Con-Script Development Centre

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Man in Space
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Man in Space »

Thank you!

Here's how it looks in a phrase (just the name of the language, nothing too involved):

Image
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sangi39
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by sangi39 »

That's actually really good! Love logographic scripts [:D] Cuneiform ones especially (and Chinese-inspired ones) because they lose their "pictographic" origins, which makes it much more interesting (that's not to say more "artistic" logographic scripts can't be interesting, but graphically it's the one's that don't stick to "picture writing" that just, for me, are the most interesting, because the relationship isn't immediately obvious)
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Salmoneus »

Man in Space wrote: 18 Sep 2021 03:07 Thank you!

Here's how it looks in a phrase (just the name of the language, nothing too involved):

Image
The cuneiform looks fine, but I'd really suggest 'flattening' it - having it be horizontal instead of at a weird angle. Looking weird aside, is it realistic that people would write like that? It makes everything harder to write (you need a protractor just to get started), it makes it much harder to gauge when to start a new line (because the intuitive 'width' of a character along its axis will often be smaller than its actual width horizontally), and as your example shows, with small inscriptions in particular you may have to waste more than half of your clay tablet on white space! [I reckon that in your example you could fit in three lines of horizontal text on the clay you've used to write only one line]. Cuneiform scribes generally weren't so eager to throw away money.

Put it this way: what would I actually do if I were a scribe told to write like this? Well, step one, I'd obviously just tilt my piece of clay 30 degrees to before I started, rather than trying to write each character at an angle. At which point, once I get used to writing horizontally (and tilting the clay back to show people), I'm pretty quickly going to get in the habit of, whenever I'm given someone else's text, just tilting that by 30 degrees too, and reading horizontally (the way I write it). Since all my fellow scribes are likely to do the same thing, we're basically no longer writing/reading at 30 degrees, we're just writing on oddly-shaped pieces of clay with a lot of wasted blank space. At which point, we're going to start saving money by cutting off the unneeded corners of the clay. At which point, we're now spending money and time just to create slightly hexagonal writing tablets, so we'll save more money by just making them rectangular and aligned with our writing.

[I also think it's very unusualy to have a consistently bottom-to-top writing system. It encourages scuffing of the written letters by our hands, and it also just make it harder to write by continually concealing what we've already written under our hands.]
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Man in Space »

There's actually two modes (eaksi ar) of writing: Levárian (n Lemhár) and Atskian (n Atki). This slanted one is Levárian; Atskian is more conventional.

Image

Same thing, but in Atskian.
sangi39 wrote: 18 Sep 2021 05:55That's actually really good! Love logographic scripts
Thank you!
sangi39 wrote: 18 Sep 2021 05:55Cuneiform ones especially (and Chinese-inspired ones) because they lose their "pictographic" origins, which makes it much more interesting (that's not to say more "artistic" logographic scripts can't be interesting, but graphically it's the one's that don't stick to "picture writing" that just, for me, are the most interesting, because the relationship isn't immediately obvious)
How about Aztec-style, which is kind of the opposite?
Salmoneus wrote: 18 Sep 2021 13:32 Looking weird aside, is it realistic that people would write like that? It makes everything harder to write (you need a protractor just to get started), it makes it much harder to gauge when to start a new line (because the intuitive 'width' of a character along its axis will often be smaller than its actual width horizontally), and as your example shows, with small inscriptions in particular you may have to waste more than half of your clay tablet on white space! [I reckon that in your example you could fit in three lines of horizontal text on the clay you've used to write only one line]
Works for Farsi.
Salmoneus wrote: 18 Sep 2021 13:32[I also think it's very unusualy to have a consistently bottom-to-top writing system. It encourages scuffing of the written letters by our hands, and it also just make it harder to write by continually concealing what we've already written under our hands.]
I explained that poorly: Each individual line is read bottom-to-top if slanted. Stacks/blocks of lines are written and read from the top line down.
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CC = Common Caber
CK = Classical Khaya
CT = Classical Ĝare n Tim Ar
Kg = Kgáweq'
PB = Proto-Beheic
PO = Proto-O
PTa = Proto-Taltic
STK = Sisỏk Tlar Kyanà
Tm = Təmattwəspwaypksma
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Davush »

Man in Space wrote: 20 Sep 2021 08:07
Salmoneus wrote: 18 Sep 2021 13:32 Looking weird aside, is it realistic that people would write like that? It makes everything harder to write (you need a protractor just to get started), it makes it much harder to gauge when to start a new line (because the intuitive 'width' of a character along its axis will often be smaller than its actual width horizontally), and as your example shows, with small inscriptions in particular you may have to waste more than half of your clay tablet on white space! [I reckon that in your example you could fit in three lines of horizontal text on the clay you've used to write only one line]
Works for Farsi.

