Kintsugi Conlang Creation

I'm happy to design symbols, I just wouldn't know how to compile them into a digital typeset (although I daresay I could look it up anyway?)

Besides, what would the point of designing a new font for a language if we don't use novel symbols?

Also uh I don't understand, how is Wingdings alphabet type? The symbols and their corresponding keyboard keys/ascii values are seemingly arbitrary.

 

ahhh im communicating this badly i think

i can design symbols if need be, and also compile them into a digital typeset! i see wingdings as alphabet type because each ding has corresponding letter right? so its an alphabet type set. languages like modern chinese or ancient hieroglyphics wouldn't be able to work in the same way with a keyboard as wingdings or the cyrillic alphabet does because of how extensive they are! does that kinda make sense?

 

Oh, yeah! That's exactly what I was suggesting. How many symbols can be fit into a single regular typeset?

 

i dunno, honestly!! easily, probably as many as many keys as there are on a standard keyboard! :O

 

But there are more characters in a given typeset than there are on the keyboard. There are capitals of course, but also special symbols you can access using alt-numpad, etc. I know that different versions of ASCII and Unicode have character sheets of varying length, but I don't know what the standard is or what you can author with your software :')

 

It may be worth it to figure out how to reappropriate the Unicode diacritic marks.

Honestly, though, I see actual fonting being pretty far in the future. We should start with a standard transliteration/ASCII-typable equivalent for glyphs.

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If we're going with glyphs and modifiers, I wonder if we could structure our language like this:

[sun][proper noun] = The Sun

[sun][collection] = stars in general (lit. "other suns")

[sun][adjective] = warm (lit. "sunlike")

[sun][adverb] = cheery (lit. "sunny")

Compare and contrast:

[road][proper noun] = the highway/freeway network (lit. "The Road")

[tree][collection] = forest

[fire][adjective] = hot

[predator][adverb] = quickly (lit. "the way a predator pounces")

 

Can the language be agglutinating? Because I love piling on elements to make more and more specific words. :3

 

That would be a pretty great way for us to start with a smaller base of meanings, and have the learning curve be pretty smooth.

 

I like what you're all saying! I'm a little busy at the moment but I'll put forward some ideas tomorrow as soon as I get a chance to.

 

Possibility: Base the phonology on that of Japanese, as a nod to the forum name and also because the minimal consonant clusters make it fairly easy to pronounce.

 

meanwhile I always trip over Japanese because I'm used to lots of consonants, dammit! (I speak Polish)

 

As I see it, we have a couple options for grammatical gender:

1. The language has no grammatical gender.
2. The grammatical gender is based upon something completely orthogonal to human gender (such as "speaks" vs "listens", or "mobile" vs "stationary")
3. The language's grammatical gender system is so bullshit and confusing that in the end everyone just uses whatever the hell they like.

What I might find cool, though, are markers for "person/object 1 in the sentence" and "person/object 2 in the sentence", to wit:

[Person][1] did something to [person][2], while [person][2] did something else to [person][1].

In an agglutinative language paradigm this could spiral out of control into [person][1][1][2][1][2] monstrosities, which are hilarious but unreadable. So we probably shouldn't go down the road of trying to nest them. It might be worth defining a person/object 3 affix. Beyond that, though, there's really no point adding more; at that point you should start using names, even if hypothetical placeholder ones.

 

I love the first/second/possibly third markers.

...I've been kind of intrigued by this idea, but this may be exactly the wrong place to try it out.

 

How about animate vs inanimate vs abstract?

ed: Then adding the abstraction marker to other things could be like [person][abstract]=the concept of personhood, and so on.

 

Ooooh. There's some fun things we could do with that. Abstract is the intangible, the theoretical. People could use the [abstract] marker for things that they haven't personally experienced.

 

So does that mean [book][abstract][proper noun] = TVTropes?

 

*mashes like link*