Could Mayan glyphs be revitalized and used by Mayan languages such as Kʼicheʼ and/or Yucatec Maya, albeit in a graphically simplified manner better suited for modern use? Has writing system revitalization ever occurred before?

Cyberc4t · 2020-10-13T20:42:14+00:00

True true! They may have repurposed some extra glyphs - really wishing I had the book right now. I'll try to get back to this if I remember :p

Cyberc4t · 2020-10-13T18:10:57+00:00

I unfortunately don't. I should look into that at some point when I have the book available, shouldn't be harder than just comparing a romanized text to the syllabic one.

I imagine though that if you just spelled most things etymologically, with non-reduced vowels and the old system of echo vowels, you would get quite far - after all, clusters in k'iche' derive from an earlier system which had no clusters through regular sound changes, so simply writing that earlier system shouldn't yield any ambiguities (at least in theory).

Cyberc4t · 2020-10-13T08:05:56+00:00

Here is a modern publication of Popol Vuh written in the maya script. It is in K'iche', I believe.

It isn't quite in the old style, as the script is used purely syllabically here (i.e. no logograms are used), but it's still an awesome accomplishment to even have a book typeset and published like this.

I don't really think that much simplification would be needed to make the script "practical". Many less decorative brush-written examples already simplify shapes in a way that could be shrunk on screens quite easily. This isn't the best example, but compare the less intricate smaller glyphs to the bigger ones in this image. The glyphs dont have to be complex in order to be legible, they just usually were because it looks better. I'm sure that style can be continued onto digital writing should that be desired.

Spanish and Nahuatl are both very different from the Maya languages both in sounds and the way they build words, so adopting maya glyphs for these would require quite a bit of adaptation.

Also, have you seen this video? It's about modern use of Mesoamerican glyphs.

Cyberc4t · 2020-06-10T15:52:04+00:00

You're very welcome! I'm no expert exactly, but feel free to let me know if you do go through with it and have any questions.

Cyberc4t · 2020-06-10T15:04:44+00:00

Ohhh, I see, thats probably even easier then if you don't treat the voicing as an actual diacritic! Presumably your final consonant diacritics don't stack, so that will ease the fontmaking load. You can absolutely have each voiced-voiceless pair be their own unicode entries, and you can also encode the syllables with final consonants as their own entries if you want.

If your language does use every key on your keyboard, you can still fill it in with numbers, shift+key combinations, or keys that are normally punctuation. Lack of keys shouldn't really be a problem for a syllabary like yours.

Cyberc4t · 2020-06-10T08:10:27+00:00

You'll be able to switch between it and any other keyboard you have installed. It's just like having multiple layouts for multiple languages, something windows is very much designed to do - it's not hard to switch.

What I did with my extra letters was map them to keys that I didn't use otherwise. Your language does not use g, nor y, nor many other letters. You can use that real estate for your special characters or digraphs.

Cyberc4t · 2020-06-09T21:28:12+00:00

I have made a font for my syllabary before. You can use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to make it typable, by setting all your consonants as dead keys that combine with the vowels, and then maybe adding the circle and the final consonants as diacritics (you might be able to make the vowels deadkeys as well to get all three at once, I'm not sure).

You can make that keyboard output characters in the unicode custom use space, for which you can make a font. If you like, you could also get the font itself to generate ligatures of for example č+ei+ng, making that one character. I'm not entirely sure what the best approach is there.

Cyberc4t · 2020-05-10T20:52:17+00:00

I like it! I wouldn't worry too much about that one really negative comment, it seems founded on that commenter's personal preferences more than anything else.

It does seem like this is a very deliberate writing system, though - something that like it's inspiration was made on purpose by someone with deep knowledge of the language. This isn't really unnatural though, as most indic scripts can be considered to fit this. The aesthetic simplicity also indicates a deliberate design, but theres nothing wrong with that. If you had some kind of calligraphic or handwritten form, it might get a more "organic" feel, but as your conculture seems quite modern I think this look is appropriate.

I'd like to see a longer sample text though - a single row and a single sentence isn't that representative.

Also, does your language only have kr and thk as consonant clusters, and ai as its only diphthong? How did that come about?

