ideograms for English, German

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brumpfschmlog
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ideograms for English, German

Post by brumpfschmlog »

I have ideograms for English at neoideograms.wordpress.com, if anyone is interested in that sort of thing. I've also applied them some to German: scroll down to "Alles Was Du Brauchst Ist Liebe." Comments welcome, help even more welcome!
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Yačay256
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by Yačay256 »

Hi, and welcome to the board!

Looks interesting: I'm not sure if you're tying your conscript (and conlang?) to English and German, and if so I would like to know why, given all the irregularities? Why not tie the script to more a grammatically simple and straightforward language, like Indonesian or Mandarin? If you're trying to make a zonal script for the Germanic languages, then it cannot really be an ideogrammy (or semasiogrammy; see below), but rather a logogrammy, given that it is representing uttered languages - namely, German and English. Even if you adapt it to unrelated languages - as Chinese characters were adapted into Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese, among others, or how Sumerian Cuneiform was adapted to languages as unrelated as Hittite, Akkadian and Elamite, it will nonetheless still be glottographic, or perhaps a mixed script of some sort.

For the record, in case you didn't know, ideograms (or, as I generally, call them, semasiograms) represent ideas independently of uttered (signed, spoken, whisled...am I forgetting anything?) language, while logograms represent morphemes in uttered languages (again, any signed, spoken or whistled language). [urlhttps://www.dukeupress.edu/Writing-Without-Words/]Examples[/url] of semasiogrammic scripts include the conscript and conlang [urlhttp://www.blissymbolics.org/]Blissymbols[/url], probably the undeciphered khipu of several Andean civilizations, and partially also the Mesoamerican codices of the Mixtecs and the Aztecs (but not the Maya; their writing was logosyllabic).
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by brumpfschmlog »

Thanks. They're for English because it's my home language. I applied them to German to show the ease with which it could be done and that a person knowing them for the one language would largely be able to read them in the other.

I'm afraid the technicalities of classifiying what I have done don't interest me. I use the term ideogram loosely. They are both logograms and ideograms, sometimes focusing more on the word, sometimes more on the idea.
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Thrice Xandvii
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

For the record, your link in the first post is broken... You need the http:// for the URL to link properly.

Like this:http://neoideograms.wordpress.com/
Or, if you put in url= in the first [], you can do this so that you can click other words to go to your link.

As for Yačay's post above, I don't really think you can quote a Blogspot post as an authoritative way to contradict someone's use of terminology. Secondly, I'm not understanding why the term "ideography" doesn't apply to what the OP has attempted to do since the glyphs don't represent any about the sounds inherently, but instead all seem to be trying to convey they idea of a word through pictures. I was under the impression that an ideograph is an image used in language to convey an idea, while a logograph is an image used to convey a word/sound.

The sounds the words make that we recognize through the OP's creation aren't necessary, per se, as long as the underlying concept is clear... which is why it can be translated directly to other languages like German since the basic concepts a language expresses would be the same. Hence why Chinese characters were used by many Asian languages to convey totally different words in the native languages of people, yet almost invariably referred to the same core concept. After all, 山 is mountain whether it is said "mountain," "yama, "shān" or "graggleploof."
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by brumpfschmlog »

Thanks. http://neoideograms.wordpress.com/

What I've done has both logograms and ideograms. For many words I have both (an) etymological picto/logogram, which I call an "etymid," and an "id" that represents the idea or word more directly, which I call a "directid," and even many that are a mixture of the two ("mixid") or include a sounds-like element ("sonid"). For English words from Latin or Greek I often illustrate the roots--for instance for "permit" I have "per- through" and "mit-send," but also a more direct ideogram that does not rely on the roots. Etymids work so well that I couldn't do without them, though I generally prefer directids.

