Re: writing system

Hallo!

On Sat, 1 Jan 2005 04:28:57 -0500,
# 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:

> a few times I've tried to create a goodwriting for my conlang but nothing
> wich seems as esthetic than other witings I've already seen
>
> Each time it seems only a few decided lines or circle but nothing natural
I know what you are talking about.  It is easy to invent a handful of
letter shapes; it is less easy to come up with something that looks
"right".

> [...]
>
> How do you create your writings?
>
> You sit and write them?
>
> You draw one or two when you have an idea?
What I do is to design letter forms and "test-write" them.  I am
currently in the process of "test-writing" a featural script that
is meant to become the native script of Old Albic.  The letter-forms
I have now seem to work well and give good results with calligraphy
attempts.

> Do you try to make them logic to link logicaly the similar sounds like all
> the fricatives or all the billabial ones together?
Yes.  The Old Albic script I am currently testing is a featural system
where similar sounds are represented by similar letters.  However,
it wasn't easy to me to come up with a satisfying featural system;
there is a strong tendency of the letters to look all alike.

> Are there some qualities a writing should have for not being ugly?
This is hard to say.  Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder;
there are no hard and fast rules.  It is also a matter of how the
glyphs are written.  A good calligrapher can render almost any script
in an esthetically pleasing way.  I think what makes a script
beautiful is a consistency in style; it shouldn't look as if it was
jumbled together from different scripts.

On Sun, 2 Jan 2005 06:24:27 -0600,
"Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> wrote:

> [...]
>
> IMHO, the most beautiful script is Tengwar; second thereto being only
> Georgian mkhedruli.
I like those two scripts very much, too.  In the beginnings of my
Albic project (back when it was Nur-ellen, the modern-day descendant
of Sindarin) I used Tengwar for my conlang, but later I developed
my own script.  The first designs were merely third-rate Tengwar
rip-offs, but gradually, something different came out of my
experiments.  It is still a featural script, but written from
bottom to top (an unusual writing direction which, however, feels
strangely natural to me), and now quite different from Tengwar.
Some of the letters are similar to Tengwar rotated 90 degrees
counterclockwise; others look more like Mkhedruli.

>       I don't know where Tolkien got his inspiration,
I think from Old English uncials.

>       but
> there are eery resemblances in shape and sometimes in value to mkhedruli:
> Sindarin <s> is almost identical to mkhedruli _sani_, and the whole feel
> of the alphabet is similar.
I wouldn't say that Tengwar and Mkhedruli are very similar.  They look
quite different from each other to me.  But both are beautiful!

Greetings,

Jörg.