This is something that I've been thinking about for a while. As a sort of general cool-looking language, I'd like to make a symbolic alphabet for English, like the Chinese/Japanese/Egyptian ones. It wouldn't really be a conlang, since it's just English written funny.

Problem is, I don't know much of anything about these languages. What's the etymology of the images? Is "etymology" even the right word? How do they indicate tense or declension? I'm completely at a loss. Help?

(Take this with a few grains of salt... I don't really study the languages in question, just speak them. )

Most Chinese characters fall into one of three categories:

• Pictograms built from simple illustrations of the concept at hand (日 for the sun, 門 for a door, 田 for a field).
• Symbolic representations of a concept (上 for up, 下 for down).
• Compounds built from (usually) a semantic half and a sound half: the semantic half is usually a simplified radical indicating the general category that a character belongs to (⺡ for water, ⺅ for person); the sound half is usually another character that gives an indication as to how the character should be pronounced.
  • Example: the character 們 (a pluralizer used to indicate multiple people, pronounced as neutral-tone "men" in Mandarin) is composed of ⺅ (semantic part for person) and 門 (sound part of "mén").

Chinese also uses a lot of multi-character compound phrases where English usually has a single compound word: 電話 "telephone", from 電 "electricity" and 話 "speech"; 飛機 "airplane" from 飛 "flight" and 機 "machine".

Modern Chinese usually indicates tense by using separate "particle" characters — for instance, 了 following a verb puts the verb into the past tense (more strictly, it means "finished [verb]"). Japanese similarly adds kana to the end of verbs and adjectives for conjugation instead of touching the kanji (Wikipedia has a list if you haven't seen that).

Hope that helped.

edited 15th Aug '09 1:41:46 PM by Anemotaxis

I don't know much but I can offer what little I know about the Japanese writting system.

Tense in Japanese is indicated by verb-endings. As are things like negetives and copula. An example: You want wakaru (understand, know) to be in present negetive form so it becomes wakaranai （分からない）Past negetive form? Wakaranakatta （分からなかった）. I think that's it anyway.

There are three sets of characters in Japanese. Kanji　(漢字), hiragana (ひらがな), and katakana　(カタカナ). Kanji carry both meanings and sounds. Hiragana and katakana carry no meaning other than sound.

One can find the meaning of a kanji by looking for its radical; the root character. Radicals can often times indicate what the character's meaning might be related to. The kanji 潤 (moisten, wet) has the radical meaning water.

Many words are made up of multiple kanji. This can give a clue as to what it means. Volcano is one such word. 火山　is made up of the kanji for fire and mountain.

Furigana can be seen on the sides of kanji to show its reading.

If I got any of this wrong please correct me.

edited 15th Aug '09 1:39:41 PM by Aondeug

Thank you, you've both been quite helpful. I thought of the "add a symbol on the end to conjugate it" thing independently, oddly enough. I guess that it's sort of natural.

I remember reading about Chinese's compounds in a book by Hofstadter. He pointed out some illogic in it. For example, "elephant" is "大象". The first character means "big", and the second "elephant". Kinda pointless, but cool. I also like Chengyu. Hopefully I'll be able to use both of those things in my writing system.

Looks like I'll have to come up with characters that look sort of like what they're describing without aping the Han. Oh well, I'll figure something out. Thank you again.

This has already been thought about.

Wow, that's really useful! Thanks, Matrix! I may need to shamelessly rip off some of that!

How about thoughts on the actual idea, rather than the implementation? I'd like it to be a mysterious runic-type language for a Cosmic Horror Story, and maybe get some use out of it elsewhere, like a general-purpose art language. But the characters in that article make it seem sorta primitive, like cave drawings. I'd rather it be more abstract, like Hanzi. If somebody tells me what a han character means, I can usually see the resemblance, but I can't discern the meaning just from the character. But on the contrary, it's easy to see what this◊ means. I may need to put it through some reduction to simulate years of simplification.

Well, yeah, the Chinese logograms started off as pictures like Rosenfelder has in his article there, but changed over time to consisting of the standardised strokes they have today.

But yeah, runic, you say? You mean European Runic?