I love the look of the script (and cuneiform-inspired scripts in general), but I'm not sure Farsi/Arabic script is a good comparison here, especially if the script is intended to be written on clay? The slanting in Farsi (and indeed lots of handwritten/calligraphy Arabic and Arabic-based scripts) also works a bit differently – the "white" space under the slanted part is usually (partially/wholly) "filled in" by the remaining part of the word or the following word. Starting a little bit above the bottom line and descending as you write is also a practical consideration for several handwritten forms of Arabic letters which don't join fluidly if writing along a totally straight line and need a bit more vertical space. (Of course, if the slanted version is a calligraphic/stylistic form and not "everyday", then I don't see why not!)
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by WeepingElf »

Man in Space wrote: 20 Sep 2021 08:07 There's actually two modes (eaksi ar) of writing: Levárian (n Lemhár) and Atskian (n Atki). This slanted one is Levárian; Atskian is more conventional.

Image

Same thing, but in Atskian.
I like this one better.
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Salmoneus »

Man in Space wrote: 20 Sep 2021 08:07
Salmoneus wrote: 18 Sep 2021 13:32 Looking weird aside, is it realistic that people would write like that? It makes everything harder to write (you need a protractor just to get started), it makes it much harder to gauge when to start a new line (because the intuitive 'width' of a character along its axis will often be smaller than its actual width horizontally), and as your example shows, with small inscriptions in particular you may have to waste more than half of your clay tablet on white space! [I reckon that in your example you could fit in three lines of horizontal text on the clay you've used to write only one line]
Works for Farsi.
Does it, though? Has Farsi ever regularly been written like that? Looking examples, whether handwriting or formal texts, it doesn't seem so, that I can see. Some styles of writing seem to slightly slant each word - but that's very different from slanting an entire line. And there does seem to be a calligraphic tradition of writing entire slanted lines in creating frontispieces and... I don't know what you'd call them, 'posters'? - but there's also calligraphic traditions of writing in all sorts of shapes, and that's true of almost any script. Arabic is sometimes calligraphically written in the shape of animals, but I wouldn't call that a regular mode of the script...
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Man in Space »

I thought nastaliq was the default mode for writing Farsi. I gather that it’s not?
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CC = Common Caber
CK = Classical Khaya
CT = Classical Ĝare n Tim Ar
Kg = Kgáweq'
PB = Proto-Beheic
PO = Proto-O
PTa = Proto-Taltic
STK = Sisỏk Tlar Kyanà
Tm = Təmattwəspwaypksma
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Salmoneus »

Man in Space wrote: 20 Sep 2021 21:25 I thought nastaliq was the default mode for writing Farsi. I gather that it’s not?
I'm not saying it's not; I'm saying so far as I can see Nastaliq isn't written at a steep angle.
Eg this is apparently nastaliq. And this, and this. The angled nastaliq I can find is better characterised as art rather than as writing - and crucially, you can find art in which the lines tilt one way, OR the other way, OR both on the same page (or where they curl or form complex shapes). So I think it's more accurate to say that Persian art just has a recognisable trope of having calligraphic writing in weird directions on it (presumably as a way of filling space without using pictoral representations), rather than that this is a characteristic of the writing style itself.
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Man in Space »

Salmoneus wrote: 21 Sep 2021 01:12
Man in Space wrote: 20 Sep 2021 21:25I thought nastaliq was the default mode for writing Farsi. I gather that it’s not?
I'm not saying it's not; I'm saying so far as I can see Nastaliq isn't written at a steep angle.
Eg this is apparently nastaliq. And this, and this. The angled nastaliq I can find is better characterised as art rather than as writing - and crucially, you can find art in which the lines tilt one way, OR the other way, OR both on the same page (or where they curl or form complex shapes). So I think it's more accurate to say that Persian art just has a recognisable trope of having calligraphic writing in weird directions on it (presumably as a way of filling space without using pictoral representations), rather than that this is a characteristic of the writing style itself.
OK, thank you for explaining.

