Re: Constructed Languages in History

Boudewijn wrote:
>>>>>>
On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Paul Bennett wrote:

>
> I have to be honest, and say that I've yet to see a magickal script that
didn't
> look _incredibly_ corny,
It of course terribly authentic, if a magickal script is tacky. I mean, I
used to know an archeologist, and he showed me some twelfth or thirteenth
century pottery he had found with inscriptions he couldn't make sense of -
 comb-like crosses, circles with dots and whatnot. I recognized them as
the symbols and letters presented in the clavicula salomnis, as authentic
as you can get, but they weren't any less tacky for being old ;-).
<<<<<<

Hmm, further reflection leads me to the conclusion that these conscripts (yikes,
what a very misleading homograph!) were created under very different
circumstances and with very different motives than "ordinary" conscripts.

I'd guess it's likely that the inventors weren't familiar with (the workings of)
any scripts that differed considerably from their own, and had a deliberate
desire to create something that looked "foreign" or "exotic" without any real
understanding of what "looking foreign" entailed.  Also, there'd be a deliberate
attempt at obfuscation, which (not just in magical scripts, there's plenty of
codes that do it as well) leads to cruciform letters, small circles on the end
of lines, and Zig-zag lines.

I'm thinking of doing a hoax-magickal script, based on these principles.  Stay
tuned for more details.










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