Conscripts

[HoskhMatriarch]

I was making a logographic script, but I had a couple of people tell me I shouldn't make a logographic script since it's for a "polysynthetic" language and not anything remotely like Chinese. Both of them were like "make an alphabet". However, I feel like making alphabets is too European, plus, everyone does that and I don't want to make just another alphabet. Should I make an alphabet or continue with the logograms or make an abugida or what?

[masako]

Syllabary.

But have it develop from the logographs...and incorporate a few of the logographs as grammatical morphograms, or something.

[gufferdk]

I see no problem with a relatively syntethic language using a logographic script. The maya script was a combined logographic-syllabic script, and the maya languages are pretty syntethic.

[k1234567890y]

You can make a logographic system first, then derive some syllabary system from it, as how Mayan peoples did in the past.

Mayan languages, as far as I know, are polysynthetic, but they still used logograms with syllabaries to spell their languages.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Syllabary.

But have it develop from the logographs...and incorporate a few of the logographs as grammatical morphograms, or something.

A syllabary, for a language with syllables like khfräs, ⱨoskh, ⱪwornths, zjmäckt, thröpt, wanth, skiist, zjnett, ⱨaafs, ⱨwett, ⱪapf, dlon, rors... How? That's the worst writing system for this kind of phonology (an abjad would probably also be pretty poor, but at least it'd be easier to recognize words like ⱪwornths written as ⱪwrnths than as ⱪoworonotohoso. Hoskh has not a lot of vowels per word. Hoskh is an Anglicization of the endonym, after all).

Mayan languages are written with logograms, but how well do the logograms represent the language? Sumerian was written with logograms, but they didn't represent the language well and they eventually switched to a syllabary.

I realize I put this thread in the wrong forum, since this was a quick question, but nothing I can do about that now.

[Curlyjimsam]

I was making a logographic script, but I had a couple of people tell me I shouldn't make a logographic script since it's for a "polysynthetic" language and not anything remotely like Chinese.

That's rubbish. There's no particular reason why a polysynthetic language shouldn't have a logographic script. Of course, it's going to differ from Chinese in that a lot more of the characters are going to represent grammatical morphemes (rather than lexical ones) and it's going to be farther from a one-to-one relation between characters and phonological words, but I don't see why it shouldn't work at all.

[Curlyjimsam]

I was making a logographic script, but I had a couple of people tell me I shouldn't make a logographic script since it's for a "polysynthetic" language and not anything remotely like Chinese.

That's rubbish. There's no particular reason why a polysynthetic language shouldn't have a logographic script. Of course, it's going to differ from Chinese in that a lot more of the characters are going to represent grammatical morphemes (rather than lexical ones) and it's going to be farther from a one-to-one relation between characters and phonological words, but I don't see why it shouldn't work at all.

[sangi39]

Syllabary.

But have it develop from the logographs...and incorporate a few of the logographs as grammatical morphograms, or something.

A syllabary, for a language with syllables like khfräs, ⱨoskh, ⱪwornths, zjmäckt, thröpt, wanth, skiist, zjnett, ⱨaafs, ⱨwett, ⱪapf, dlon, rors... How? That's the worst writing system for this kind of phonology (an abjad would probably also be pretty poor, but at least it'd be easier to recognize words like ⱪwornths written as ⱪwrnths than as ⱪoworonotohoso. Hoskh has not a lot of vowels per word. Hoskh is an Anglicization of the endonym, after all).

Mayan languages are written with logograms, but how well do the logograms represent the language? Sumerian was written with logograms, but they didn't represent the language well and they eventually switched to a syllabary.

I realize I put this thread in the wrong forum, since this was a quick question, but nothing I can do about that now.

Check out Old Chinese. In terms of syllable structure, it's much more complex than what you find in the modern Chinese languages. Not necessarily as complex as Hoskh, but it did have a syllable structure of (s)C(r)(j)V(w/j)(C)(s), I think.

What happened with Old Chinese, as more characters developed (if I remember this right), was that the phonetic element was only really a phonetic "approximation", combined with a vague semantic complement. So, for example, a character that would be read "kang" could be used as a phonetic complement in words that would read "khrang", "kjam", etc. where is was mostly the main consonant of the onset and the vowel that was important. As more characters were created, there were more options for phonetic complements. Where earlier on you had just "kang", you now have "kjam" to use for "krjam" and "khrang" for "skhrang".

If you've got words that are polysyllabic, then Chinese has a solution for that too, IIRC, where you use the same semantic component in the two syllables covering a bisyllabic word with the appropriate phonetic element. 蝴蝶 (butterfly, OC *ga-lep) is the only example I can think of, where the semantic radical 虫 covers insecty~wormy things and 胡 (*ga:, wild or foolish) and 枼 (*leb, leaf, flat wood, slip, etc.) are phonetic elements. 胡 itself derives from 古 (*kaːʔ) plus a semantic 月 while 枼 derives from a phonetic element 世 (*hljebs [note that this is more phonetically complex than the derived character]) plus a semantic 木 referring to wood and things relating to wood. The boxy nature of Chinese makes it look like this would be easier in Chinese than in scripts like Sumerian and Mayan, but if I remember rightly, especially earlier on, phonetic approximation in deriving new glyphs was still a used process, it's just that the glyphs weren't combined to form a single new glyph and context played a part, much in the same way that Japanese uses Kanji. Different syllables have different Kanji representations and different Kanji have different pronunciations, but context plays a part in what those readings are.

