#alphabetic glyphs

[zironcrane]

>conlang

>look inside

>english relex

[blujayonthewing]

elvish and dwarvish should have logographies in addition to syllabaries or alphabets

[copalcetic]

Wanted a short piece of text to practice my Aurebesh on, so I wrote a drabble. That's normal motivation, right?

Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Darth Maul & Leia Organa Characters: Darth Maul, Leia Organa Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Sith Ideology & Philosophy (Star Wars), Drabble Summary: Maul, not Obi-Wan, rescues Leia from Daiyu.

[glyphs-fi]

an ABSOLUTELY STUNNING fi ligature crocheted by @caliconiko for our 1000-members glyph challenge!!!!!!!!!!!

[sparkycinnamon]

fun letter fact:

this funky little rare cyrillic glyph’s (named multiocular o) only documented usage is in a 15th century manuscript that says “серафими многоꙮ҄читїи҄” which means “many-eyed (or multiocular) seraphim”

so it’s a visual pun. from the 15th century.

[happywebdesign]

FROST

[nomaishuttle]

worked on my conlang a lot today :] lost track of time a little bit .. i got around to drawing the base of sll the glyphs so now i just need 2 make all the variants for them

[thewandererh]

THIS IS SO COOL LOOK LOOK LOOKKK💛💛💛💛 LOOOKK WAUGHH

(Part 1) Written and Illustrated by Me, Researched by @bitsbug, @ikayblythe and @needlemeister.

(the link)

[olderthannetfic]

This is going to be an obvious question to anyone who's familiar with the language, but how does one type in Chinese? All the languages I've studied have had alphabetic writing systems, so to me foreign language typing is just assigning different letters on the keyboard and hitting them in order the same as English.

I imagine there's some way of entering the elements of each glyph with a command that tells it where to place it? I tried googling and just got a bunch of articles about how autocorrect can suggest Chinese characters when a user types the words in pinyin, but this sounds like a laborious and clunky system for someone who reads and writes Chinese fluently, and it wouldn't nessecarily exist on all devices.

--

(same anon wondering about typing Chinese characters) I also figure that if converting from pinyin was the primary or only way to get digital Chinese characters, then a lot more online spaces would just use pinyin in the first place and save everyone the trouble. The people writing multichapter fanfics or chatting away on social media in Chinese definitely have a fluent way to type their language that probably doesn't involve converting the entire text from an unrelated writing system, but these articles just aren't telling me what it is.

Ahahaha. Anon... phonetic entry is so much easier than other methods.

No, nobody enters characters while typing by picking radicals and where to place them. There are ways to look up an unfamiliar character that use radicals. There are also apps that let you try to draw something by hand, then attempt to figure out what you drew. But, again, that's for unfamiliar things, not typing up a story.

Computers were developed by English speakers and others with alphabets. Phonetic entry would probably be easiest anyway, but with the early infrastructure geared towards it, it's definitely easier.

There was an interesting phenomenon in Japanese (I'm not sure about Chinese) where The Youth™ were using fewer and fewer complex or less common kanji in... I want to say the 80s or 90s. The usual suspects moaned about the death of literacy...

Then cell phone/computer typing came along. If you knew the word, you didn't have to remember every single detail of how to write it. And people responded by using hella kanji all over the place, including lots of much rarer characters that a person would often recognize on sight but not remember perfectly enough to write by hand with confidence.

English spelling is tricky, but just learning 26 letters and then using them in a way that makes sense to a native speaker of [whatever] isn't. People are going to know pinyin. It's not a hardship to use it.

[larnax]

[ id: a fictional twitter conversation by verified user Derbl3s @/d3rb135 reading "Streamer s8brFrgh has spoke out publicly to defend Undro&*45↖◇₹‎⸘∂⑨ "No one should be deplatformed just for comitting arson, armed robbery and vehicular manslaughter". tweet is accompanied by two stock photos of white men with headphones baring their teeth at the camera. Zimbus @/Z1mbu5 retweets "if your being defended by s8rbFrgh you Know you messed up". / end ]

Thoughts on the drama going on rn in the streaming community?

[dedalvs]

How did you come up with the Zhyler alphabet? It's my favorite of all your scripts.

And yes I realize the answer is probably related to Asimov's famous quote "I just make them up, you see" but I'm hoping for something a bit more detailed.

Of all my scripts? A lazy alphabet most of whose characters can be found in Unicode?!

It's funny, I used to defend Zhyler's script from those who said its characters were mainly remapped Unicode characters, because I did actually create it. I wanted it to look like Roman characters (kind of like with Valyrian glyphs), so I took the original design and tried to get it as close to Roman characters as I could. You can see the whole write-up here (plus the original font), but essentially this was a snippet of the original logic behind it:

So you can see the stops there all have a line and a characteristic shape that appears to the left of the line for voiceless and to the right for voiced. Glides are the associated vowel with a dot. [tʃ] and [dʒ] were also reversies of each other and I made that clearer with the second version of the font created by Claire Ng. There are other patterns in there. So I did actually design a script, but it's still a lazy alphabet.

