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Re: Scripts

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Saturday, July 6, 2002, 17:14
En réponse à Jeremy Louzao <socialanarchist@...>:

> So, what do folks think are the most beautiful scripts? What are the > best different types (cursive, block, consonantal, logoraphic, > whatever)? What are some creative things that could be tried in > constructing new scripts? Each time I try, my conscripts always look > like the Hindi alphabet, Arabic, or Russian? Is there any possibility > for an innovative, original looking writing system?Get more from the > Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com >
Well, my absolute favourite is and stays the Tibetan script. I also like the Arabic script and the Devanagari. Among alphabets, my favourite is the the Irish Uncial alphabet, which is the main inspiration for the alphabet of Maggel. As for creative things, it's quite difficult, as nearly everything has been done already :)) . I personally tried to be innovative for the Itakian native script, and I managed that by taking the opposite approach of the Devanagari: instead of having letters representing consonants and diacritics to mark vowels, and ligatures to mark groups of consonants without vowels, in Itakian letters mark syllable peaks (vowels or syllabic consonants) with ligatures to mark diphtongues, and diacritics are used to indicate the previous consonant of the syllable (the syllable structure of Itakian is CV(V), so it's easy to represent like that). As for the shapes themselves, I used round shapes for the letters, and big diacritics which often surround the letter itself. I won't pretend it's the ultimate originality, but I do think it's not bad :))) . Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.