Professor Mao's Conscripting Pet Peeves

[Curlyjimsam]

I aim for naturalism in my conscripts - and some of the "problems" you identify are frequent;y found in natural alphabets, so why shouldn't I duplicate them? I think there's very little in conscripting terms I actively dislike; I will use pretty much anything if it seems to fit the circumstances.

About cultures exclusively using computers - what about a culture which has used computers for so long (say, a few thousand years or more) that all resemblences in its alphabet to previous handwritten forms have dropped out of use? Indeed, such a culture might even have a writing system specifically designed for use on computers.

[Ossicone]

I aim for naturalism in my conscripts - and some of the "problems" you identify are frequent;y found in natural alphabets, so why shouldn't I duplicate them? I think there's very little in conscripting terms I actively dislike; I will use pretty much anything if it seems to fit the circumstances.

If that's what you want go for it. I've already said that I don't like many natscripts, and I've already said that I don't consider them an excuse for ill-conceived scripts.

Also I made a point of listing my grievances as excesses. I did not say no diacritics, I said too many diacritics.
Of course, I haven't seen any of your scripts so I don't if you have achieved a fine balance of naturalism and practicality or not.

About cultures exclusively using computers - what about a culture which has used computers for so long (say, a few thousand years or more) that all resemblences in its alphabet to previous handwritten forms have dropped out of use? Indeed, such a culture might even have a writing system specifically designed for use on computers.

They could. The reason for why it is good on the computer and not handwritten would have to be pretty compelling. I have yet to see any script say why it is designed solely for computer use and why it a good fit for that medium.

Honestly, the scripts I've seen saying this look a lot more like lazy conscripters rather than actually well thought out ideas brought to reality.

[KiKi Tampusa]

Any more rules miss Mao?

[Ossicone]

No. And it's 'professor.'

[zelos]

2. Using too many tails!

Okay, so I like writing tails too. They're fun and fancy. But too much is too much! If every fecking letter has a tail it's not 'fancy fun time;' it's a mess. This includes upwards tails. You'll just end up in a tangled knot.

what is defined as a tail?

[Ossicone]

I believe the technical term is an descender or ascender. (Depending on which way it's going.)

[zelos]

Ah

Perosnally when makings cripts I usually go or a general idea of how a symbol should be, have a set of motions that is used and use them in various fashions along with several individual touches to make each unique

[Ossicone]

Do you have any samples? I always like seeing new scripts.

[zelos]

Do you have any samples? I always like seeing new scripts.

yes jsut not scanned unfortunately

[Ilaeriu]

Just wanted to add my own opinion to #3 - Being too uniform. Don't make letters almost entirely identical to one another, but also don't make them really different from each other either. Scripts should have some sort of general look to them that helps distinguish them from other scripts and makes them look like they belong in theirs. If you make your letters look too different from one another, the script might look non-cohesive and jarring. It might be like getting a letter from Devanagari, another from Katakana, a third from Armenian, etc. and throwing it all into one. They might look nice on their own, but put together it'll probably look like a mess.

(This post is vague and rambles. It's finals week. Deal with it. :D )

[Ossicone]

That's a good point, but I've never actually seen a conscript like that to be annoyed by it.

Finals week you say? I'll tell your teachers to give you moar work! :lol:
But seriously, finals week was always my easiest week.

[Maximillian]

They might look nice on their own, but put together it'll probably look like a mess.

Greek alphabet looks like that to me... >:

[Veris]

This isn't a conscripting pet peeve, but a conlang Romanization pet peeve of mine. In my opinion, if you don't use a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y, there's absolutely no reason to use  â Ấ ấ Ầ ầ Ẩ ẩ Ẫ ẫ Ậ ậ Ê ê Ḙ ḙ Ế ế Ề ề Ể ể Ễ ễ Ệ ệ Î î Ô ô Ố ố Ồ ồ Ổ ổ Ỗ ỗ Ộ ộ Û û Ṷ ṷ Ŷ or ŷ unless those variations have grammatical/stress/etc. meaning. Far too often I see someone say "check out my new conlang, here's a sentence; "âɰwẩîqħềô kếế p nvầậ (IPA: awaeo ki p na)."

Yes, all those funky diacritics make your language look foreign and unique, but if there's no need for your Romanization to be so complex, it just seems amateurish, like you're trying to show off how original your conlang is when in fact it's just a cipher of Greek or Lakota or something.

