There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
1b. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: J. 'Mach' Wust
1c. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: Matthew George
1d. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: Roger Mills
1e. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: BPJ
1f. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: Elena ``of Valhalla''
1g. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: BPJ
Messages
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1a. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Sun Sep 29, 2013 6:38 am ((PDT))
Hallo conlangers!
On Sunday 29 September 2013 01:11:59 BPJ wrote:
> I came across the Greek alphabet and three varieties of runes some years
> before I came across the Tengwar. I remember believing that I wrote Greek
> when I wrote Swedish with Greek letters, so I must have been quite young!
> OTOH I remember being perplexed over 'missing' letters in the Greek
> alphabet and my father helping me out with digraphs borrowed from French.
> My source had nothing (or nothing I understood!) on Greek digraphs and
> diacritics, and I doubt I or my father knew that Greek uses the OU
> digraph^[here be BetaCode!] just as I used it for _u_ guided by the Swedish
> respelling of French loan words.
I dimly remember experimenting with Greek letters for German
when I was young (don't remember the age), but I do not remember
details. But as with you, Greek was the first foreign script
which I happened upon, and not Tengwar. (Chinese was noticed by
me quite early, too, but with no idea what those characters
meant.)
My first attempt at a conscript, which was meant to be the
writing system of Atlantis, was inspired by a chart of the
evolution of the alphabet, from Phoenician via Greek to Latin,
I found in a book that contained a collection of facts from
various fields of knowledge.
> When I was a little older I found meaty stuff on runes in an old
> encyclopedia and then I found a translation of one of Diringer's books on
> the history of writing in the library. When I hit the Tengwar I had already
> done a cursive syllabary with contextual variants! I remember using CV-VC
> sequences for CVC syllables to keep down the number of symbols needed as
> well as using 'silent Es' to write consonant clusters -- probably my
> father's Gallophilia rearing its head again.
>
> The old (and rather bad) Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings came
> without the appendices, and when I eventually did get an English paperback
> in my hands half the title page inscription was missing so my start in
> Tengwar was rather challenged.
The paperback edition of the German translation of _The Lord of
the Rings_ which I had missed the appendices, too, so I had
similar problems; I noticed the examples of Tengwar and Cirth
in the book, but had no ideas about the phonetic values of those
characters.
> I didn't even understand the featural bit
> until I came across a phonetics textbook, but then I was hooked on both
> phonetics and featural scripts.
I don't remember when I understood the featural character of
Tengwar, and I think my first featural alphabet ("Serindian")
was after that. Yet, it did not look much like Tengwar.
> I used a featurally arranged pigpen cipher
> for some years -- the checkers were consonants arranged by PoA and MoA and
> the X's were vowels -- and even developed cursive forms before coming
> across Melin's shorthand which had clear featural traits. I had a moment of
> delight and enlightenment at eighteen when realizing the fact that all
> vowels were upstrokes and all consonants were downstrokes, except _r l n s_
> which were loops, and what that meant for the efficiency of the shorthand!
> I remain a user of the shorthand to this day, and have developed my own
> adaptation to English. Naturally I've tried and failed as a shorthand
> constructor as well!
I never explored shorthand, and thus did not make any scripts
influenced by shorthand systems.
> In later years I did consciously avoid featural traits in the glyph design
> as being unrealistic in the cultural setting when developing the Sohldarian
> scripts. OTOH I did use featural underspecification like in younger
> Scandinavian runes and Linear B, so that obstruents at the same PoA share
> the same signs. I also allowed myself to introduce diacritics to make up
> for this, again like in late Scandinavian runes.
My current Old Albic alphabet is featural, and I indeed worried
how realistic that is. But according to Old Albic legend, the
script *was* a conscript - it is ascribed to a cultural heroine.
The letters _p_, _t_, _c_ and _s_ are quite similar to their
Phoenician counterparts, so an influence from there is likely,
especially as the Guildford fragment contains an Old Albic
inscription in Phoenician letters.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (24)
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1b. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "J. 'Mach' Wust" j_mach_w...@shared-files.de
Date: Sun Sep 29, 2013 11:32 am ((PDT))
On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 07:57:31 -0500, Adam Walker wrote:
>My mother had a big hard-bound dictionary. I believe it was an
>American Heritage Dictionary. I'm pretty sure it was published by
>Random House. I know it was gray. Anyway, it had an evolution of the
>alphabet graphic on the back endpapers that showed Phoenician, Greek,
>Latin, Crylic, Hebrew and Arabic IIRC. That was my earliest
>inspiration as an inquisitive elementary schooler.
At our house, we had a 24 tome Meyers Taschenlexikon that also had a
similar table. At one point, I paged through all of it in search of
any foreign alphabets. But that must have been some years after I had
developed my initial interest in scripts. I think it was not the
tengwar that first awakened my interest, but my uncle who told me
about the Caesar cypher (used in Hebrew). But the tengwar must have
come soon afterwards. I was lucky to get the Appendices to the Lord
of the Rings soon after I had read the book, at age 10 or 11, in
German.
As a teenager, I invented dozens of scripts. I had a row of alphabets
that had started from my Latin script handwriting and that evolved
into likenesses of numerous other scripts. And I had learnt many
other alphabets. For a time, I used to write much in Cyrillic. I took
to increasingly refined phonemic scripts, using a Latinate alphabet
expanded to 50 letters for Swiss German.