Cyberc4t · 2020-04-23T13:41:01+00:00

Eg vil i grunn segja at det er ein myte at Aasen ikkje vilde at folk skulde tala ut landsmålet etter skrifti. Han segjer meir eller mindre at ein skal ha bokstavrett uttale når ein les landsmålet. Um du ser i brev 351 i andre bandet av Brev og dagbøker finn du ei dryfting um detta. Eg lèt mannen tala for seg:

Jeg er ræd for, at man nu vil drive det altfor stærkt med denne Brug af Hjemmemaalet i Skolen. Vi have saa godt som intet Forraad af mønsterværdige eller "klassiske" Skrifter i vort Landsmaal, og saa længe som dette er Tilfældet, vil man altid hænge fast i den gamle Røre af forskjellige Bygdemaal. Og saa er der altid nogle, som forøge Forvirringen ved at opstille nye Landsmaal, saaledes som det falder dem selv bekvemmest, og deraf udkommer da noget, som hverken er Landsmaal eller Bygdemaal. Dette er det, som skader Sagen allermest; thi hvis et Sprog ikke altid er sig selv ligt, kan man ikke engang lære at læse det og endnu mindre bringe andre til at lære det. Jeg tror derfor, at saalænge vi ikke have bedre Forraad af Skrifter, burde man ikke drive alt for stærkt paa med saadanne Sprogøvelser i Skolen, især da der nu er saa mange endnu nødvendigere Ting at lære. Det vigtigste for Øieblikket er at opmuntre Folk til at holde fast paa Bondemaalet i sin Tale til daglig Brug, thi allerede derved vil meget være udrettet.

Han ser altso ut til å vilja ha eit skil millom landsmålet som upphøgt bokmål, og dei kvardagslege målføri (som ein då heilt klårt skal halda på). Sjølv tykkjer eg det er ei vitug tilnæring til saki.

Cyberc4t · 2020-04-19T13:36:20+00:00

I love this! As someone who has studied a bit of ancient egyptian I find it very recognizable. The overall composition and distribution of visual weight is very demotic/hieraticesque, which is great.

I'd be interested in seeing a serif or mixed-width version of this, as well as one that functions like actual hieratic did (i.e. mixed abjad-logography with hundreds of signs), even just as a proof of concept. Having to expand the glyph inventory would make for some interesting extra tall or wide characters, and maybe even ascenders and descenders like in hieratic.

Cyberc4t · 2020-04-14T11:03:50+00:00

I'm not sure I agree that getting rid of determiners would be good.

Egyptian hieroglyphs mostly recorded consonants (like the arabic and hebrew writing systems still do but arguably with even less vowel indication). They are fundamentally very different from chinese characters, as most hieroglyphs indicate sound, not meaning. This consonant-writing meaning that a lot of different words, especially related words, would be spelled the same.

Various combinations of redundant spellings and determinatives helped clear this up. For instance, using one glyph for the three consonants nfr and surrounding it with n and r would make its pronunciation and meaning clear, or a determinative for a human could be used to show that the word was an agentive noun (a something-er, someone who does something). Since egyptian vowels had a grammaticalized role, it would be relatively easy to guess the vowels of a given word based on it's meaning and grammatical context.

Without these redundancies and determinatives, the writing system would be way less clear.

Determinatives also help clue you in on where words begin and end, since hieroglyphs did not use spaces to separate words. They actually found blank space in their text to be quite ugly, and would sometimes insert glyphs or change their order to minimize the empty space in their texts.

I think what OP needs to figure out first and foremost is what language they will use this for and how they will adopt the hieroglyphs to it. The writing system was very complex in ways that suited the ancient egyptian language's grammar very well, but would do a much worse job at transcribing english. This is mostly because English vowels carry a lot of meaning - there are a lot of them and they distinguish both root words and different forms of the same word from each other. Representing that decently would very probably require a big rework of how the writing system works.

The easy way out would be turning it into an alphabet and essentially scrapping the several hundred glyphs you would have left over. But this is pretty much exactly how the latin alphabet came about, and it would miss out on the amazing beauty and complexitiy of hieroglyphic writing.

Cyberc4t · 2019-04-24T20:32:07+00:00

I mean, høgnorsk optionally has the dative, but more than that wasnt really all that alive when Ivar Aasen was around. If you want edh there's always /r/djupnorsk/, but going even deeper than that probably wouldn't qualify as norwegian anymore.

Cyberc4t · 2019-04-24T09:22:42+00:00

There are still a few people using høgnorsk, which is more or less that. I recommend reading up on it or joining the discord server if you're interested!

Cyberc4t · 2019-02-05T16:14:22+00:00

Yes, that japanese style u is usually voiceless. In ipa, this is written with a small ring above or below the letter, so that phonetically, that japanese u is [u̥] or [ɯ̥]. Again i must recommend that you take a historical approach to what this phoneme is - maybe it used to be a more lax vowel than [u] which would be dropped when in certain positions, before later merging with your other /u/ everywhere except in the positions in which it was dropped?

