snappdragon wrote:
- Nouns and verbs would have a top determinative showing the declension or conjugation class, and the rest of the determinatives would be either semantic or phonetic.
- Prefixes and infixes (Proto-Haethic has no suffixes) would be shown using glyphs to the left (for prefixes) and right (for infixes). They would only give the information on which type of prefix to use - which set of prefixes would be determined by the class. Infixes would just be infixes, they wouldn't change from class to class. That'd be tedious.
The first is precisely how I do it in Fyrthir. There are 5 genders, and ~12 "classes" of nouns, making for roughly 60 categories of nouns. Fyrthir is "verbless" in a restricted sense: verbs are a closed class which carry little semantic content, heavily relying on periphrastic constructions a la Jingulu, Basque, Japanese, and what spoken Welsh appears to moving towards, so I won't consider them here. Anyway, nouns inflect for case and number, although Fyrthir does feature suffixaufnahme, so can have more than one ending. Anyhow, there are a bit less than 60 different gender+class determinative glyphs, as not all possible combinations of gender/class are possible in the language and thus aren't provided. Moreover, similar to your Proto-Haethic, Fyrthir features infixes, as well as initial consonant mutation system that derived diachronically from a series of prefixes. In addition, Fyrthir has a system of ablaut, vaguely similar to Germanic languages but used in a very different way. In my grammar, I draw a very important distinction between roots and stems. Each root is an abstract concept, from which concrete stems are derived. That is, the vowel in each root is specified for height (of which there are 4) and otherwise underspecified. Ablaut causes the "abstract vowel" to be instantiated in various manners, differing in roundedness and frontness. Both infixing and ablaut are purely derivational. Thus, ablaut derives a concrete stem from an abstract root, and infixes furthermore derive stems from other stems. I bring this up because both infixing, ablaut, and initial mutation are all collectively referred to as stem modification, and indicated through diacritics on the logogram of the root. That is, the set of stems derived from a particular root share a base glyph. Note that ablaut of the form [-front,-round], and non-mutation (there's just one, unlike the Celtic languages) are unmarked. I haven't decided whether I will allow prefixes in the language.
Anyway, here's a basic template of how the system would work:
Code: Select all
[mut.]
[ablaut]
[root][det.][case][number]{[case][number]}*
[infix]
note: the asterisk represents zero or more, as in regex
The point is that the glyphs used for case and number have no concrete pronunciation on there own, independent of a determinative glyph. I will tell you that in this system, I have made no attempt whatsoever to be naturalistic, so if that's your goal, seeing as how something like this has never really developed, I might avoid it. With that in mind, in-universe, my system was invented by a team of scholars, much like Hangul So perhaps if you want something like this to be justified, perhaps start out like Sumerian, as clawgrip suggests, then have a King (or someone) recognize the inadequacy of the system and assemble of team of scribes to develop a new system. It's also worth nothing that there an attested system vaguely similar to the idea of abstract morpheme glyphs:
sometimes in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and in earlier inscriptions generally, plurals are represented by tripling a glyph, and duals by doubling. As I remember, this was eventually replaced with the use of a dual or plural indicator (two or three strokes) but with the addition of a phonetic spelling of the actual ending. (It's been a been awhile, so don't quote me on this). Given that the system moved towards spelling out the endings, it might suggest that abstract glyphs are diachronically unstable, but I don't know. Also shout to WeepingElf who I vaguely recall independently describing a logographic system with diacritics.