There are 9 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: Padraic Brown
1b. Re: Gateway to conscripts
From: R A Brown
1c. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
From: BPJ
2a. Re: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
From: Don Boozer
2b. Re: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
From: Alex Fink
2c. Re: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
From: BPJ
2d. Re: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
From: Padraic Brown
2e. Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
From: BPJ
3. FW: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
From: Padraic Brown
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Sat Sep 28, 2013 6:15 am ((PDT))
>The inspiration, as I recall it, came from seeing pictures
>in an encyclopedia showing the huge round medallions in
>Hagia Sophia with their Arabic calligraphy. I knew nothing
>about the Arabic abjad at the time and just used the symbols
>rather as Sequoyah used Roman script as the basis for his
>syllabary (tho my system of 'squiggles' were an alphabet).
Neat. I don't think I had met Arabic or Hebrew letters until
rather later. Definitely after tengwar.
>By the time I encountered Greek and Cyrillic, I found them
>too similar to the Roman script to be particularly
>interesting. I guess as far as conscripts are concerned,
>the exotic has greater appeal. :)
Quite. This is probably why, when I did meet with tengwar,
they became a matter of some fascination. Their influence can
yet be seen in the rounded mode of the Talarian alphabet.
>I have long had a vague notion of developing a featural
>script not on the lines of tengwar but having a cuneiform
>character. Whether this will ever get further than a vague
>notion, I'm not sure ;)
I was never terribly interested in featural scripts, at least not
heavily featural ones. I might note that in Talarian some scribes
will rotate a native letter, for example "T", in order to note a
foreign sound, like [d], in a transcribed name or a borrowed
word. I mention only because of the strong cuneiform influence
on ancient Talarian writing. As one scholar wrote: "...and upon
each house is a virtue. Look! The ancients wrote upon stones and
riverclay – if you don’t believe me, travel into the sunset with the
caravans to the Great Western Empire and see with your own two
eyes as I did! – your ancestors, peace be on them, wrote upon
leather and wood. These symbols we preserved from scholar to
scholar: anyone who seeks to attain wisdom learns the letters
(xaraffiyyar), the syllables (papos) and the glyphic symbols (çiritar)."
Naturally, no one writes in riverclay anymore! But some of the
letters and even larger symbols are still there.
Other scribes, I suppose, don't see the point in this kind of thing,
saying you're just going to pronounce a [t] anyway, so write "T"! I
guess they figure having to deal with six different writing systems
and two different languages all in one text are problem enough
without having to coddle to foreign sounds no one knows how to
deal with anyway.
The Auntimoanians, with their four lengths of vowels, have been
slowly adopting the "reversed letter" to write the short weak
vowels. So, Є = [ɛ] and Э = [ə]. Long strong vowels are
simply doubled: H = [e:] and HH = [e::].
Sometimes I wish I had kept those old "decorated alphabets". I
can still dimly see some of those notebook pages in my mind
filled with fancily altered Д and Ѫ.
Padraic
>Ray
Messages in this topic (17)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: Gateway to conscripts
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Sat Sep 28, 2013 11:14 am ((PDT))
On 28/09/2013 14:15, Padraic Brown wrote:
[snip]
>> I have long had a vague notion of developing a
>> featural script not on the lines of tengwar but having
>> a cuneiform character. Whether this will ever get
>> further than a vague notion, I'm not sure ;)
>
> I was never terribly interested in featural scripts, at
> least not heavily featural ones.
I suppose my interest stems partly from my interest in
phonology which, as many will know, is probably the aspect
of language that I find most interesting. It interested me
from the time when I first realized there were different
languages with different sounds.
I learnt Pittman Shorthand when I was about 11 or 12 and
that has some featural marking (as does Gregg shorthand
which I learnt later in my teens). Also somewhere in my
mid-teens I came across Alexander Bell's "Visible Speech",
so that by the time I came across Tolkien's tengwar the
notion of featural script seemed quite 'natural' to me :)
You may recall that I was somewhat unimpressed by the
arbitrary ad_hoc values given to the 16 four-bit characters
of "Plan B" ("the particular letters and pronunciations
chosen don't matter much"). I came up with alternative
versions which:
- gave a CV value to each character, as suggested by Jacques
Guy in his critique of Plan B.
- where each bit in the four-bit "nibble" had a featural value.
http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Exp/Appendix1.html
http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Exp/March2006.html
It seemed so obvious to me that if each character is encoded
by four bits, then each bit should have a featural value.
