beautiful scripts (to Christophe/Amber)

> In a message dated 02.10.2001 12:52:28 AM,
> amber@OJNK.NET writes:
> >It reminds me a little of Khmer, which is another
> script I like a whole lot.
...and...

> >On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 09:33:52AM +0200,
> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> >> Indeed, that's a beautiful script! But how can
> you write that, let alone
> read
> >> that at normal speed?!! The letters look to
> intricated and similar to be
> >> writing as they are in normal handwriting!
> Probably a hell difficult to
> read
> >> and write! :)
Hi Christophe, Amber,

At the moment, I'm learning Thai "for the fun of it."
You may know that Thai, albeit a completely separate
language from Khmer, has imported a large bulk of its
vocabulary (and customs, it seems) from Cambodia.
Occasionally, I have glanced over this quite consise
manual of Khmer hand-writing I picked up this summer
while on vacation in Phnom Penh -- it does resemble
Thai in a lot of ways, and Thai, if you ask me, is a
piece-of-cake to master.

After a couple of weeks focusing on the mind-boggling
manner in which the Thais write, you do catch on
quickly!  Let me tell you that, from the perspective
of a Westerner, Japanese 3-layered kana/kanji script
still takes the medal as "most difficult to master
reading/writing"!  After nearly 10 yrs (half of which
I've lived/worked in the country), I'm almost ready to
comfortably read a newspaper in Japanese...

By the way, my half-hearted attempt at my conlang
(Vya:a:h) has left me stumped.  The script appears a
pseudo-Khmer script written in form of Hangul, but
also incorporates the Chinese/Japanes system of
pictograms for up to the 500 most common concepts.
I'm stumped, however, with how to keep the
"3-to-an-inverted-triangle-set" concept I want, as
most of the vocab are polythetic (is that the right
word? -- ie, very long words).  I don't want to break
a word up into 2 "sets" as the writing then loses
flavor.  The more I think about it, the more I come up
with ways to "abbreviate" the writing of long words --
ie, a 10-syllable word-phrase turning out to be
written in only 3 key characters (but which defy the
original pronunciation values assigned to those
chars)!  At first, it was fun to think of new
"vowel/consonant harmony" rules but now I've got way
too many!!

Well, anyway, that's my two cents about Khmer...

Matt33


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