Writing systems general

Have any of you attempted to make your own writing system? What was your goal, what was your process like, and what did you learn? Alternatively, have you ever stumbled upon a writing system that grabbed your attention? And what about it aroused your interest? Info on writing systems: Writing systems of the world: https://scriptsource.org Wiki on both constructed and natural writing systems: https://www.omniglot.com General introduction: https://neographilia.wordpress.com Software for language documentation, font development, translation etc.: https://software.sil.org/products/

I like to collect albums and books from around the world just so that I can have an excuse to have unique writing systems in my library. It's pretty shallow but I've found some good stuff doing it. Anyway, I can't wait for Mayan to be added to Unicode. It's a very cool system.

>>6123 I programmed and extended GNU/Emacs's org-mode such that it; - Highlights and/or emphasizes (dynamically) - Hyperlinks texts together, words, jumping around the text - Self modifying text (on cursor movement or interaction) I write with a very weird personal schizophrenic style. Exploring different paths of the text

>>6124 Please recommend some of those books >>6150 Please post link to your modification of Emacs org-mode

I made my own writing system: https://miraflutty.neocities.org/writing_system_manual.pdf It was my attempt to make a writing system that maps to english phonemes, that's practical to use and works for most (common) dialects. I also made a minimalist system of grammar that's meant to be simple to understand, that only adds rules when they make a sentence more clear and avoids arbitrary constraints. I made the grammar system because I thought the current grammar is too inconsistent and unpredictable. I'm not really confident about the grammar rules because I'd need someone to look them over and give a second opinion. A fun side effect: my english pronunciation improved lots since I started working on the writing system, as english isn't my first language and I didn't understand english phonetics before I started researching them for this.

I've been (at a distance) interested in shorthand systems for some time now, but a number of their features I've found undesirable. Namely the great deal of wondering on the page, and I'm presently undecided on the system of abbreviations. Arabic's writing system has most of the features I find desirable with its strong groundedness, compactness, and writing which flows, unfortunately abjad's are not useful for writing all languages, and even in Arabic there are great number of marks which require breaking the flow of writing. "Quikscript" seems to be the closest system currently existing to my ideal for the expression of English. It still contains abbreviations, but only a rather small amount and at least some of these are justified by words which lack a unique pronunciation within the standard dialect (it's a phonetic orthography). Further it does on occasion wonder a little more than I would like but this is mostly limited so far as I can tell to the fusing of half, or quarter letters instead of writing the full letter and the less sophisticated system can simply be used in these cases. It also has the disadvantage that nearly every glyph has a mirrored form typically conveying a related sound. Perhaps I will learn it and use this as the basis of a new system similar to what the author did for Pitmann's shorthand. >>6158 This is really neat, thanks for sharing!

I've made a couple dozen writing systems, and spent a lot of time on a handful, for the constructed languages I've unfortunately spent far more time on. I've made everything from complex logographies to simple alphabets. I like reworking real scripts sometimes. I've redone Roman letters into an adbjad with accents (not that that's hard, you just go o ó ò ö), made a dumb little language for that. I have a Fake chinese dictionary going that reinterprets everything from the basic 218 radicals and also from my own arrangement of strokes. I have also made up various shorthand arrangements for my own dialect of English. I like to style them after Gregg shorthand. I don't use any of them, it's usually just to kill an hour or two. I like the cursive, connective nature of it; it's like Arabic, which I also love. I am currently working on a personal language and script along some strict aesthetic principles (esp. rule of three), and also a very simple International Auxilliary Language That Isn't Another Rip-Off Of Latin. It's insane. I have no idea why I like this. It is beyond useless. Nobody's going to use my IAL. >>6158 >a minimalist system of grammar I'd love to see that. Your English script is very cool, I might dabble in it. >>6124 seconding a book rec

