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

> Maybe this is too simple a thought, but I'd say both of my conlangs are
> written languages, as I don't speak either, and haven't tried memorizing
> them. Granted, they CAN be spoke, but geneally they aren't.
Yeah, but that's no more written-only than Latin. Unless, of course,
you omitted phonology and phonologically-based/representative
orthography...

> 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*]...)

- Sai

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