A Little Linguistics (Purely for Interest!)

This is a small example of my shorthand writing system. If you are familiar with Gregg, then you will recognise a number of influences: similar stroke patterns and the same non-essential vowel addition, but with a personal twist. It’s the most efficient method, what can I say? What’s that quote about the wheel and inventions?

Every part of the script is functional, and it can be written in a mirrored fashion from right to left, allowing the writer to snake down the lines on a page and not remove his or her hand. For ease-of translation, I present the following only in standard left-to-right. It reads as the first part of this post, up to the colon. There are a few word changes, because I made alterations later, maybe you can spot them.

The following two extracts belong to the same language, but are written in differing scripts. For writing systems, they are the simplest I have created, being alphabetic in nature, similar to the Latin system I am using now, but the syntax of the language differs considerably, with highly agglutinative morphology being used to free up word order, creating pretty, convoluted forms of lexemes.

The top example originates in a writing system I never happily named. It is facile, and is my most ancient creation. The graphemes are dense, causing it to be lengthy to write, but it is easy to read. The second example is just pretty, and based roughly on the script for Quenya/ Sindarin but is the one that matches closest with the phoneme system for the language as it was designed for it.

The closest (rough) translation in English would be:

Warrior- voc.sg.nom great if overpwer-2.sg.nom woman-PROX.sg.acc evil SUB create-2.sg-FUT son.1.sg.gen sword-INDEF.sg.acc magic SUB fear-COND god-def.pl.nom

OR

“Oh great warrior, if you can defeat this witch, my son will make you a magic sword that the gods would fear.”

Currently, I am working on a highly efficient tonal language with a writing system including two elements to the writing system: semantic and phonetic, just like Mandarin.

 

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