Ogham ought to be reformed along the same lines ;)
Guess this is very much a personal choice, but I sort of
like featural scripts.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"language … began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
for individual beings and events."
[Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
Messages in this topic (17)
________________________________________________________________________
1c. Re: Gateway to conscripts (was: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorte
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Sat Sep 28, 2013 4:12 pm ((PDT))
I came across the Greek alphabet and three varieties of runes some years
before I came across the Tengwar. I remember believing that I wrote Greek
when I wrote Swedish with Greek letters, so I must have been quite young!
OTOH I remember being perplexed over 'missing' letters in the Greek
alphabet and my father helping me out with digraphs borrowed from French.
My source had nothing (or nothing I understood!) on Greek digraphs and
diacritics, and I doubt I or my father knew that Greek uses the OU
digraph^[here be BetaCode!] just as I used it for _u_ guided by the Swedish
respelling of French loan words.
When I was a little older I found meaty stuff on runes in an old
encyclopedia and then I found a translation of one of Diringer's books on
the history of writing in the library. When I hit the Tengwar I had already
done a cursive syllabary with contextual variants! I remember using CV-VC
sequences for CVC syllables to keep down the number of symbols needed as
well as using 'silent Es' to write consonant clusters -- probably my
father's Gallophilia rearing its head again.
The old (and rather bad) Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings came
without the appendices, and when I eventually did get an English paperback
in my hands half the title page inscription was missing so my start in
Tengwar was rather challenged. I didn't even understand the featural bit
until I came across a phonetics textbook, but then I was hooked on both
phonetics and featural scripts. I used a featurally arranged pigpen cipher
for some years -- the checkers were consonants arranged by PoA and MoA and
the X's were vowels -- and even developed cursive forms before coming
across Melin's shorthand which had clear featural traits. I had a moment of
delight and enlightenment at eighteen when realizing the fact that all
vowels were upstrokes and all consonants were downstrokes, except _r l n s_
which were loops, and what that meant for the efficiency of the shorthand!
I remain a user of the shorthand to this day, and have developed my own
adaptation to English. Naturally I've tried and failed as a shorthand
constructor as well!
In later years I did consciously avoid featural traits in the glyph design
as being unrealistic in the cultural setting when developing the Sohldarian
scripts. OTOH I did use featural underspecification like in younger
Scandinavian runes and Linear B, so that obstruents at the same PoA share
the same signs. I also allowed myself to introduce diacritics to make up
for this, again like in late Scandinavian runes.
/bpj
Den lördagen den 28:e september 2013 skrev Padraic Brown:
> >The inspiration, as I recall it, came from seeing pictures
>
> >in an encyclopedia showing the huge round medallions in
> >Hagia Sophia with their Arabic calligraphy. I knew nothing
> >about the Arabic abjad at the time and just used the symbols
> >rather as Sequoyah used Roman script as the basis for his
> >syllabary (tho my system of 'squiggles' were an alphabet).
>
>
> Neat. I don't think I had met Arabic or Hebrew letters until
> rather later. Definitely after tengwar.
>
>
> >By the time I encountered Greek and Cyrillic, I found them
> >too similar to the Roman script to be particularly
> >interesting. I guess as far as conscripts are concerned,
> >the exotic has greater appeal. :)
>
>
> Quite. This is probably why, when I did meet with tengwar,
> they became a matter of some fascination. Their influence can
> yet be seen in the rounded mode of the Talarian alphabet.
>
>
> >I have long had a vague notion of developing a featural
> >script not on the lines of tengwar but having a cuneiform
> >character. Whether this will ever get further than a vague
> >notion, I'm not sure ;)
>
>
> I was never terribly interested in featural scripts, at least not
> heavily featural ones. I might note that in Talarian some scribes
> will rotate a native letter, for example "T", in order to note a
> foreign sound, like [d], in a transcribed name or a borrowed
> word. I mention only because of the strong cuneiform influence
> on ancient Talarian writing. As one scholar wrote: "...and upon
>
> each house is a virtue. Look! The ancients wrote upon stones and
>
> riverclay – if you don’t believe me, travel into the sunset with the
>
> caravans to the Great Western Empire and see with your own two
>
> eyes as I did! – your ancestors, peace be on them, wrote upon
>
> leather and wood. These symbols we preserved from scholar to
>
> scholar: anyone who seeks to attain wisdom learns the letters
>
> (xaraffiyyar), the syllables (papos) and the glyphic symbols (çiritar)."