I, like most others, despise digraphs in Romanization in particular for the same reason; it's ususally utterly unnecessary. My opinion -- your conscript can and should be as wild and flavorful as you like it, but the purpose of Romanization is to make it so that your conlang can be written using the Latin script. In other words, the point of Romanization is ease of use and understanding. Save the artsy fartsy stuff for the conscript -- please, please make your Romanization as simplistic as possible; I'm much more impressed by a conlang with cool grammatical concepts and constructs with a plain ASCII Romanization than by âɰwẩîqħềô kếế p nvầậ and utterly mundane grammar.

[Czwartek]

3. Being too uniform!

Gah. This drives me nuts. If all the letters differ only different by one tiny difference it is going to be very hard to read. I could call this dictatorial writing. Where in pursuit of perfection, all characters are forced to look the same, only smallest glimmer of personality is allowed. When writing a lot of features become reduced (just as phonemes in speech), that's why it's good to have more than one distinguishing feature.

I want to be able to look at a character at one glance be able to write it. Chinese writing is an exception. This is because of the use of radicals. If I know the radicals in a character, I can come pretty close to duplicating it.

4. Having too many mirror images!

This goes in hand with #3. If the characters are just transformations of each other it is going to be annoying. I'm looking at you Latin alphabet! <b p q d> have cause me enough grief. Just because it's present in a real script is no excuse for you to be lazy!

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/atomtom.htm

But seriously, I think everyone knows that the Ithkuil script beats every other one hands-down.

[Ossicone]

Gibberish.

This would be better suited to 'Orthographic Pet Peeves.'

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/atomtom.htm

But seriously, I think everyone knows that the Ithkuil script beats every other one hands-down.

I had seen that one before. It seems to me like some got a little drunk and thought of the worst way to type ever.

Yeah, well it suits Ithkuil -- overly dense and hard to decipher.

[zelos]

This isn't a conscripting pet peeve, but a conlang Romanization pet peeve of mine. In my opinion, if you don't use a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y, there's absolutely no reason to use  â Ấ ấ Ầ ầ Ẩ ẩ Ẫ ẫ Ậ ậ Ê ê Ḙ ḙ Ế ế Ề ề Ể ể Ễ ễ Ệ ệ Î î Ô ô Ố ố Ồ ồ Ổ ổ Ỗ ỗ Ộ ộ Û û Ṷ ṷ Ŷ or ŷ unless those variations have grammatical/stress/etc. meaning. Far too often I see someone say "check out my new conlang, here's a sentence; "âɰwẩîqħềô kếế p nvầậ (IPA: awaeo ki p na)."

Yes, all those funky diacritics make your language look foreign and unique, but if there's no need for your Romanization to be so complex, it just seems amateurish, like you're trying to show off how original your conlang is when in fact it's just a cipher of Greek or Lakota or something.

I, like most others, despise digraphs in Romanization in particular for the same reason; it's ususally utterly unnecessary. My opinion -- your conscript can and should be as wild and flavorful as you like it, but the purpose of Romanization is to make it so that your conlang can be written using the Latin script. In other words, the point of Romanization is ease of use and understanding. Save the artsy fartsy stuff for the conscript -- please, please make your Romanization as simplistic as possible; I'm much more impressed by a conlang with cool grammatical concepts and constructs with a plain ASCII Romanization than by âɰwẩîqħềô kếế p nvầậ and utterly mundane grammar.

Jag tycker att du är felande här å så mycket över =)

I disagree in the sense that Diatrics for romanization is allowed to use if it is used logicly.

That you FIRST fillup all nondiatric symbols with sounds and then want to use diatrics for the sounds you have but cant fit anymore for some reason (quantity or whatnot) is perfectly accaptable

[Ilaeriu]

That's a good point, but I've never actually seen a conscript like that to be annoyed by it.

Finals week you say? I'll tell your teachers to give you moar work! :lol:
But seriously, finals week was always my easiest week.

>_< :P
It's not finals week yet, but the week before finals week. That awkward twilight period when you attempt to cram everything about graphing systems of equations that you ignored when you were really working on the finer points of a conscript :P (True story.)
But really, I agree that finals week is pretty chill. It's just the review, review, review part before that makes me a bit loopy.

