Himmaswa language

[Nortaneous]

I cleaned up the vowel organization and made it more compact and presentable. This is probably the clearest they can be organized.

here's how I'd do it (cf. Cherun's vowel chart, which even has shiny coloring)

[clawgrip]

Interesting, thank you.

[el imiradu]

This is the first time I've read this thread. What a great language and script!

[clawgrip]

Thank you el imiradu.

I've consolidated a lot of the grammar on the Knee Quickie page here:
http://kneequickie.com/kq/Himmaswa

I've also added some details on the writing system here:
http://kneequickie.com/kq/Fkeuswa

[clawgrip]

After a year and two months of steady character creation, the script has finally surpassed 1000 characters (there are now 1006 in total).



There are a few interesting oddities and features that I hope to expand on and add more of in the future:

The character gjehjgeng "evening" is just a transparent compound of gjeh "night" and jgeng "enter" but it gets its own character anyway.

The word klauch is written two different ways based on usage. klauch means "to heal; to cure" while klauch means "to fix; to repair"

The character jriang "finger" has an archaic and non-standard variant, , which is not sanctioned by the government but continues to be used. It occasionally appears as a constituent of other, officially sanctioned characters, such as ktaat - "to be little; to be few"

The character was originally used for bngeul "design; plan; scheme" and contains the phonetic complement bngoy "group; collection" to indicate that it represents bngeul. However, the character was also used for mder "to plan; to plot" as well, and eventually came to be associated more with mder than bngeul. Bngeul subsequently came to be written with an originally ad hoc character, , which eventually became officially sanctioned.

The character was used for both mpua "to take; to grab; to steal; to sieze" and haang "pressure; force; strength" but eventually came to be used only for mpua. The character was then slightly modified () to create a distinct character for haang.

Some archaic, non-productive derivational morphemes are not recognized by the script as distinct morphemes and thus are not represented with their own characters:
swok - food
soken - animal feed; bait

din - side
den - servant

sur - curve
swen - hook; barb

choh - to be dry
cher - to dry out; to dehumidify; to remove moisture

gdaa - to hear; to listen
gder - to ask

gleh - elder; sage; wise man
gloy - to be wise

Other non-productive morphemes are more transparent and receive their own characters:

gloy - to be wise
gloytom - wisdom; insight; sagacity; savvy

jtil - ancestor
jtiltom - immediate relative

mjur - to find; to discover; to come across
mjurmay - to look for; to search for; to find

Also this compound, biangnker "to be discontented; to be unsatisfied" was entirely unplanned, but looks kind of funny.

[masako]

Congrats.

I only hope that I can soon (in a year or two) say the same for tloko.

[clawgrip]

Thanks. I hope you can do it. I would say that a well-planned method of sorting them and keeping track of them is essential, especially with a script like mine, where characters are often built out of other characters. I need to be able to easily reference similar characters. I store my characters in a font in the CJK range mapped onto characters of similar meaning, and keep all the characters in a column of my master dictionary, so I can easily see them and arrange them as necessary. I also have a separate file that sorts the characters by radical, so I can look them up quickly if I have trouble remembering what word it represents.

Also the character lo "lock; seal; plug" was specifically designed to look like a 5.25 in floppy disk. A friend requested I make one that look like that.

[Jipí]

Also the character lo "lock; seal; plug" was specifically designed to look like a 5.25 in floppy disk. A friend requested I make one that look like that.

Teeheehee

[masako]

Well, your advice is already in action. What I have done is make charts of glyphs I have made...64 at a time (on each chart) and annotated the ones used. example. Then, I email myself a zip file with all appropriate images and working documents.

[patiku]

bngoy

[clawgrip]

Do you like the word or the character?

[masako]

He's referring to the character and word being similar to an animated gif and the name a former frequenter of this forum called the gif.

http://www.saprutum.cymru247.net/bmelyn.gif She called these "boingy"

[clawgrip]

Ah, I see. Interesting coincidence. The character actually indicates two objects held together by force.

[masako]

Interesting

Not the word I would use, but tell us more about the script/language...that's what this thread is for anyway.

[patiku]

.that's what this thread is for anyway.

Are you sure? It seems likely, but can we get confirmation from a mod or the OP?

[Halian]

Oh, nice. Very nice, even. =O

[clawgrip]

Not the word I would use, but tell us more about the script/language...that's what this thread is for anyway.

If you'd like some more information, here are some character etymologies, selected mostly randomly:

[Astraios]

Kchoch looks like a silly face. I like it.

[Ċeaddawīc]

Just got to this thread, and it is, indeed, beautiful. I also mainly like to dabble in logography myself, so I must ask: How do you do it? What's your process? From the realization you need a new word to the conceptualization of a new glyph to the creation and implementation of the whole thing, how do you do it? How do you organize your work?

I'm not experienced with how to digitize and organize logographies. So far, I have an English logography entirely contained in a notebook and I'm working on a script for a conlang, so I'm always looking for new ideas and methods. Thanks, and your language is fabulous. I love reading your etymologies and favorite glyphs.

[clawgrip]

Just got to this thread, and it is, indeed, beautiful. I also mainly like to dabble in logography myself, so I must ask: How do you do it? What's your process? From the realization you need a new word to the conceptualization of a new glyph to the creation and implementation of the whole thing, how do you do it? How do you organize your work?