Hoskh is polysynthetic, sure, but it's already been shown above that a phono-semantic script can handle morphological complexity quite well. In Mayan, for example, certain logographic and phonetic glyphs were employed to mark grammatical information. There exact use was usually determined by their position in the glyph complex and whether the glyph was reduced in form or not.

[k1234567890y]

HoskhMatriarch, you can use the syllabary for the inflections and derivations, while you can use logograms for content words, like Japanese.

[masako]

HoskhMatriarch, you can use the syllabary for the inflections and derivations, while you can use logograms for content words, like Japanese.

But he already said:

That's the worst writing system for this kind of phonology...

So, case closed.

Never mind the fact that he gave no clues to the phonology or phonotactics in his original question, leaving the parameters wide open.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Is a hybrid logographic-alphabetic script a good idea? Egyptian was a hybrid logographic-abjad script, so all you need is vowels.

[k1234567890y]

Is a hybrid logographic-alphabetic script a good idea? Egyptian was a hybrid logographic-abjad script, so all you need is vowels.

not bad, as long as it is expressive to your language, it is good

[kadmii]

You could develop a syllabary from a logographic system and represent the clusters you described by compounding symbols. Some of the abugidas do that, especially Tibetan. I figure that Tibetan is a good approximation for representing crazy consonant clusters:

SPYIR


BSGRUBS


I can't see why a modified syllabary can't be made to do that instead of an abugida.

[clawgrip]

Or Tocharian:



lska, kṣtsā, śtwa, ddrä, mbu, wñu, mträ, mwtā, lymāṃ

Still, I say go with a logosyllabic script.

[Halian]

Korean used to use a mixed logography and alphabet (though arranging the letters of the alphabet into syllabic blocks) and it seemed to work well. So I suggest doing something like that.

[WeepingElf]

I once pondered making a logographic script for Old Albic (not polysynthetic, but rich in compunds and inflections) where diacritics express inflections. Perhaps that would be an idea to pursue. I don't know how realistic that is, though; after all, there is AFAIK no such system in the real world.

[kadmii]

I once pondered making a logographic script for Old Albic (not polysynthetic, but rich in compunds and inflections) where diacritics express inflections. Perhaps that would be an idea to pursue. I don't know how realistic that is, though; after all, there is AFAIK no such system in the real world.

That doesn't seem particularly unrealistic to me. Conceptually, it isn't far from Japanese's use of hiragana to indicate the endings of words whose core is represented by Kanji. Perhaps those diacritics could even originate as severely stripped down forms of logographs with corresponding sound -- an early rebus use that boiled down the extraneous strokes to form a diacritic mark. You can even use that to produce regional or archaic variants that derived from different logographic choices.



EDIT: Thinking about it later, the development of ideographs used as a rebus to mark inflections into diacritic marks could begin as a means to indicate when a glyph is being used to indicate ideographic meaning and when it is being used phonetically to indicate endings. For example, it could be that inflectional glyphs get written small and in a superscript. Then, these inflectional glyphs get simplified for ease of writing. Finally, they're shifted over to become a diacritic over the main ideograph.

Using Kanji as a visual example:

1. Ideograph full-sized, rebus small/superscript:

生^牟

2. Rebus simplified:

生^ム

3. Simplified rebus eventually gets reduced fully into a diacritic.

[clawgrip]

Yeah, and also I don't think you need to worry about naturalism in the structure of a conscript so much, since unlike spoken language, it is generally consciously designed, often by only a few or as many as one person, and is far more susceptible to unilateral rules or decrees than is spoken language. Anything is possible, if one random person thought up a unique way to write things, and then the few other people who could write thought it was a good idea and followed suit.

The actual visual appearance of the script is a bit harder to control though, once it gets in the hands of a large enough group of people.

[mèþru]

I have two questions:

1. One of my scripts uses symbols which indicate the initial consonants and vowels of a syllable. The finals are indicated by diacritics. None of the symbols bear any relation to each other, but they all use identical diacritics. What is this system called?
2. The language which uses this conscript has a lot of vowels and few consonants. The syllable structure is extremely simple: (C)([lr])V[lr](C). Can languages with few vowels, many consonants, and/or more complex initials adapt and change the system without it becoming unrecognizable?

[Mike Yams]

1. One of my scripts uses symbols which indicate the initial consonants and vowels of a syllable. The finals are indicated by diacritics. None of the symbols bear any relation to each other, but they all use identical diacritics. What is this system called?

A modified syllabary? Really, I'd just call it a syllabary.

[shanoxilt]

Has there ever been an attested reversion to logographic scripts, especially pictorial ones?