The Conlang thread: tlhIngan QIp

Started by Legend, Dec 17, 2016, 11:09 PM

previous topic - next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

the-pi-guy

@the-Pi-guy
You put way more thought into this than I expected.  :o

I think it's a cool concept. Has some traces of being a featural system yet isn't as "sterile" as most of those feel to me. A ton of different ways vertical and horizontal elements can be represented. It could be cooler if you embrace this distinction between verticals and horizontals even more than in your example.

Take the Z, V, S, D, B, R, Th, T, Sh, Y, L, F, K, Ch, and W. They all have elements that have a slope of zero. Especially with something like AK, this could be confusing. A speaker would not know which horizontal lines belong to the K and which one belongs to the A unless they had experience with that specific combination.
Ak definitely.  That's what I didn't really like about ak.  

I and O could be replaced with the horizontal lines of Z and V. Then 45 degree elements could be more common in the vertical characters, instead of only using two as a pair. IE the F character could have one instead of its horizontal bar. Sure it'd look more like the english N, but I feel it'd greatly increase clarity of the designs.
I think I will try this out.
Z, V, and a few of the other characters, I was imagining them basically as pictograms. So az means down and av means up.  
But I think there's a way to retain that.  

Another/alternative thing you could do is make all the vowels in a word connected. The vowel of the next element would continue from the previous vowel as if they were all a single line. This could give your script a cool visual identity and additionally help with differentiating which lines belong to which parts. It might require shallowing the I and O a bit to keep the vowel line from extending too far up or down. One negative/positive about this is that combinations of vowels and consonants would look different depending on the word they're in. On one hand this makes it harder to parse the syllable directly but on the other hand it makes it easier to read whole words since additional information is encoded in each part. Two otherwise identical words that start with I and O would never be misread as the other.
I think this is a cool idea.  

With the actual aesthetics, the characters with just straight lines feel at odds with the characters with curves. It's pretty hard to judge though without seeing the vowels and consonants overlaid. I like the visual identity of D and F. They feel unique.


It's a cool flip on Japanese to reverse the consonants and vowels. I imagine it would feel really weird for a native Japanese speaker to hear.
One thing I think is really cool about the Japanese writing system is that it basically limits what sounds can be written.  Gives a new learner a good idea of what basically constitutes a "Japanese sound".


Legend


the-pi-guy

I thought this produced better results

           
   

    Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet

Yeah.  That looks pretty good.  

No offense to the other one, but it mostly looks like scribbles with very little structure.

the-pi-guy



It's incredible all the things that Tolkien made.  :o

Legend



It's incredible all the things that Tolkien made.  :o

Those are really small images for text!

The left one looks so much like futhark.

the-pi-guy

I really like reading about Tolkien.  

That's been something I've wanted to do.  Build a world with people that have their own history and languages.

Legend

I really like reading about Tolkien.  

That's been something I've wanted to do.  Build a world with people that have their own history and languages.
That's kinda what ended up happening with VizionEck Adventure. I started a stupid conlang to put in the background and give the game a little bit of interesting background graphics. That evolved into a true conlang, and then a conworld to go with it.

Legend


Legend


the-pi-guy

I've been thinking of putting together some sort of language, where the letters in the words are basically descriptive.  

I'm not really sure how possible it is.  
It seems really challenging to try to figure out categories, but I've only just started thinking about it.  

As an example:
The first letter might describe if it's a living noun, or a verb or something.  Say 'a' for a living thing.

The second letter might describe how many legs the living thing has.  Say "b" means 2.


So the word "ab" would mean bipedal, and the word for human would start out with "ab".

I want to try to see if there are some good categories so that the words wouldn't become overly long.  

Legend

I've been thinking of putting together some sort of language, where the letters in the words are basically descriptive.  

I'm not really sure how possible it is.  
It seems really challenging to try to figure out categories, but I've only just started thinking about it.  

As an example:
The first letter might describe if it's a living noun, or a verb or something.  Say 'a' for a living thing.

The second letter might describe how many legs the living thing has.  Say "b" means 2.


So the word "ab" would mean bipedal, and the word for human would start out with "ab".

I want to try to see if there are some good categories so that the words wouldn't become overly long.  

Stuff like that is hard and there's no shortage of attempts of trying to categorize everything.

Lots of conlangs try to have as few root words as possible and then build everything by compounding them. Toki Pona is one example.

Yours is different since the second "root" is contextual (and you want to use a single letter so you have less options) but that might give you a direction to start with.


Also maybe look into logban. Verbs in that language have very specific and defined noun relations so maybe you could do something like that. IE "A" means it's living and then that defines that the second letter is leg count, third letter is kingdom, etc.

the-pi-guy

Stuff like that is hard and there's no shortage of attempts of trying to categorize everything.

Lots of conlangs try to have as few root words as possible and then build everything by compounding them. Toki Pona is one example.

Yours is different since the second "root" is contextual (and you want to use a single letter so you have less options) but that might give you a direction to start with.

I'm thinking at most a single sound, so possibly a few letters.  I'm going to play with it.  


Also maybe look into logban. Verbs in that language have very specific and defined noun relations so maybe you could do something like that. IE "A" means it's living and then that defines that the second letter is leg count, third letter is kingdom, etc.
Will do.  Thanks!  

Legend

I love creating words. You get to think of lots of fun definitions that might be nothing like English. A few of my dictionary entries go into great detail explaining such basic things like "door" or "cube." It really helps to have a culture to guide you and stop things from feeling random.


My conlang is up to about 200 words right now. I used to have a lot more but I restarted it last year after making some changes. Have a lot of free time without a computer right now so it's a good thing to work on.

the-pi-guy

I'm thinking that verb will be constructed by literally describing what's doing an action.  
Like if read meant read, then r would specify it was a verb, e would specify eye, etc. That kind of thing.  

Just an example of how it'd work.  

I'm kind of excited.  A lot of room for strange slang terms.

Legend



Pretty poor/casual talk about conlangs but hey it is vsauce.

Go Up