I'm not experienced with how to digitize and organize logographies. So far, I have an English logography entirely contained in a notebook and I'm working on a script for a conlang, so I'm always looking for new ideas and methods. Thanks, and your language is fabulous. I love reading your etymologies and favorite glyphs.

Thanks for your comments.
As for the process, it goes something like this:
1. decide if the new character should be:
a. a pictograph
b. an ideograph using only semantic primitives
c. an ideograph using one or more semantic primitives and a pictograph/ideograph
d. a complex character with a semantic radical, phonetic complement, and possibly a semantic primitive

If it is a., then I will sometimes draw something and then simplify it gradually over several iterations and eventually fit it into the permissible strokes. Other times I will just start out using permissible strokes.
If is the others I usually have all the tools I need to combine characters, though sometimes I decide I want to do d or c but do not have an appropriate semantic radical or pictograph/ideograph, so I will end up creating more than one character just to get the one I want. This happens less than it used to, as the number of created characters is increasing.

Because the strokes are quite thick, a lot of simplification can happen when compounds are made, sometimes to the point that the original characters are hard to recognize.

[Ċeaddawīc]

Once you know how you're going to make the glyph look, what programs do you use to draw it and organize it? That's mainly the part that stumps me. I guess I could just get better at making paths and after determining some of the base sets of strokes like you did manipulate them into their own glyphs, but it seems like there's probably a better way.

[masako]

When I read <fngurch> I imagine a toddler trying to say "my finger hurts".

[clawgrip]

Once you know how you're going to make the glyph look, what programs do you use to draw it and organize it? That's mainly the part that stumps me. I guess I could just get better at making paths and after determining some of the base sets of strokes like you did manipulate them into their own glyphs, but it seems like there's probably a better way.

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. I use a round, thick brush (I have a couple slightly different thicknesses I use depending on how detailed the character needs to be—you can recognize the thinner brush in noy and fngurch). At this point I have enough characters made that I can always copy and paste any shapes I need from other characters and just modify them slightly in order to build new characters, rather than drawing each new character from scratch. This is both to save time and to keep as much visual consistency as possible. There are still a few inconsistencies that I need to eventually clear up (like occasionally certain elements that are not 100% symmetrical actually are mirrored horizontally, but this is probably the sort of inconsistency that only I would notice.

Once this is done, I copy/paste them into High-Logic Font Creator, clear up some of the mess that arises from importing them, and merge the paths. This technique works well, but unfortunately, copy/pasting from Illustrator to HL creates overly complex outlines. I need to figure out how to simplify the outlines a bit because the characters have far too many points each.

The way I keep them organized is quite simple. Because the creation process involves inserting them into a font, I can simply store and sort them quite easily. As I told masako:

I store my characters in a font in the CJK range mapped onto characters of similar meaning, and keep all the characters in a column of my master dictionary, so I can easily see them and arrange them as necessary. I also have a separate file that sorts the characters by radical, so I can look them up quickly if I have trouble remembering what word it represents.

When I read <fngurch> I imagine a toddler trying to say "my finger hurts".

The use of <r> for rhotic vowels makes a lot of words look slightly English-y. Same with the vowel <ea>, and the vowels <oa>, <oo>, and <ee>, which were taking right from English anyway. Lots of the consonants clusters are often not possible in English though, it makes the Romanization kind of confusing.

[clawgrip]

The way I keep them organized is quite simple. Because the creation process involves inserting them into a font, I can simply store and sort them quite easily in a document. As I told masako:

I store my characters in a font in the CJK range mapped onto characters of similar meaning, and keep all the characters in a column of my master dictionary, so I can easily see them and arrange them as necessary. I also have a separate file that sorts the characters by radical, so I can look them up quickly if I have trouble remembering what word it represents.

In fact, every time I invent a new root word or compound that would still be expressed with one character, I always simultaneously choose a Chinese character that I will eventually map that character to.

Examples:
yorng 'ear' is stored at U+8033 耳 'ear'
dua perfect auxiliary is stored at U+4E86 了 perfect particle
guil 'exhaust; use up' is stored at U+5C3D 尽 'exhaust; use up'

Sometimes the matches are a bit distant:
euuk distal locative pronoun is stored at U+90A3 那 which only appears in names in Japanese, but seems to be some kind of distal demonstrative in Chinese
hoach 'blackwater river' is stored at U+6C5F 江 'large river'
dat 'exemplify; be comparable; be similar to; be somewhat (so); be approximately so' is stored at U+51E1 凡 'all; any; every; ordinary; common'

Occasionally Chinese characters completely lack a distinction I want, so if I'm lucky, There are traditional and (Japanese) simplified forms available in different Unicode spaces that I can use.

Examples:
kaak 'animal; beast' is stored at U+7363 獣 'beast; animal'
wo 'small creature; critter' is stored at U+7378 獸 'beast; animal'

paiyt 'transmit; send' is stored at U+4F1D 伝 'summon; propogate; transmit'
sark 'tell; relate; inform; command' is stored at U+50B3 傳 'summon; propogate; transmit'

When choosing characters I mostly stick to Japanese forms and Japanese meanings whenever possible, just because I know Japanese and don't know Chinese, and can type Japanese forms easily on my computer, so it's just more convenient.

[KathTheDragon]

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