zompist bboard

Well, I've completed the Elkar?l ASCII transcription scheme, and I have to say it turned out to be harder than it looked. I've tried to stay as true as possible to the graphical nature of Elkar?l's writing system, but in a few places I've had to work with things a bit to get them to come out right. For instance, instead of trying to create an independent form for each of the "headgear," I instead created a general headgear template and then differentiated each from there. You'll see what I mean. Also, for ease of typing, every character used in this transcription is available right on your keyboard, without use of special characters or anything of the like.

So, on to the scheme! I'll present it in the same order as it is presented on the Elkar?l page itself, for ease of reference as well as for the reason that that's how I did it.

Consonants
Stops: Insofar as it seemed possible, I strove for symmetry when the original writing system called for it. The ch head-shape is one place where I gave up trying to do that--it was a hard enough shape to match once. Also, the k shape isn't perfect, but it seemed the best based on my mission for this transcription.
Sonorants: As you can see, the general headgear template I referred to above was x| |x, so as to help distinguish them from everything else.

Vowels Again, the vowels were a tough match. I've tried to faithfully represent the actual expressions given. To double a vowel, 8 is used in place of : for the eyes, and to get more than double vowels, multiple 8's are used (or, if you feel like being mathematical, you could measure out exactly how many duplicate vowels you wanted with a combination of 8's and a possible extra :).

Voicing, implosives, and fricatives (shown on tek) Remember at this point that a lot of how these turn out depends on the font you're using. I designed the system using Verdana (the font this board is in), with the idea that that's the font it would most often be used in, so it looks best in that. However, I'm presenting it in Courier because that's the least ambiguous of the fonts. Trust me: in Verdana, those lower case L's look a lot more convincing as wrinkles.

Prefixes (shown on tek when applicable) Note ch- and g-.

Suffixes -e is probably the most awkward of this set of symbols, but it ironically does possibly the best job of actually representing what it is supposed to represent. Note that, with -kh the <W> and <M> go on opposite sides of the face proper.

Object anaphora Note that the <>> goes after the mouth (if the mouth is a straight line, use <P> instead, in place of the mouth), <o> replaces the regular <-> nose, and <:> goes directly before the mouth.

Assignment anaphora Suffice it to say, some of these require an imagination.

Numbers Everything's piled together in the order prefixes-face proper-suffixes-object anaphora-assignment anaphora, exactly in the order I've listed them.

And so you have what you might call &|)8-() (():o(>.)-)E, were you so inclined.

Excellent! Naturally the first thing I thought was, "Can I make a program to do this?". The answer was, "Probably not, but what the hell", so I think I will. Plus it'll go in reverse. Expect it in several decades.

Very impressive, Dudicon --you obviously put a lot of thought into this.
I assume that it is quite learnable as well--with a bit of practice...

p@,
Glenn

i didn't understand a single word of what you said dudicon, but it looked good, and thats what counts

Wow! Great job!!

-J. Ramirez

Here's my first attempt, more is coming:

((|(:-(3 ~{|:-||} [):-(l}*: ((:-(|& <(:-(ll> c({:-(} El{:-(|(*: &|):-(>

(BTW. Remember to disable smilies when posting in Elkar?l!)

A simple ~<[:-(3~

<l{:->|} (():o(>.)-) [):-(l}*{ (ll{:->)) El(:-(|}*{ ^{{:->} (({:->ll)
Answer: {{:->|(
(Edited to hide the answer and remove a "typo")

Great job, Dudicon. Nice schmematization of the nasals, too. Or should I say:

(({:l-)|( {l(:-(|<

Thanks, everyone, for the enthusiastic responses!

zompist wrote:Great job, Dudicon. Nice schmematization of the nasals, too. Or should I say:

(({:l-)|( {l(:-(|<

{|(:-(|(88 (l(:-()) (l(:-|)) <{-:->|(

Probably awful Elkar?l, but I think it should be at least understandable.

Amazing. Now I can make an Elkaril sig!

pharazon wrote:Excellent! Naturally the first thing I thought was, "Can I make a program to do this?". The answer was, "Probably not, but what the hell", so I think I will. Plus it'll go in reverse. Expect it in several decades.

Creating such a program would be much easier in Python.

Suggestion: Insert a spacing symbol because it?s hard to tell where one word begins and the other ends. I know there are some languages (Amharic?) that use : to space words, and :: to space sentences. Obviously you can?t use :, but you need something else. Maybe . to space words (more clearly, space-.-space) and .. to space sentences?