> Naturally, no one writes in riverclay anymore! But some of the
> letters and even larger symbols are still there.
>
>
> Other scribes, I suppose, don't see the point in this kind of thing,
>
> saying you're just going to pronounce a [t] anyway, so write "T"! I
>
> guess they figure having to deal with six different writing systems
>
> and two different languages all in one text are problem enough
>
> without having to coddle to foreign sounds no one knows how to
>
> deal with anyway.
>
>
> The Auntimoanians, with their four lengths of vowels, have been
> slowly adopting the "reversed letter" to write the short weak
> vowels. So, Є = [ɛ] and Э = [ə]. Long strong vowels are
> simply doubled: H = [e:] and HH = [e::].
>
> Sometimes I wish I had kept those old "decorated alphabets". I
> can still dimly see some of those notebook pages in my mind
> filled with fancily altered Д and Ѫ.
>
>
> Padraic
>
>
> >Ray
>
Messages in this topic (17)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
Posted by: "Don Boozer" librarian....@gmail.com
Date: Sat Sep 28, 2013 8:17 am ((PDT))
I've always thought these script animations were cool. ..
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html
Going the next step from Roman to conscript would be interesting.
Don
On Sep 27, 2013 9:38 PM, "Padraic Brown" <elemti...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > My other qualm is that the Tengwar are arranged simply to look like the
> English.
>
> > What's wrong with just writing the proper Elvish?
>
> I suppose the English tengwaresque letters could magically morph into
> proper Sindarin tengwar?
> I daresay tengwar are the gateway through which many conscriptwrights
> entered the craft. I can
> still recall some boys in my fourth grade class using tengwar for their
> secret codes. My gateway
> had already been Greek, and I do recall many an early decorated alphabet
> being based on
> Greek and Cyrillic letter forms. Graphically seeing how the English sounds
> turn into Elvish
> letters would be visually interesting I think.
>
> Padraic
>
Messages in this topic (17)
________________________________________________________________________
2b. Re: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Sep 28, 2013 12:21 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 11:14:46 -0400, Don Boozer <librarian....@gmail.com> wrote:
>I've always thought these script animations were cool. ..
>http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html
>Going the next step from Roman to conscript would be interesting.
>From Roman to conscript: well, Jim Henry has an instance of that for
>gjax-zym-byn,
http://jimhenry.conlang.org/gzb/writing.html .
That said, I was hoping there would be more animàtion in the animations. The
Phoenician set had what I was after, characters actually rotating and flipping.
The Latin animation was rich enough that this omission wasn't that bad, and
the Cuneiform was also gave at least some impression of continuity, having four
frames. But the others, nothing: parent alphabet blinks out, child blinks in
(maybe with a bit of visual hocus pocus). I wanted to see, you know, the right
leg of pi visibly curling up and in, and the chin of rho sprouting a growing
flourish in response, and all that sort of thing.
Sad to say, but the still image
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ph%C3%B6nizisch-5Sprachen.svg might actually
contain _more_ information than these animations -- with the exception of Latin
-- in that it indicates what the sources of the added letters are. And less
false information: in the animations the temporal order of additions and
deletions appears to be fake (it's just the alphabetical sequence order).
Alex
Messages in this topic (17)
________________________________________________________________________
2c. Re: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Sat Sep 28, 2013 1:14 pm ((PDT))
I just wanted to chime in and point out that it's perfectly OK to use the
Tengwar to write English, and by extension any natural language. In fact
known evidence suggests that Tolkien used them to write English more often
than his conlangs! There are samples in Latin, Old English and Old Norse (a
single word!) as well. There are some quite long texts in English of his
hand, about a page each.
It should be noted that Tolkien was interested in English script reform and
the Tengwar have a strong root in that direction too. He experimented at
least as much with English Tengwar modes as with conlang modes; if anything
his conventions for writing Quenya and Sindarin were more stable than those
for English, showing that he was constantly engaged in the subject of
English Tengwar modes, and since he was constantly revising everything he
worked on I'd almost say stability would have been a sign of lack of
interest.
/bpj
Den lördagen den 28:e september 2013 skrev Padraic Brown:
> > My other qualm is that the Tengwar are arranged simply to look like the
> English.
>
> > What's wrong with just writing the proper Elvish?