Rounin Ryuuji over on the Other Place was kind enough to devise a(n intentionally) perfectly imperfect method of being more precise with the vowels while keeping the skeleton of my original spelling system. Basically, literally every second vowel is not pronounced, though it can affect the preceding one—e.g. CA-CA = /CaC/, CA-CU = /CoC/…

OLD WAY OF SPELLING THE LANGUAGE NAME:

Image

NEW WAY:
Image

A strictly phonetic transliteration of a quote:
Image
LA-GA-HA-A ĜA-RA A-U-Ü-RU LA-GA-HA-A GA-I-NA-RA
Laghá ĝár, ör laghá genr
'Trust, but verify'
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CC = Common Caber
CK = Classical Khaya
CT = Classical Ĝare n Tim Ar
Kg = Kgáweq'
PB = Proto-Beheic
PO = Proto-O
PTa = Proto-Taltic
STK = Sisỏk Tlar Kyanà
Tm = Təmattwəspwaypksma
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Backstroke_Italics »

The world needs more cuneiform-inspired conscripts. Nice work, Man in Space.
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by dva_arla »

Shin Tenjikiji (新天竺字), an 'alt-abugida' for Japanese based on the mediaeval Brahmi Siddham script. The premise is that the monks supplemented their orthography of Japanese with the latter, finding man'yougana somewhat too cumbersome.

Version 1.0
Image

Version 2.0, with a parallel set of characters for transcribing names (including ones of Yamato provenance) and gairago; and some letterforms re-considered.
Image
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by AndivahXevos »

I've been practicing some glyph evolution (from a seed of randomly generated glyphs). Here is the result for March. I plan to do it monthly just for fun.

This script is intended to be written RTL in rows, but looking back on it - I think it would be more fitting being written in columns instead. Feel free to use this as inspiration or just outright steal pieces of it. I don't care, nor will I sue.
Spoiler:
Image
Image
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by lsd »

a clay tablet version of my logographic language
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Man in Space »

AndivahXevos wrote: 03 Apr 2022 03:08-awesomeness-
Is this glyphic evolution thing on the Internet somewhere where I can avail myself of it?
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CC = Common Caber
CK = Classical Khaya
CT = Classical Ĝare n Tim Ar
Kg = Kgáweq'
PB = Proto-Beheic
PO = Proto-O
PTa = Proto-Taltic
STK = Sisỏk Tlar Kyanà
Tm = Təmattwəspwaypksma
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by AndivahXevos »

Man in Space wrote: 04 Apr 2022 03:37 Is this glyphic evolution thing on the Internet somewhere where I can avail myself of it?
You can find the glyph generator that I downloaded and use at this link on Itch.io, but the evolution process is something that I do myself -- that's where the practice is. I do, however take a lot of inspiration from Clawgrip's posts regarding writing script development.
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by AndivahXevos »

lsd wrote: 03 Apr 2022 10:05 a clay tablet version of my logographic language
Hey that's neat! Although I can't help but wonder how big such a tablet would need to be when everything's that close
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by AndivahXevos »

April's monthly script evo is now, well, as complete as it's going to be. I slacked a bit, and I don't have enough time or inspiration to make a polished version to present like last time. Because of that, I'll post the major steps I took to get from the initial glyphs to the final form.
Again - feel free to use this as inspiration or just outright steal pieces of it. I don't care, nor will I sue.

Initial batch generated:
Image
Spoiler:
1 - Actually write it, don't try to make it pretty.
Image

2 - Prettify a little bit, decide direction.
Image

3 - More rules.
Image

4 - Delete glyphs that didn't pass vibe check.
Image
Of the glyphs that made it to the last step, I experimented with a font/presentation style that I wanted.
Image
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by Keenir »

AndivahXevos wrote: 04 Apr 2022 06:01
Man in Space wrote: 04 Apr 2022 03:37 Is this glyphic evolution thing on the Internet somewhere where I can avail myself of it?
You can find the glyph generator that I downloaded and use at this link on Itch.io,
thank you; going to give this a try.
At work on Apaan: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4799
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Re: Con-Script Development Centre

Post by AndivahXevos »

May 2022's glyph evolution set is complete! This script was intended to be written from top to bottom in columns from left to right.
I'm not as proud of these glyphs overall - I think I could have simplified them in a way that would be much more appealing to write and read, and I feel like the typeface design is more sloppy than normal. However, I still enjoyed making it! [<3]
As always, feel free to use this as inspiration or just outright steal pieces of it. I don't care, nor will I sue.
Spoiler:
The initial generation: Image

Pre-Final with last marks to change: Image
The Result: Image

I wonder if anyone would join me if I were to post the first generation at the beginning of each month. We could see how our choices differ in the end result, and it could be a fun exercise.
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