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

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 01:01:07PM -0700, 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.)
Why does it have to encode meaning directly? It can have idioms too,
like the symbol for a horse combined on its bottom-right stroke with
the symbol of a frog being an idiom meaning "it is going to rain". It
can also have such features as indicating focus: say you're describing
a story, and you'd use a particular decoration on the symbol for the
hero to indicate that it's an important figure.


> 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*]...)
[...]

Affixes would simply generalize to ... sub-symbols in some sort of
geometric relation with the main symbol. E.g., symbol X with a small Y
on top means something, symbol X with a small Y below means something
else, symbol X with a small Y to the left means a third thing. They'd
still be affixes, except you can attach them to a LOT more than just
two ends of a "word".


T

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