Crazy Ideas Of The Week

This weekend, I was cleaning out my brain and found this:

1) An idea for a conlang, which I may never do any work on, so anybody who's
up for the challenge, go ahead!  I won't sue.

The people are Indo-European, specifically Iranian (probably descendants of
the Medes).  The language has a grammar much like Avestan, but with a lot of
Semitic and Kartvelian borrowings, so it can have a pretty hairy grammar,
with inflections and affixes making some pretty scary verb forms.  A lot of
Semitic (Aramaic, Arabic), Persian, maybe Greek and Turkish borrowings.

I have no name for the people or the language, but they are situated between
Lake Van, Turkey and Lake Urmia, Iran, are about 50/50 Muslim and Assyrian
Christian, and write in a variety of scripts (Syriac for the Christians,
Roman and/or Arabic for the Muslims -- possibly also Cyrillic if speakers
are found in the former USSR).

Culturally, just picture a mix of Assyrian, Kurdish, Armenian, and
Anatolian/Turkish.

2) I've worked some more on a personal shorthand, which I was going to base
on Arabic, but decided to use Syriac with Arabic influence instead.  Kinda
messy, but effective I think.  I've even devised abbreviated methods of
writing the numerals 4, 5, 8 and 0.  (4 is like a cursive y, 5 is headless
or like a teardrop, and 8 is just a loop, or a stick-figure fish facing
upward.  0 is a simple dot or a dash.

I'll get a .gif of my results this week, I promise.

3) Someday, I'll make fonts of my own handwriting in several styles; I write
in a rather inflated loopy fashion with a lot of angular strokes thrown in.
My more 'formal' writing with added serifs is something to see.  Maybe I
could sell it!

Now I know I got way too much free time on my hands.

Danny

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