Encountering shorthand systems in my late teens was a revelation
because it first showed me that there is something else than phonemic
writing.
Currently, I am using mainly three kinds of conscripts: (1) The
tengwar; (2) a "calligraphizable stenography" that has developed from
Stolze-Schrey shorthand and that I am using in a number of different
styles; (3) the "pattern script", a somewhat featural script inspired
by Hangul which is unusual in that it has been a one-time creation
that I have not altered since.
I never got much into featural scripts, though. That is to say, I
rather dislike that terminology. I think certain alphabets have some
"featural" traits, but no natural alphabet is purely "featural", so
this category is misleading. On the other hands, many natural
alphabets have different representations for vowels and for
consonants (e.g. the alphasyllabaries, the consonantal alphabets,
many shorthand systems, or Hangul), but there is no term for this
common distinction.
I also like con-orthographies, for instance, writing my dialect in a
manner that resembles Finnish orthography.
--
grüess
mach
Messages in this topic (24)
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1c. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "Matthew George" matt....@gmail.com
Date: Sun Sep 29, 2013 12:05 pm ((PDT))
My introduction was the pseudo-futhark runes on the dwarven maps in *The
Hobbit*.
Matt G.
Messages in this topic (24)
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1d. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun Sep 29, 2013 12:29 pm ((PDT))
I learned the Greek alphabet early on; then I encountered Thai script and fell
in love with its appearance (though I didn't know the value of the glyphs), and
sort-of imitated it for a conlang back in high school days. In grad school and
doc. research I was exposed to Javanese, Balinese, Batak, and
Buginese/Makassarese scripts (all derived from Indic precursors). And of
course, being interested in the field, I've seen a lot of others, like
Cyrillic. Somewhere in pre-high school days, I got a book "You too can write
Chinese, and I still remember some of the easier characters, like 'big' /ta/
and 'middle' /tSuN/). Have never quite been able to figure out Hebrew and
Arabic. Old Malay dictionaries in Arabic order/script are a total puzzlement....
My Kash script is inspired by the Thai/Indonesian stuff, but isn't imitative (I
don't think :-)) Gwr script is too (and conhistorically probably predates the
Kash, who no doubt got the idea of writing their lang. from the Gwr.....
Messages in this topic (24)
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1e. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Sun Sep 29, 2013 12:51 pm ((PDT))
2013-09-29 20:32, J. 'Mach' Wust skrev:
> Encountering shorthand systems in my late teens was a revelation
> because it first showed me that there is something else than phonemic
> writing.
Actually it's perfectly possible for a shorthand system to be
both phonemic and alphabetic. Melin's Swedish Shorthand which
I've been using for almost 30 years is, and is cursive too. It
has distinct and separate signs for all phonemes of Standard
Swedish even for the phonemes /ɕ/, /x/ and /ŋ/ which are written
with digraphs in longhand orthography. It achieves an effective
cursive rythm by assigning vowels to upwards or rightwards hair
strokes and consonants with perpendiculars, except the four
phonemes /r/, /l/, /n/, /s/ which are frequent in endings and
clusters and are written with loops/dots. There are some signs
for whole prefixes and suffixes, signs for consonant clusters
(including sC and nC clusters) and various types of abbreviations
are the rule, but it *is* perfectly possible to write
phonemically without any of those. When writing in English --
using my own adaptation -- I use very few abbreviations, and some
cluster signs are reassigned to phonemes not found in Swedish.
There are enlarged versions of the I and Ö signs which are
normally used for two affixes, and two arched hairstrokes --
'smile' and 'frown' -- also used for affixes, so at a pinch there
are in total thirteen vowel signs which I just barely make
suffice for English. You can see (not quite identical, the one on
the Swedish page being more complete) graphics of the basic sign
inventories at the Swedish and English Wikipedia:
<http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Werling_Melin>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melin_Shorthand>
/bpj
Messages in this topic (24)
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1f. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "Elena ``of Valhalla''" elena.valha...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Sep 30, 2013 1:38 am ((PDT))
On 2013-09-29 at 15:38:06 +0200, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > The old (and rather bad) Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings came
> > without the appendices,
> The paperback edition of the German translation of _The Lord of
> the Rings_ which I had missed the appendices, too, so I had
That's just evil!
I remember that when I got LOTR (in a single volume italian translation)
I was maybe a bit too young for it (around 10 year old or so) and didn't
finish reading it for a couple of years, but I spent hours reading
the appendices and looking at the big map.
I believe I had already seen greek characters, and possibly arabic
ones, but Tolkien's were the first ones for which I read something
on the way they worked, and they were quite a big influences
on my first conscripts, together with a book on the history
of numbers that I read around the same age.
--
Elena ``of Valhalla''
Messages in this topic (24)
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1g. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Mon Sep 30, 2013 5:23 am ((PDT))
2013-09-29 21:05, Matthew George skrev:
> My introduction was the pseudo-futhark runes on the dwarven maps in *The
> Hobbit*.
>
Actually they are real Old English/Anglo-Saxon runes, with one or
two additions of Tolkiens, and applied to modern English according
to his taste.
<http://forodrim.org/daeron/runes-eng.pdf>
/bpj
Messages in this topic (24)
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