More in the imprecise Instant Runes sense. In the game I'm thinking of it would be a written Language Of Magic. For example, the game's plot starts because the protagonist gets the word for "gnosis" carved into her cheek, letting her see all kinds of things that maybe she'd rather not.

The runic alphabet does look pretty cool, however. It's not logogrammatic of course, so I'd have to take some liberties, but I could steal some of the shapes.

For example, this◊ looks pretty magical to me. The Chinese language probably would as well if I wasn't used to the look.

edited 15th Aug '09 3:34:07 PM by Tzetze

Have you looked at Blissymbolics?

Huh, the writing on that circle in the picture for Instant Runes is Armenian.

Ninja'd. It's amazing that you can tell, Matrix.

I can see why Negima used it, it looks very bizarre. Kinda like Georgian or that one that the [sternface] symbols come from.

A bit, but they don't seem particularly mystical. They're designed for clear communication, which is basically the opposite of what I'm going for. I mean, the Chinese term for "paradox" literally means spear-shield, which is completely opaque to a newbie. That's the sort of thing that I'm going for, which means that I'll probably have to dig into the roots. Probably the Germanic ones, out of preference.

edited 15th Aug '09 3:50:38 PM by Tzetze

Well, Armenian is pretty distinctive, full of straight lines that curve at corners. Also the fact that no other language uses its alphabet.

Maybe I'll make it mostly English.

I could be wrong about this but didn't the Elder Futhark (Norse Rune) have an ideographic component as part of it's use in fortune telling? It was the Younger Futhark that was phonographic.

Personally I think the simplest (sort of) is make a bunch of symbols, some basic rules for how they're put compounded (graphically that is, ie a 4x4 grid, read counter-clockwise from the top left corner), map these symbols to English words and then get compounding.

edited 17th Sep '09 4:55:53 AM by Knight of L-sama

Both Futharks were phonographic; it's just that the languages that evolved from Old Norse used fewer phonemes, and thus the symbol-set was pruned down. A bunch of the runes got re-designed, as well (or evolved). There's also the Anglo-Saxon futhark, which contains more letters; it's an interesting thing for English-speakers to take a look at and remind themselves that the Latin alphabet we use was not designed for and is actually not a great fit for English, thus the letter-pairs we use for certain phonemes (th, sh, ch for instance).

Using the runes in divinatory practices seemed to be a parallel process whose origins are uncertain and which died out eventually (probably with Christianity, though I don't think that's certain or anything). It was certainly popular in the Roman era and was described by Tacitus, who noted that the Germanic tribes cast lots for absolutely everything.

It's also worth noting that the forms of many of the runes appear to derive from non-Northern European scripts; it's likely that traders brought them back with them from southern Europe or the Middle East. These may have been combined with symbols already in use, possibly mystic symbols, possibly not, and adapted for ease of carving, particularly onto wood — all the runic alphabets deliberately eschew horizontal strokes, probably because they would have been indistinct since they'd have followed the grain of the wood.

We really have no idea, but probably not. Everything we know about the role of the runes in historical Northern European magical practices can be written on the back of my bar tab. (Well, maybe a little more than that — we'd have to include the Havamal, and that's a few pages.)

We don't know which runes were conceptually associated with particular concepts, and we don't know exactly how they were used — we just have a basic idea of what they were thought to be capable of, and we know that runes were cast for the purposes of divination. All the actual process, and all of the symbol-to-meaning mapping, is reconstructed — by which I mean "completely made up".

We do know that runes were used and considered magical later on, but we don't know much about their actual use in the actual timeframe. Runes remained pretty much decipherable for a LONG time though, and there was never really a need to "translate" them, AFAIK.

And yes, the runes were phonographic. It's possible they had certain connotations assigned to individual runes (sort of like what is sometimes done with the hebrew alphabet) though.

An ial based on English?

Sorry, every one in a while my qoutes cause gitches. My Hero Zero!

Just posting to fix the glitch. You going to fix that signature, yurifan?

Who would use this as an ial? No, it would be an art language.

edited 16th Nov '09 6:01:03 PM by Tzetze

Semi necroing this thread. Think I might post my progress here, for people's criticisms and inputs.