The CBB

Looks to me that orthographically Finnish doesn't really represent the spoken language. Hmm Compared to English orthography it is much more regular, but you already refused to accept that . Were you able to understand it? Don't lie. I have a college reading level. I don't represent all the function...

All of these arguments have been quite thoroughly debunked in the links I provided. a) The overwhelming majority of English words have a perfectly regular and predictable spelling and pronunciation; Then why is the English the most difficult language to learn to read out of all European languages? R...

Actually, I recently saw this video and it made a pretty good point that maybe we don't need to reform orthography much or at all. There may be some small places where we can iron out some inconsistencies, but this video completely changed my view on English orthography. All arguments against spell...

So creating new hanzi by combining two existing hanzi is not permitted? Any new hanzi must be coined using that limited set of semanto-phonetic components? That seems reasonable and it should be easy to implement such a composition model for computer fonts. Great idea!

I can see the benefits of recreating the hanzi inventory from scratch based on how modern Mandarin is spoken. However, I am against a composition model and favor writing the semanto-phonetic components independently. The advantage of this is that it would be much easier to create new morphemes if yo...

The point of reducing the inventory of hanzi to a handful of radicals, over simply adopting pinyin, is nationalism. Learning to read English as a native speaker was already difficult enough; I can't imagine what learning to read Mandarin would be like.

There are no real pictographic or ideographic writing systems. Logographic scripts assign semantic and phonetic meanings to graphemes and combine those to indicate words in the writer's own spoken language. I can't find the page right now, but I recall someone writing a book using only emoji. The in...

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "reading Hanzi", but taken at the meaning of "look at characters and understand what they mean", then "reading hanzi" does not require learning Mandarin grammar. I look at 山 and understand that it means mountain; I look at 禁止酒後開車 and...

Reading hanzi still requires learning Mandarin grammar. There are heterograms , where a phonemic multigraph in one script is a logogram in another. The literacy rate in China ~95%. The test for literacy is rated at a 4th grade level requiring the memorization of ~900 hanzi. Most of this literacy is ...

I was researching logographies and comparing different methods. One trait that distinguishes Hanzi from Hieroglyphics and Cuneiform is that the latter used separate determinatives to distinguish phonemes whereas the former created new graphemes that combined the determinatives with the phonemes. How...

If Widge is pronounced /widʒ/, then I'd go with the spelling Weege instead. I am not distinguishing length or height in that orthography. No, but presumably you're distinguishing between /ɪ/ and /i/. (I'd suggest Weej, but that's probably because I've been replaying Skyrim lately and running into A...

I also don't see why you can't use <j> to represent /dʒ/ everywhere: an English speaker would certainly interpret it that way everywhere. You seem to be making your language names conform to English orthography, which you can do if you want. If your audience is doing things like <dh> /d/, though, t...

Do you have an example of some of these "impossible" names? I bet they're not as impossible as you think. That being said, you might just have to live with people mispronouncing names. How many people pronounce Tolkien's <Celeborn> with /s/ instead of /k/? And he put out tons of informati...

I don't think a quick and dirty pronunciation guide is at all a bad idea. If it's simple and short enough and you place it before your main story, your readers might even take note of it. Apart from that, the best solution is probably to choose names for which a naive English reading isn't too far ...

When one invents names for speculative fiction, native English speakers will mangle the pronunciation since English lacks correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. How could this be avoided without including a pronunciation guide (which is pointless for English)?

Keenir wrote: at the time I made it, nothing inspired it.

in hindsight, I can see bits of Ogham (the vowels stabbing into the word), and English & Korean (the o bit) :)

Interesting. It reminds me of a couple conscripts on omniglot that use a stem and branch arrangement.

The more I read this thread, the more confused I get. In this day and age you can't make anything without it being derivative of something else, be it constructed scripts, languages, music, sculpture, fiction, comedy, whatever. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make anything, it just means you just t...

I guess I misunderstood then. The OP made it sound as though you were making an original conscript that was simply based on these ancient scripts, not just doing a spelling reform. This line: ...constructing a script based on Old Persian and the Paleohispanic scripts. is what led me to that conclus...

A conscripter who does not want to make a conscript because there are already a lot of them? I'm honestly a little confused! Oh, so you were not creating a new script, just reforming Old Persian? Because I'd like to see a completely new conscript that employs the rules you've set out. Omniglot alon...

clawgrip wrote:Oh, so you were not creating a new script, just reforming Old Persian? Because I'd like to see a completely new conscript that employs the rules you've set out.

Omniglot alone has a massive number of conscripts (mostly alphabets), so IMO that feels like reinventing the wheel.