Space Dracula wrote:

pharazon wrote:Excellent! Naturally the first thing I thought was, "Can I make a program to do this?". The answer was, "Probably not, but what the hell", so I think I will. Plus it'll go in reverse. Expect it in several decades.

Creating such a program would be much easier in Python.

PERL!!!!!!!!! *stabs Space Dracula through the heart with a wooden ->*
More importantly, I want it online and my host doesn't support Python.

Dudicon wrote:Voicing, implosives, and fricatives[/b] (shown on tek)

Code: Select all

Voicing: (l):-(l]
Implosive: (ll):-(ll]
Fricative: ~():-(]~

Shouldn't that last character be > rather than ]?

I think this is probably as good a place as any to say that the Elkaril, uh, script is probably the best con-script I've ever seen. Ten points to Gryffindor

While we're talking about Elkar?l, the ? in 'ebd?nm?k' in the lexicon is a typo, right? Or is that some subtlety of the vowels I'm missing?

(Another minor typo: ? is written ? in 'r?ntur' in the 'adjectivizers' section)

GreenBowTie wrote:I think this is probably as good a place as any to say that the Elkaril, uh, script is probably the best con-script I've ever seen. Ten points to Gryffindor

And the most original one! I haven't heard of anyone actually having made a complete writing system based on facial expressions and headgear and stuff. And Dudicon: your ascii representation, well, ahem, ...rocks. Ten points to Hufflepuff.

Shm Jay wrote:Suggestion: Insert a spacing symbol because it?s hard to tell where one word begins and the other ends. I know there are some languages (Amharic?) that use : to space words, and :: to space sentences. Obviously you can?t use :, but you need something else. Maybe . to space words (more clearly, space-.-space) and .. to space sentences?

Yeah, spaces are used to separate words, as in the examples shown.

pharazon wrote:

Dudicon wrote:Voicing, implosives, and fricatives[/b] (shown on tek)

Code: Select all

Voicing: (l):-(l]
Implosive: (ll):-(ll]
Fricative: ~():-(]~

Shouldn't that last character be > rather than ]?

Whoops, thanks for pointing that out.

Ok, the program is semi-done. So far, it'll convert any Elkar?l text that requires only one face. I haven't implemented multi-face support yet (sounds fancy) because I have to leave soon; it won't really be very hard. The reverse transliterator should be easy too. So here it is: http://cgi-bin.spaceports.com/~pharazo/elkaril.html (you'll have to paste that into the window, like Geocities). Don't hold back in mentioning any bugs; I can't imagine having gotten everything right the first time.

Edit: I just realized one problem: it won't handle the stop form of the honorific suffix right, so don't bother telling me if you find that. I guess everyone will just have to suffer through this version for a while.

pharazon wrote:Ok, the program is semi-done. So far, it'll convert any Elkar?l text that requires only one face. I haven't implemented multi-face support yet (sounds fancy) because I have to leave soon; it won't really be very hard. The reverse transliterator should be easy too. So here it is: http://cgi-bin.spaceports.com/~pharazo/elkaril.html (you'll have to paste that into the window, like Geocities). Don't hold back in mentioning any bugs; I can't imagine having gotten everything right the first time.

Very, very nice. And very, very useful.

pharazon wrote:Ok, the program is semi-done. So far, it'll convert any Elkar?l text that requires only one face. I haven't implemented multi-face support yet (sounds fancy) because I have to leave soon; it won't really be very hard. The reverse transliterator should be easy too. So here it is: http://cgi-bin.spaceports.com/~pharazo/elkaril.html (you'll have to paste that into the window, like Geocities). Don't hold back in mentioning any bugs; I can't imagine having gotten everything right the first time.

Edit: I just realized one problem: it won't handle the stop form of the honorific suffix right, so don't bother telling me if you find that. I guess everyone will just have to suffer through this version for a while.

i'm getting 404's with that

Warmaster wrote:i'm getting 404's with that

Are you sure you're cutting and pasting the address into the window? I'm fixing it right now, so you'll probably get weird results anyway, at least in the Elkar?l -> emoticons direction.

It seems to work ok now, though still only one face when going to emoticons, but it goes both ways now. One question: how is the ng- prefix ("foreign, non-elcarin") represented in the writing? It's not mentioned on Mark's writing page.

That page is a bit dodgy in Opera: the boxes keep jumping from the middle to the left and so on. Quite weird. But good work!