>
> I suppose the English tengwaresque letters could magically morph into
> proper Sindarin tengwar?
> I daresay tengwar are the gateway through which many conscriptwrights
> entered the craft. I can
> still recall some boys in my fourth grade class using tengwar for their
> secret codes. My gateway
> had already been Greek, and I do recall many an early decorated alphabet
> being based on
> Greek and Cyrillic letter forms. Graphically seeing how the English sounds
> turn into Elvish
> letters would be visually interesting I think.
>
> Padraic
>
Messages in this topic (17)
________________________________________________________________________
2d. Re: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Sat Sep 28, 2013 8:06 pm ((PDT))
> I just wanted to chime in and point out that it's perfectly OK to use the
> Tengwar to write English, and by extension any natural language. In fact
> known evidence suggests that Tolkien used them to write English more often
> than his conlangs! There are samples in Latin, Old English and Old Norse (a
> single word!) as well. There are some quite long texts in English of his
> hand, about a page each.
I don't think the complaint was about English written using tengwar — it's my
opinion that any language can be written by any writing system — but rather
that the letters used in the video were actually Latin characters shaped in
imitation of tengwar.
Padraic
> It should be noted that Tolkien was interested in English script reform and
> the Tengwar have a strong root in that direction too. He experimented at
> least as much with English Tengwar modes as with conlang modes; if anything
> his conventions for writing Quenya and Sindarin were more stable than those
> for English, showing that he was constantly engaged in the subject of
> English Tengwar modes, and since he was constantly revising everything he
> worked on I'd almost say stability would have been a sign of lack of
> interest.
>
> /bpj
>
> Den lördagen den 28:e september 2013 skrev Padraic Brown:
>
>> > My other qualm is that the Tengwar are arranged simply to look like
> the
>> English.
>>
>> > What's wrong with just writing the proper Elvish?
>>
>> I suppose the English tengwaresque letters could magically morph into
>> proper Sindarin tengwar?
>> I daresay tengwar are the gateway through which many conscriptwrights
>> entered the craft. I can
>> still recall some boys in my fourth grade class using tengwar for their
>> secret codes. My gateway
>> had already been Greek, and I do recall many an early decorated alphabet
>> being based on
>> Greek and Cyrillic letter forms. Graphically seeing how the English sounds
>> turn into Elvish
>> letters would be visually interesting I think.
>>
>> Padraic
>>
>
Messages in this topic (17)
________________________________________________________________________
2e. Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Sun Sep 29, 2013 1:47 am ((PDT))
---------- Vidarebefordrat meddelande ----------
Från: *BPJ*
Datum: söndagen den 29:e september 2013
Ämne: [CONLANG] Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
Till: Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com>
OK my bad. I have no speakers on my desktop so I watched the video on my
phone and couldn't see all too clearly; I thought it was Tengwar which
morphed into Latin letters. You can't really blame McWhorter for that as he
probably didn't do the artwork himself. Given the brevity of the video my
only complaints are the non-mention of contemporary hobby conlanging and
that he said that fans have created new Eldarin words; conscientious fans
do *not* pull new words out of thin air but limit themselves to compounds,
semantic extensions and Quenya/Sindarin phonological transpositions. You
have to give him kudos for actually studying Eldarin grammar and phonology
though!
As for the Hollywood bias I think it's really hard for people to think out
of that box. Earlier this year I gave an interview on conlangs on student
cable TV and they edited out all I said about conlanging as a hobby and the
Internet community. Perhaps they just thought it was too weird! They did
however include my quip that if it has a grammar it is a language and the
main difference is that a natural language has native speakers -- as long
as it is a living language.
/bpj
Den söndagen den 29:e september 2013 skrev Padraic Brown:
> > I just wanted to chime in and point out that it's perfectly OK to use the
>
> > Tengwar to write English, and by extension any natural language. In fact
> > known evidence suggests that Tolkien used them to write English more
> often
> > than his conlangs! There are samples in Latin, Old English and Old Norse
> (a
> > single word!) as well. There are some quite long texts in English of his
> > hand, about a page each.
>
> I don't think the complaint was about English written using tengwar — it's
> my
> opinion that any language can be written by any writing system — but rather
> that the letters used in the video were actually Latin characters shaped in
> imitation of tengwar.
