoopy