Re: Non-linear / full-2d writing systems?

Sai Emrys wrote:

> > I suppose however, that for a language to be visual only, your lexicon
>would
> > have to be ideographic as someone else said. I'm thinking you'd have to
> > create symbols for each function word, root, etc. A simple method would
>be
> > to  do affixing or maybe create something isolating instead (because
> > obviously you couldn't do anything sound based (duh). You could also
>create
> > semantically related words by altering the form of a base word/root.
>
>Mm. Ideographic I think would be limiting, but obviously whatever it
>is, it would need to encode purely meaning. (I don't know of any
>ideographic writing systems that do so; all the ones I know have at
>least some phonetics in them, like Chinese.)
>
>However, "affixing" and similar concepts I think become meaningless -
>or at least, they would change significantly if nonlinearized. (After
>all, "suffix" only is a useful concept in a linear system [*cough*
>like speech *cough*]...)
>
You could make affixation in a 2d writing but in more directions and in more
manners

Instead of prefixes,suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, you'd have upfixes,
underfixes, rightfixes, leftfixes, upleftfixes, middlefixes,
right-middlefixes, circumfixes, up-hemicircumfixes, right-hemicircumfixes,
far-rightfixes, near-circumfixes...

OK to distinct right-left or up-down, it needs a directionnal indication but
if not you still have the various angles an affix might take and its
distance from the "root"

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