Himmaswa language

[clawgrip]

So, if you had this font installed, how do you type it?

Either by typing directly in Japanese (my computer is set up for this because I frequently need to do it), or by copying and pasting from my dictionary when it is a character that I can't easily type in Japanese.

To grab an example from somewhere in the fluency thread:


Sdoanfkeupsay knongjnger noh duool ongtey kangmua daak.
I encourage you to try developing a logographic script!

Is actually written out as: 貌示字薦励当汝動致作制哎

Incidentally, Google translate thinks this means "Maung word shown when Ru Lai recommended action caused for system hey"

[KathTheDragon]

Ah.

[Jipí]

And how do you make all those pretty PNG graphics?
____________________________________________________________

Personally, I print a LibreOffice document to PDF, then do

Code: Select all

convert -density 96 -trim in.pdf out.png

in a terminal, but due to too fine lines, automatic hinting, bad anti-aliasing or something in my font, it looks kind of ugly:




Printing on a laser printer at 600 dpi makes it look absolutely crisp, though, even at relatively small font sizes (the two lines above are set at 14 pt).

[Ċeaddawīc]

Well, that turned out being super duper more interesting than I thought. You literally type the Japanese... and then BAM change it to Fkeushwa (or whatever it's called; that's my best guess, and I'm super duper tired).

Anyways, thanks for responding to my inquiries! Also, I love your romanization as well. You've captured such a unique and interesting flavour with it. Recommended action caused for system hey right back at'cha!

[clawgrip]

And how do you make all those pretty PNG graphics?
____________________________________________________________

Personally, I print a LibreOffice document to PDF, then do

Code: Select all

convert -density 96 -trim in.pdf out.png

in a terminal, but due to too fine lines, automatic hinting, bad anti-aliasing or something in my font, it looks kind of ugly:




Printing on a laser printer at 600 dpi makes it look absolutely crisp, though, even at relatively small font sizes (the two lines above are set at 14 pt).

I use Photoshop 5.5 (1999), which still can do a lot of useful things that the somewhat wimpy Photoshop Elements 8 I also have is unable to do. However, Photoshop 5.5 is poor when it comes to unicode support, and I think it renders Fkeuswa characters a little too bold, so what I do is I actually take a screenshot from MS Word or from the font editor's font preview window, then I crop the screenshot, make a completely black file, paste the text from the screenshot into an alpha channel, and then invert the colours and save as a .png.

Well, that turned out being super duper more interesting than I thought. You literally type the Japanese... and then BAM change it to Fkeushwa (or whatever it's called; that's my best guess, and I'm super duper tired).

Yes, as I mentioned, I save all the Fkeuswa characters in the Unicode range already reserved for CJK characters (4E00-9FFF), so as far as any computer is concerned, it is Chinese/Japanese/Korean, because the computer only looks at the character codes, and doesn't know or care what form the actual glyphs themselves take. It's just like Wingdings, in that the glyphs are stored in the Unicode Basic Latin range (0000-007F), but are not actually basic Latin characters at all and thus don't actually represent what the computer thinks they do.

Anyways, thanks for responding to my inquiries! Also, I love your romanization as well. You've captured such a unique and interesting flavour with it. Recommended action caused for system hey right back at'cha!

Thanks. I have grown attached to the Romanization and have ironed out the parts I didn't like about it. It is easy for me to read and understand. I don't really like using apostrophes for this language, but they are sometimes necessary to remove ambiguity (sometimes even creating orthographic minimal pairs, e.g. ngur /ŋɚː/ 'seat; spot; personal space' and n'gur /nɡɚː/ 'business; trade; craft').

[Rui]

Thanks. I have grown attached to the Romanization and have ironed out the parts I didn't like about it. It is easy for me to read and understand. I don't really like using apostrophes for this language, but they are sometimes necessary to remove ambiguity (sometimes even creating orthographic minimal pairs, e.g. ngur /ŋɚː/ 'seat; spot; personal space' and n'gur /nɡɚː/ 'business; trade; craft').

Pinyin does the apostrophe thing too, most notably in the city name Xi'an, 西安 (xi1 an1), to avoid confusion with the syllable "xian", which is pronounced completely differently (and also 1 syllable). This mostly happens only with vowel combos and -ng/[-n g-] words, though. And only when there's ambiguity. Certain vowel combinations can never begin a word in pinyin (such as -iV, -uV), and certain vowel combinations that don't exist (ex: iou), so 南瓜 "pumpkin"'s pinyin is just "nangua" because that pinyin can only be divide "nan gua", and can't possibly be "nang ua". Don't know how Fkeuswa is, but yeah...just thought I'd throw that out there.

[clawgrip]

Himmaswa has no restrictions about which vowels can start a syllable; all restrictions are on the coda. This means a lot of combinations are valid and open to be misinterpreted, like gaachoaut "each and every one" could be gaa choa ut or gaa cho aut (it's the former), or lohaung "be cute/endearing" could be loh aung or lo haung (also the former). Other times it's less likely to be ambiguous, but I still use an apostrophe. Even though bioeu "achieve; succeed in" could technically be bio e u or bi o eu or whatever, but it's pretty clearly bio eu. Nevertheless, I still tend to separate it as bio'eu because I think it is ugly with so many vowels together. I also tend to use it with <r>, e.g. bnar'oot even though it is entirely unambiguous because there is no /r/ consonant, and the only purposes of <r> are to indicate rhotacization of the preceding vowel, and to indicate /l/ after /t/, /d/, /ʧ/, and /ʤ/.

[kanejam]

Himmaswa is a very cool lang (even though I'm not a huge fan of some of the initial consonant clusters) and its script is equally cool!

I am one of the many people with a half developed logographic script, but I lack the knowledge to digitise it and more importantly don't quite have the willpower to learn how to. I think a lot of people asking you how you do it are expecting some super easy method, but I don't think there is one.

Anyways, you're awesome.

[clawgrip]

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Making a font of any kind is usually difficult and time-consuming, so making one with hundreds or thousands of glyphs increases the difficulty level and required time exponentially. For some perspective, the font I am making was created, according to the file details, on February 22, 2012, meaning it's taken me over a year to build up this font beyond 1000 characters. I think I had about 30 or 40 characters already made when I first started the font.

[Karinta]

Wow. It does look like Khmer.

[Halian]

I use Adobe Illustrator 8 (released in 1998) because it gets the job done, I have nothing better, and I don't use Illustrator enough to want to buy a new version.

You can go on Adobe's website and download certain CS2 programs, Photoshop and Illustrator included, for free.

[clawgrip]

Hey, thanks for the tip. I'll check this out soon.

[clawgrip]

I've been working on a comprehensive grammar of Himmaswa on and off. It's gone through three versions and I've finally settled on a format I like. It's at 20 pages so far, but there's so, so much more left to write. I've got a lot of other non-conlang things to do, so I figure this is going to take a long time to finish. Anyway it's fun to finally be writing down a lot of the details of this language.