This isn't a conscripting pet peeve, but a conlang Romanization pet peeve of mine.... *snip*

I agree! Aentoui actually has two romanization schemes - "Practical Style" and "Aesthetic Style". Practical style uses only the letters of the alphabet available on a standard American keyboard, but looks pretty messy (and it uses <w> for a vowel sound, which I hate). Aesthetic Style uses a couple of nicer looking letters for some letters that I don't like the look of (<g> or <w>, for instance), and uses one ligature (Æ). Still no digraphs ;P

[masako]

Really, the only thing this thread is missing is a Serali scriptgasm and a multitude of boingies.

I am so depressed that this is what has become of the CBB.

[MyghternTighrijd]

This isn't a conscripting pet peeve, but a conlang Romanization pet peeve of mine.... *snip*

I agree! Aentoui actually has two romanization schemes - "Practical Style" and "Aesthetic Style". Practical style uses only the letters of the alphabet available on a standard American keyboard, but looks pretty messy (and it uses <w> for a vowel sound, which I hate). Aesthetic Style uses a couple of nicer looking letters for some letters that I don't like the look of (<g> or <w>, for instance), and uses one ligature (Æ). Still no digraphs ;P

I have two orthographies, but I've got my keyboard set up for ''American International'' so I get dead keys and loads of things with AltGr - thus my keyboard ortho is slightly more elaborate than standard. So I can do ðis kiñd øf þing jußt tö bè åñnóÿìng very efficiently. Of course, I can never find the @ symbol, because British keyboards are set up differently, and when I want to writr the word ''don't'' it can end up as ''doný'' because the apostrafe is one of the dead keys. So my vowel orthography on the keyboard goes: a ä æ e ì i ÿ o ö ø ü u, whereas written I tend to use macrons, as they are faster and more clear than umlauty things and accents respectively.

[Veris]

Gibberish.

This would be better suited to 'Orthographic Pet Peeves.'

More properly, Romanization pet peeves.

But seriously, I think everyone knows that the Ithkuil script beats every other one hands-down.

Is that the one that was designed for computer use?

I disagree in the sense that Diatrics for romanization is allowed to use if it is used logicly.

That you FIRST fillup all nondiatric symbols with sounds and then want to use diatrics for the sounds you have but cant fit anymore for some reason (quantity or whatnot) is perfectly accaptable

That's the exact same thing I said -- if you have a meaningful, grammatical (in your word "logical") reason, diacritic your heart out, but there's no excuse to use diacritics if you haven't...well, not exhausted ASCII, but at least given it the old college try.

Really, the only thing this thread is missing is a Serali scriptgasm and a multitude of boingies.

I am so depressed that this is what has become of the CBB.

I know, it's so depressing when people have opinions about things other than sunshine and rainbows, and then talk about them.

Also, what is Serali and what are boingies? For the former, the only thing I can figure is that it's a popular conlang. For the latter, the only thing I can think of are boobies. The woman fun kind, not the Arctic bird kind.

This isn't a conscripting pet peeve, but a conlang Romanization pet peeve of mine.... *snip*

I agree! Aentoui actually has two romanization schemes - "Practical Style" and "Aesthetic Style". Practical style uses only the letters of the alphabet available on a standard American keyboard, but looks pretty messy (and it uses <w> for a vowel sound, which I hate). Aesthetic Style uses a couple of nicer looking letters for some letters that I don't like the look of (<g> or <w>, for instance), and uses one ligature (Æ). Still no digraphs ;P

I have two orthographies, but I've got my keyboard set up for ''American International'' so I get dead keys and loads of things with AltGr - thus my keyboard ortho is slightly more elaborate than standard. So I can do ðis kiñd øf þing jußt tö bè åñnóÿìng very efficiently. Of course, I can never find the @ symbol, because British keyboards are set up differently, and when I want to writr the word ''don't'' it can end up as ''doný'' because the apostrafe is one of the dead keys. So my vowel orthography on the keyboard goes: a ä æ e ì i ÿ o ö ø ü u, whereas written I tend to use macrons, as they are faster and more clear than umlauty things and accents respectively.

Yes, but the point of Romanization isn't to be convienent for you, the author, but to be convenient for everyone else. Hence, basic ASCII-only is preferrable to more high-falutin' Romanizations, since most people have "plain" keyboards.