>>6159 I've looked into Quikscript a bit, it looks close to what I was attempting with my own writing system. But I get the impression that lots of the letters are too similar to one another, so that what you write would be hard to read when one writes hastily and sloppily. It's an important factor to consider since people often try to write very quickly or just have messy handwriting. It's a mistake that I see a lot of writing system creators make, either that or people make their characters needlessly complicated. It's a difficult balance to strike and in my experience just requires lots of trial and error. >>6160 ooooh, how do you work on a logography? I don't know how to even get started on one or how to iterate on it, if I were to one day become mad enough to attempt such a thing :) IAL's are great. I'm kinda disappointed that none of the manmade IAL's have really taken off. I feel like the global lingua franca should be manmade, since artificial languages are almost automatically grammatically simpler and more consistent then natural languages are. I hope you discover just the right ingredients that would make your IAL appealing enough for people to adopt~ I also think that taking Latin, removing noun gender, and eliminating all grammatical inconsistencies and maybe streamlining and refining the grammar somewhat would probably make for a reasonably good IAL. I don't know enough about Latin, but its phonology seems okay and the case system seems to make Latin sentences more precise than English sentences usually are. And if you do ever look into my English writing system, I'd love to hear your feedback and questions! Feedback & complaints & ideas are always interesting, while questions tell me that I need to elaborate on something that's not clear enough in the manual.

Speaking of IAL's, has anyone looked into Lojban? Is it a meme, or does it have potential for everyday use? Does it have any severe issues that would prevent it from becoming widespread? I heard that it has a very complete vocabulary and versatile grammar to back it up, but that it might be too difficult for most people to learn and use.

>>6123 I made my own system just by taking hanzi and adding some radicals like "triangle" "triangle with extended bottom line" "some katakana syllabories" and etc. It ends up with their readability, because more complex combinations make it harder to read. I also added prefixes, suffixes, times to the characters. For example: "x" radical at the left-bottom corner means "not", "つ" means future time, "上" - means past time, etc. This id funny and I would be happy to see someday so readable and compact.

I think everyone's done some sort of cypher script at some point in their lives, where A is infinity and B is the batman symbol etc. I enjoyed the challenge of making it a bit harder to solve than it's surface appearance would imply. Batman symbol is the I before E rule or some such. >>6199 You have it all wrong there, penis nub means the future & tree in ground means the past any scholar could tell you that

When I was a kid I would write secret messages by writing half-letters and interleaving them in a sentence.

>>6123 Bump for Samuel Johnson, a true genius

this person makes adaptations of foreign scripts for english: https://alternatescriptbureau.wordpress.com I haven't looked into them much but I thought they're quite interesting

I've been fuarrrking around with a script recently, I think I'm starting to get close to something that's usable. It's kind of difficult making something that's reasonably easy to use on a computer without basically just making a cypher of latin, computers don't really handle more complex writing systems very well. To answer some of the questions in the OP: goal? I want something reduces spelling mistakes, is aesthetically pleasing and improves sight reading learn? Latin script is really great, lots of script makers soykaf on it, but it's fantastic, usually when I'm thinking of an issue and trying to come up with some solution, I realize that what I'm coming up with is basically just what Latin does already.

>>6353 Forgot to mention, it's just being used as a font in the file explorer screenshot, the notepad image shows some writing in it's own spelling system. I haven't totally settled on the spelling yet, so I'm not going to bother getting things properly set up.

>>6353 Looking good anon! Can you give a broad explanation in terms of how your script works? How did you get it to work on the computer? Did you just swap the glyphs in a font? When it comes to complex writing systems on computers Graphite seems the way to go, though I don't think a graphite font would work in file explorer: https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=projects&item_id=graphite_home

>>6357 Forgive the janky presentation. To create a font for your script and have Windows use it: BitFontMaker2 works as a quick basic bitmap font creator, creating the glyphs is straightforward, but some technical notes: a fonts size is the number of pixels it rises above the baseline, so a font that has 9 pixels above and 3 bellow is 9pt not 12pt. Windows uses 9pt for most of its user interface, but not all of it You can create multiple .ttf files that Windows will treat as different forms of the same font (bold, italic etc.) I haven't bothered with it yet, so read the sites documentation for that. after exporting and installing your font it can be used just like any other, to make Windows use it as the system font, open the Registry Editor and go to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts Clear the entries for the various versions of Segoe UI (except for historic and symbol) go to \CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes and change the entry for Segoe UI to be the name of your font (you must get spaces and case correct) In my example image Courier New would be used as the system font (also I messed up and wiped historic and symbol, they don't draw anything in the system, symbol is mostly for mathematical symbols and historic is for ancient writing systems.I'd restore it but I can't be bothered.) Sign out, then back in and it'll take effect. You should make sure you can actually read your script before doing this obviously, since the registry editor itself will be displayed in it, so if you can't read any of it that could complicate rolling it back. Also I don't know what font the new Win10 UI elements use, so things like the start menu won't be effected. I don't really think my script has achieved what it set out to do yet, I think it's still too visually cluttered and it fails to offer much above latin, although I think if I can find a way to make increased written grammar work, it could be useful for studying foreign languages where the grammar might not be as immediately obvious.