>
> Padraic
>
> > It should be noted that Tolkien was interested in English script reform
> and
> > the Tengwar have a strong root in that direction too. He experimented at
> > least as much with English Tengwar modes as with conlang modes; if
> anything
> > his conventions for writing Quenya and Sindarin were more stable than
> those
> > for English, showing that he was constantly engaged in the subject of
> > English Tengwar modes, and since he was constantly revising everything he
> > worked on I'd almost say stability would have been a sign of lack of
> > interest.
> >
> > /bpj
> >
> > Den lördagen den 28:e september 2013 skrev Padraic Brown:
> >
> >> > My other qualm is that the Tengwar are arranged simply to look like
> > the
> >> English.
> >>
> >> > What's wrong with just writing the proper Elvish?
> >>
> >> I suppose the English tengwaresque letters could magically morph into
> >> proper Sindarin tengwar?
> >> I daresay tengwar are the gateway through which many conscriptwrights
> >> entered the craft. I can
> >> still recall some boys in my fourth grade class using tengwar for their
> >> secret codes. My gateway
> >> had already been Greek, and I do recall many an early decorated
> alphabet
> >> being based on
> >> Greek and Cyrillic letter forms. Graphically seeing how the English
> sounds
> >> turn into Elvish
> >> letters would be visually interesting I think.
> >>
> >> Padraic
> >>
> >
>
Messages in this topic (17)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3. FW: Intro to Conlanging by John McWhorter
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun Sep 29, 2013 4:35 am ((PDT))
From: James Kane <kane...@gmail.com>
Padraic is correct. The video is happy to use друг for the Russian of
droog, but simply uses letterforms similar to English for the Elvish.
So the first appearance is to transliterate 'allu, verb (wash)' for
which the tengwar reads 'wehhy ?ztf ~gw2ilth', in the Quenya mode,
with a numeral sign and a character which I don't think is even real
tengwar (the one which looks like a v). It's like writing НЛРРУ for a
Russian looking happy, which instead reads NLRRU (it works better in
fonts which make the Л look like a capital lambda), and I can't see
why that would be any better than just taking a few seconds to find
the proper tengwar.
However this is all just a huge nitpick and doesn't really matter in
any way at all. It is a good video and would be made perfect by a
comment on conlangs other than well-endorsed fantasy conlangs.
> On 9/29/13, Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> I just wanted to chime in and point out that it's perfectly OK to
> use the
>>
>>> Tengwar to write English, and by extension any natural language. In
> fact
>>> known evidence suggests that Tolkien used them to write English more
> often
>>> than his conlangs! There are samples in Latin, Old English and Old
> Norse
>>> (a
>>> single word!) as well. There are some quite long texts in English of
> his
>>> hand, about a page each.
>>
>> I don't think the complaint was about English written using tengwar —
> it's
>> my
>> opinion that any language can be written by any writing system — but rather
>> that the letters used in the video were actually Latin characters shaped in
>> imitation of tengwar.
>>
>> Padraic
>>
>>> It should be noted that Tolkien was interested in English script reform
>>> and
>>> the Tengwar have a strong root in that direction too. He experimented
> at
>>> least as much with English Tengwar modes as with conlang modes; if
>>> anything
>>> his conventions for writing Quenya and Sindarin were more stable than
>>> those
>>> for English, showing that he was constantly engaged in the subject of
>>> English Tengwar modes, and since he was constantly revising everything
> he
>>> worked on I'd almost say stability would have been a sign of lack
> of
>>> interest.
>>>
>>> /bpj
>>>
>>> Den lördagen den 28:e september 2013 skrev Padraic Brown:
>>>
>>>> > My other qualm is that the Tengwar are arranged simply to
> look like
>>> the
>>>> English.
>>>>
>>>> > What's wrong with just writing the proper Elvish?
>>>>
>>>> I suppose the English tengwaresque letters could magically morph
> into
>>>> proper Sindarin tengwar?
>>>> I daresay tengwar are the gateway through which many
> conscriptwrights
>>>> entered the craft. I can
>>>> still recall some boys in my fourth grade class using tengwar for
> their
>>>> secret codes. My gateway
>>>> had already been Greek, and I do recall many an early decorated
> alphabet
>>>> being based on
>>>> Greek and Cyrillic letter forms. Graphically seeing how the
> English
>>>> sounds
>>>> turn into Elvish
>>>> letters would be visually interesting I think.
>>>>
>>>> Padraic
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
> (This is my signature.)
>
Messages in this topic (1)
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