I see English as similar to Japanese, the language of an island country off the coast of a continent that consists of a basic original language that was overlaid by that of another civilization. Original Japanese (kun-yomi for their characters) was overlaid by Chinese (on-yomi), so that compound words in Japanese are often made up of two elements that have Chinese readings. But Japanese know the native Japanese readings too--they can "see" the meanings of the roots. In English, a Germanic base was overlaid by Latin and Greek; but people don' know them well, and so are often clueless as to the meanings of syllables that come out of their mouths, into their eyes and ears, etc. With etymids the roots are illustrated, so they are a means of learning English more thoroughly, and indeed pictorially, which sticks in the mind better. For a potential ideographic lingua franca though, I suppose one would have to use directids.
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by Xing »

Yačay256 wrote:For the record, in case you didn't know, ideograms (or, as I generally, call them, semasiograms) represent ideas independently of uttered (signed, spoken, whisled...am I forgetting anything?) language, while logograms represent morphemes in uttered languages (again, any signed, spoken or whistled language). [urlhttps://www.dukeupress.edu/Writing-Without-Words/]Examples[/url] of semasiogrammic scripts include the conscript and conlang [urlhttp://www.blissymbolics.org/]Blissymbols[/url], probably the undeciphered khipu of several Andean civilizations, and partially also the Mesoamerican codices of the Mixtecs and the Aztecs (but not the Maya; their writing was logosyllabic).
XXXVII wrote:As for Yačay's post above, I don't really think you can quote a Blogspot post as an authoritative way to contradict someone's use of terminology. Secondly, I'm not understanding why the term "ideography" doesn't apply to what the OP has attempted to do since the glyphs don't represent any about the sounds inherently, but instead all seem to be trying to convey they idea of a word through pictures. I was under the impression that an ideograph is an image used in language to convey an idea, while a logograph is an image used to convey a word/sound.

The sounds the words make that we recognize through the OP's creation aren't necessary, per se, as long as the underlying concept is clear... which is why it can be translated directly to other languages like German since the basic concepts a language expresses would be the same. Hence why Chinese characters were used by many Asian languages to convey totally different words in the native languages of people, yet almost invariably referred to the same core concept. After all, 山 is mountain whether it is said "mountain," "yama, "shān" or "graggleploof."
Logograms and ideograms represent a kind of ideal types - they are distinct in theory, but in the real world, there will be lots of borderline cases, or glyphs that cannot be easily classified as either logo- or ideograms.

A couple of 'tests' might be useful to separate logograms and ideograms:

(1) Within a given languages community, is there a fixed way of pronouncing or reading a certain glyph? For the 'pure' logograph, the answer would be yes. For the 'pure' ideogram, the answer would be no. It becomes a little more complicated when we take into account the fact that logograms might sometimes have different readings in different contexts - just as English letters might be pronounced differently in different words and in different positions. The question could be reformulated as 'within a given language community, is there a fixed way of pronouncing a certain glyph in a certain context?'

(2) Can the glyphs and the (spoken) words change meaning independently of each other? For 'pure' logograms, the answer is no. For 'pure' ideograms, the answer is yes.

In many cases, it might be diffucult though to answer with a straightforward 'yes' or 'no' to these questions.

Btw, I would object to the claim that 山 can be said 'mountain' just as well as 'yama' or 'shan'. As far as I know, there is no English dialect that is conventionally written with Chinese characters (which Chinese and Japanese are, at least partially). Reading 山 as 'mountain' would simply be to use non-standard orthography for English.

Finally, we should note that all written language has some degree of ideography in it. No writing system (save for the IPA) is a straightforward representation of spoken language. In the vast majority of cases, there are certain words or word-forms, or certain grammatical or syntactic constructions that are found mainly in written language - which would sound stilted or awkward in spoken language. (And vice versa - speech is able to convey certain kinds of information that's typically not found in written language.) Therefore, all written languages work independently of their corresponding spoken languages to some extent.
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Xing wrote:Btw, I would object to the claim that 山 can be said 'mountain' just as well as 'yama' or 'shan'. As far as I know, there is no English dialect that is conventionally written with Chinese characters (which Chinese and Japanese are, at least partially). Reading 山 as 'mountain' would simply be to use non-standard orthography for English.
True.

