So this is for a language family I'm developing and the script that is used to write it. I saw something somewhere asking why conlangers didn't use logograms more often. I'm trying to go with it. Help would be appreciated and I apologize for the quality of the drawings as I'm currently using a trackpad.
Basics
What you see at the start of the post is what the language speakers call(ed) themselves—in Common Caber, Caber "the people"—written in Caber logograms. You see the glyph for cabe "person" followed by a collective marker -r. I'm thinking that most of the descriptions of the glyphs, at least in the early stages, will be in Common Caber; I haven't worked out all the sound changes for the daughter languages yet.
The script is currently written top-to-bottom, left to right, though the idea of doing a modified Mayan-style thing with blocks of characters that are read before going to the next block is a possibility, but I'm not sure if I want to do that.
Pronouns
See these symbols above? You're probably going to get a lot of mileage out of them. These are the singular personal pronouns—first, second, and third. To make them plural you simply repeat the glyph (this is how most plurals are marked, actually). These shapes were originally a representation of two people talking and pointing at whatever the referent of the pronoun was (speaker, listener, or somebody else).
An important note that the pronouns help demonstrate—the "default" orientation of something is on the right of the glyph, facing left.
Sound complements
Sometimes the same base symbol is reused for many different concepts. For example, the base glyph of a square is used for words such as śeư "six" and rubes "ball, sphere, circle" (yes, it uses a square; the design of the script is very angular).
What happens in these cases is that you get a composition of two glyphs, the second of which is a sound complement that tells you what sound the word begins with if it's not the "primary" concept of the glyph. For example, śeư "six" is a composition of the square glyph and the glyph for śocơ (a type of four-legged animal):
A special case: Marking the genitive phrase
The genitive particle fe has a special glyph that extends around the connected NPs. An example is in the phrase "my foot" ("the foot of me"):
Connectives
The connectives, bưf "and", bưcuś "but, except", and śemuc "or" (there is no difference between inclusive and exclusive or). The symbol for bưf comes from two people together; bưcuś, from someone putting up a hand to stop something (note the direction the person in the symbol is facing, which is different from usual); the symbol for śemuc was originally someone looking at two objects, but these were points and reduced to a line.
The first glyph also means "with"; the same word is used for both. Some regions have another reading for the second glyph, ec "NEGATIVE", though ec typically has its own symbol.
Negatives
The symbol ec "NEGATIVE" gets a lot of mileage and is often used as a shorthand for other words dealing with negatives (nothing, no one). I actually basically took the Egyptian hieroglyphic solution for the negative and adapted it for use here.
Numbers
From left to right, top to bottom: mưgưi "zero", bưćơ "one", bơći "two", ǵeśac "three", račboć "four", ơ "five", śeư "six".
Samples
Left to right, top to bottom: seśo "hand", bosa "water", ćơ "fire", čư "tree", ru "give", ruơa "pole", ča "wind", eseć "hear", bưbư "see", and ota "take".
Thank you!
