Re: fengxing (was Re: Familynames (was [OT] Re: Conlangea Dreaming)

At 09:31 AM 10/17/2000 -0400, YHL wrote:
>
>BTW, has anyone ever gotten to write with a quill and ink, or figured out
>how to make a writing-quill?  My attempts with pigeon feathers and
>inkpads (as for rubber stamps) never made it very far, but I couldn't get
>any other feathers and my mom wouldn't let me near the India ink....
>
My wife used to be a calligrapher.  Her books said to use a goose
quill (bigger than a pigeon feather).  You scrape the feathers off the
end (or off the whole thing), and cut the tip at an angle.  Then you
make a small slit in the tip.  You have to use liquid ink.  You can
either let the ink pull up into the shaft of the quill, or, if you
are very industrious, you make a tiny metal leaf spring and slide it
up into the shaft of the quill to make an ink reservoir.

>> I've also come up in my head with the basic ideas of a cuneiform-like
>> stylus-imprint-on-clay style of writing the "old form" of the alphabet,
>> using about 5 different-shaped stylus points - a point/line, a small
>> circle, a large circle.... something like that.
>
>Hmm.  I haven't even touched clay in a long time, but wouldn't circles be
>difficult to make with a stylus?  Maybe something that evolved into a circle?
>
IIRC, cuneiform was written with a two-ended stylus.  One end had a
wedge shape, and the other was round.  The small circles were just
stamped in the clay with the round end.  I don't know how you'd make a
_big_ circle that way, but you could make little half-circles by pressing
the round end at an angle.

>YHL, waiting for someone with knowledge of the development of writing
>systems to speak up
>
-- Terry

http://www.geocities.com/teresh_2000
http://www.geocities.com/weseb_2000