But, if you were going to create such a dialect of English, you'd certainly choose 山 as the glyph for mountain.
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by eldin raigmore »

XXXVII wrote:
Xing wrote:Btw, I would object to the claim that 山 can be said 'mountain' just as well as 'yama' or 'shan'. As far as I know, there is no English dialect that is conventionally written with Chinese characters (which Chinese and Japanese are, at least partially). Reading 山 as 'mountain' would simply be to use non-standard orthography for English.
True. But, if you were going to create such a dialect of English, you'd certainly choose 山 as the glyph for mountain.
In Andrew Smith's conworld Ill Bethisad is a nation called Икотопик Рипаблик ав Oригон ((People’s) Ecotopic Republic of Oregon).
Its "de facto" language is "Oregonian English" and its alphabet is the Cyrillic. (You can tell the official name of the republic is English, not Russian, even though it's written in Cyrillic.)

So why not a conculture with English, or German for that matter, written with some other script than the Latin-derived chiefly Latin script we use now?

The differences between U and V and between C and G are additions to the Latin alphabet.
And English's alphabet used to have thorns and eths and yoghs and ashes and wynns; and not have queues.
And English has historically been written with runes, hasn't it? Also Ogham?

So English with a Hangeul-style syllabary, or with an abugida, or with an Arabic-like or Hebrew-like pointed abjad, or with a logography, all seem plausible to me: -- That is, why didn't they actually happen? Aren't the reasons chiefly accidental?

Granted that a language with a complex and variable syllable-structure will run into problems with a syllabary,
and a language that's not a vowel-harmony language or triconsonantal-root language (or other language where words with the same consonants are usually related forms of the same root) will have trouble with abjads;
would it really be so much more trouble than English already has with the Latin alphabet?
Some dialects of English have twelve vowels, counting some diphthongs; but the Latin alphabet has only five vowel-letters.
Several sounds of English have to be written with digraphs, such as <au> <aw> <ch> <ng> <oi> <oo> <ow> <oy> <sh> <th> <wh>.
Several of the letters (<a> <c> <e> <g> <i> <o> <u> <x> -- also one digraph, <th>) in the Latin alphabet have to stand for two different sounds in English, and the reader must figure out which it stands for in each instance (although that's usually easy to do).

I would think an alphasyllabary or abugida could handle English's and German's complex and variable syllable-structures as easily as an alphabet; and there should be a way to handle the larger-than-the-world-average vowel-phoneme-inventories of most European languages.

But a logography would skip past all those problems, by having one symbol per morpheme.

OTOH several natlangs -- including some Ancient Near Eastern languages, and Japanese and Korean -- have used logograms for their verb-root-morphemes and noun-root-morphemes (and modifier-root-morphemes?) and some phonemic or syllabic strategy for their affixes and particles.

It has been said before that English spelling is so non-intuitive for beginners that many beginning readers learn it as a logography anyway; although there's some controversy over whether that's more a consequence of faddish but bad teaching methods than of English spelling.
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by Lambuzhao »

Brumpfschmlog's original http reminded me of Hobo Signs or Hobo Codes
http://www.worldpath.net/~minstrel/hobosign.htm

Used by predominantly illiterate hoboes and tramps of the early 20th century, they were a collection of pictographic symbols used as warnings or invitations for fellow hoboes.

This might be an "established" Anglophone-autochthonic system of ideographic writing, although the symbol stood for a word, or a whole phrase, and none (so far as I can tell) were clearly syllabic in nature.
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by Kimbwdishi »

brumpfschmlog wrote:I have ideograms for English at neoideograms.wordpress.com, if anyone is interested in that sort of thing. I've also applied them some to German: scroll down to "Alles Was Du Brauchst Ist Liebe." Comments welcome, help even more welcome!
Very interesting. I'm actually interested in using ideograms/glyphs for my private conlang. I've been searching for a program of some sort which lets you make glyphs or "characters," but I can't find any recent ones. I have three old programs called NeoGlyph I found several years ago made by somebody that works decent. These programs aren't even on the internet anymore. Since then I haven't been able to find better ones.

Do you know of any such programs? It appears as though you draw your glyphs out?

I've found Dscript to be a fun and sometimes artistic way to make "pseudo-glyphs." Link: http://dscript.org/
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Re: ideograms for English, German

Post by clawgrip »

I think if you want a realistic logographic script you're going to have to design it yourself from scratch. Something like Dscript is not really logographic, it's alphabetic but twisted up to look more complex (which is fine, if that's what you want).
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