I will say Claire's version of it is gorgeous and much better than my original. It's the best version of it. But it's essentially Dustox. Whose favorite Pokémon is Dustox?! Nobody, that's who! Who wants Dustox when you can have the legendary Ho-oh, the mighty Arceus, spritely little Oddish, or one of Eevee's many adorable incarnations? Dustox isn't even the best moth-based Pokémon! Really, Zhyler isn't a language to be remembered. No one cared about it when it was current, and if it weren't for one spiteful anon who wishes to drag me through the mud like some sort of non-Alolan Muk, no one would remember it now.

[whencyclopedia]

Alphabet

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. This script eventually developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which in turn was refined into the Phoenician alphabet. It also developed into the South Arabian alphabet, from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These early vowelless alphabets are called abjads and still exist in scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages since it recorded words phonemically.

Phoenician colonization allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean. In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused many different alphabets to evolve from it. The Cumae form of the Greek alphabet was carried over by Greek colonists from Euboea to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to inscribe the Italic languages. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and then for the other languages of Europe.

Continue reading...

[glyphs-fi]

Some G&A variations Koksiroj made. (From top to bottom, Wikipedia.org Wii Sports, and Omniglot.com)

[levshany]

keep developing Blindos concept

more info and thoughts under the cut

1 pic. hands are obviously the most important instrument of interaction of Belos with the outside world. Hunter had watched his uncle long enough to realize that even without eyesight, Belos could still function properly. he knows all the basic recipes for the potions he needs by heart, and if he needs to subtract something from the book, then he asks Hunter or the Collector. Belos knows where what thing he has, measures the right amount of raw materials with medical accuracy, and he has no problems even with drawing glyphs, because he prepared stencils for himself in advance and developed kind of his own Braille alphabet

2,3 pics. every self-respecting artist should at least once in their life make a parody of art from the Vocaloid song "ECHO"

4 pic. if in the original series Belos allowed himself to fool around during the battle with Luz, then in this AU the chances between them are about the same, and the fight is more tense because of that. Belos would use hearing and magic to figure out Luz’s location and Luz would have to do everything possible to prevent Belos from hearing her.

5. oof

also hey you found a sketch

[yersina]

a linguist* plays chants of sennaar (pt 1)

*i studied linguistics for four years and concurrently did three years of sociolinguistics research, but i'm not currently employed in a linguistics-related field.

[pt 2] [pt 3] [pt 4] [pt 5]

thought i'd have some fun breaking down the languages in cos and stretch my rarely used linguistics muscles in the process! disclaimer: can't promise that i'll have any insights that a layperson wouldn't have, this is kinda just me thinking through the grammar of the language out loud haha.

this post covers the first language and will contain spoilers! it also assumes that you know what each of the symbols means already.

so the three glyphs from the devotee's language that you get introduced to right off the bat already tells me a lot: it's a pictographic logography (real life example: chinese characters), which is probably a good place to start for people who are new to language deciphering (also, none of these languages are spoken so an alphabet would be pointless lol). a logography is a writing system that represents whole words/concepts with a single character, as opposed to representing the sounds that the words make (like alphabets or syllabaries). i haven't completely finished the game yet (most of the way through the fourth language), but i'm p sure 1) all of the languages are logographies and 2) the devotee's language is the most true-to-life with its pictograms.

with these three words we can also begin to establish a pattern--verbs most likely have a line on the bottom, which holds true for the rest of the characters. i think the only exception to this rule is the character for "greeting", which is also used as the verb "salute" later in the game (an interesting choice (considering etymologies for greetings in irl languages), but it makes sense when your language is only 40 words lol). other patterns include the curved line for tools, the semi-open box for structures/locations, and the half-circle with the line for things relating to sight (which amusingly is also the overall game symbol for examining something). (not gonna include things like "man" and "music" and "plant" in this list cause they're defined in game.) i do think it's kind of fun that they introduced "i/me" and "you" before they introduced "man"—it validates that you'll find patterns haha.

(while writing the prev paragraph, it finally hit me that the symbol for "key" is open-tool. isn't that cool!)

i did notice at one point in the game that there was a devotee word that was cut off in one of the stone carvings that looked like it might have been the equivalent for "fortress"--it was the room radical with the two opposing arrows from the word for "warrior". although it's not validated by the game's automatic translation function, it does seem to be evidence that the language elements are fairly flexible and recombinable!

this language is SVO (subject verb object), like english, which again is a choice that makes sense in terms of easing people in. it uses reduplication with nouns to indicate plurality, which as far as i can tell is unique amongst the languages in this game. there's no tense markers, which is common to all the languages in this game (again, as far as i can tell without having encountered the last language yet). given how simple the languages in the game need to be, i'm not surprised that there aren't really auxiliary verbs or indications of infinitives either.

questions that still remain unanswered: - "dead/death", "seek", and "find" all have dots that don't show up in the other characters. not sure why that's the case. could be a representation of something metaphysical? - the character for "go/pass" has a "room" radical on the right side and something else on the left side. wonder if that was intentional

[nomaishuttle]

DEBATE OF THE FUCKING CENTURY i dont want ro add another vowel BUT im thinking abt replacing eh (as in web) with short a (as jn cat, apple, etc)... bc i already have ey which is sortt of similar to eh.. but alsoo eh does come in rly handy for some words. struggle