Would anybody have any ideas about improving readability? Humans are obviously good at adapting to different writing systems, but could we achieve something better? Something clear and fast as reading speed is concerned? Writing is a strange thing. In the beginning, somebody literally figures out a way to draw things (*). Then, little by little these figures get morphed out into syllables or even single sounds and start to resemble letters. This takes thousands of years and countless languages to develop. Then printing press appears, computers get invented and we find ourselves able to process and transfers these letters in an abundance never experienced before. In the end our Information Technologies advance so far that even different fonts become available, all these UTF-somethings and generally graphical interfaces as well. And then? BAM! Somebody has the bright idea to replace this neat text with an image, an icon, resetting the whole system thousands of years into ideogrammatical past once again. Did we intend to do that? Our letters are not designed to be readable. They are designed to represent images, on a language long ago forgotten. The fact that they are at least somewhat readable might largely be by accident. (*) "literally figures out a way to draw things" - had to stop there for a while to ponder hidden meanings.

>>6123 >Have any of you attempted to make your own writing system? >What was your goal, what was your process like, and what did you learn? Yeah, many times. I sometimes randomly do it, just for fun. I've also tried to adapt writing systems to [more compatibly] write English, and I've tried to make writing systems so that I can write things without them being recognizable. I've learned that it is difficult to make a "logical" writing system—I've tried doing this by doing things like using indicative methods for voiced vs. unvoiced or otherwise modified consonants or sounds with diacritics or inverted characters or etc. It can be hard to decide how to represent "letters" i.e. how each should look (especially "logically"), and keeping them unique can be hard. I've also tried making pseudo-abjads where vowels are represented by diacritics and block-like writing like in Hangul, but I feel like I've never implemented these well. I normally just write in "real" writing systems—other than the Latin alphabet as in English, I am most familiar with the Cyrillic, Greek, Runic, and Kana writing systems. >Alternatively, have you ever stumbled upon a writing system that grabbed your attention? >And what about it aroused your interest? Alternate phonemic scripts for English like the Shavian alphabet are quite interesting and unique. Hangul is also interesting because the characters resemble the shape of the mouth to make the sound, the block characters, etc. >>6367 >Would anybody have any ideas about improving readability? Idk, heiroglyphics maybe? Logographs like in Chinese languages have more details to them and one might confuse characters, but they are more compact. So this sort of solves but also unsolves your problem. Improved phonetics could also help, but maybe just making individual characters more unique or more logical.

How the heck are there so many people here who have invented their own fuarrrking languages? Who the hell are you people.... how did you find the time to do this? Also, I find it very cool to know people like this exist, and even cooler that they are all here.

>>6124 Check out the Powa syllabary for Nahuatl frankdiazautor.blogspot

I'm the person who posted >>6158 and I have a question; Does anyone know of any community centered around constructed writing systems or of any other place where I might get feedback? I feel like I've reached the limit of my knowledge and skill and that I could use other people's insight. I think that getting one or more second opinions would help me out a lot, especially since this script was developed to reach specific goals rather than for aesthetics. I want second opinions in order to gain the confidence needed to finalize and lock the design of the writing system before I commit to big time investments like developing a font and a keyboard layout / IME. (I also made some minor stylistic changes to the manual so here's a new PDF)

Technically I have never attempted to make my own writing system but I did make my own version of the glagolitic script. I call it "technical glagolitic" since it reminds me of technology.