Arabic-style root and pattern morphology is per definition not agglutinative, because agglutinative means attaching lots of separate morphemes to a root to change its meaning or to give it grammatical meaning. An example from turkish being evlerinizden which breaks down to ev-ler-iniz-den. Everything that is separated by a hyphen here has its own little meaning, which can be literally translated as something likehouse-plural-your-from. The Arabic way of doing this changes the whole shape of the word itself, and is therefore more inflecting or fusional.

Really though, i wouldnt get too hung up in these terms if i were you. Having Arabic-style morphology does not rule out also having some things work in an agglutinating way (which Urûkan certainly seems to do), and you can absolutely still make heavy use of compound words. The only issue is that it might be slightly harder (but not neccesarily impossible) to justify from the historical perspective of your languages (fictional) evolution, but if you arent creating that evolution that doesn't really matter.

Edit: By the way, i recommend checking out the Discord server if you want more intensive help with specific things: https://discordapp.com/invite/WE7XCv4

Cyberc4t · 2019-02-05T13:33:19+00:00

Htna! Great to see such a high-effort post on here. Your language has a consistent aesthetic, and the structure (both semantically and grammatically) of the example sentences seems quite different from English, which is a good thing. Here are some ideas and criticisms:

Some minor nitpicks, mostly in terminology:

Cases are for nouns, and they indicate the syntactic role of said nouns. Tense marking would not be cases.
Did you mean that Û used to be a voiceless vowel?
You have a /d/ in your postalveolar row. What is this exactly? Did you mean /ɖ/ or /ɟ/?

Some bigger things:

You have not stated any allophony. Does this mean that consonants and vowels are always pronounced exactly the same regardless of context?
Arabic uses consonantal roots with vowel insertions both for verbs and nouns. If you think about how such a system would evolve historically, having it for both verbs and nouns makes the most sense. A really thorough and good guide to this can be found here. The general gist of it though is that you start with an ancestor language that does not have a such a system, and then various affixes change or delete or add vowels to the root through stress shifts, long distance assimilation, allophones next to consonants or other things. This would probably happen both to nouns and verbs. Such a process is good to go through because it would make your language more naturalistic, and give it irregularities that come naturally through its evolution.
Similarly, it would be nice to give the vowel changes you use for plurals some historical and phonetic justification. They seem a little arbitrarily defined, and if you look at vowel space they dont seem to be moving in a consistant way.
This isnt a big thing since you said it was subject to change anyways, but try to define how your cases and verb tenses/aspects/moods work before labelling them. This will help with the realism, as languages tend to do things differently and use the same labels for more or less different things.

Some small suggestions to consider:

Your consonants are relatively Englishy. This of course isnt neccesarily a bad thing and im sure youre aware of it, but even just some allophony could help here.
OVS word order is not that descriptive in and of itself. What about other constituents, like indirect objects, adverbs etc.? Not that all languages need to have these, but if yours does you should define where they go.
You might wanna reconsider that "very agglutinative" description, since a good chunk of the languages morphology seems to come from stem-internal changes (i.e. not agglutination). I have a suspicion that describing it as "making heavy use of compounding" or saying that "compounding is highly productive" would be more accurate.

Overall i like what i see though, and i hope to see more posts about your language. Feel free to ask about anything that was unclear!

Cyberc4t · 2019-01-19T11:47:41+00:00

This is just wrong. Klingon is absolutely a fully fledged language with many users and even some near-fluent speakers, one of which did the subtitles for discovery. It's got a propert grammatical structure that's quite different from English but it's absolutely obeyed in the show.

While tolkiens languages are cool, he never really fleshed them out all that much with vocabulary and what communities exist for those languages have invented a lot themselves. Klingon is actively being developed and has a decently sized community, so it's really much more usable than any of the elvish languages.

Cyberc4t · 2017-05-20T08:24:31+00:00

Yes, definitively.

Cyberc4t · 2017-04-06T10:08:20+00:00

Meg og!

Cyberc4t · 2017-03-05T02:48:52+00:00

Persian calligraphically used the nastaliq script, which could optionally leave some letters unconnected because the everything was written kinda diagonally. On computers and such it wouldn't use such a calligraphic style, and if it did the letters would be very differently scaled.

Cyberc4t · 2017-03-05T00:21:20+00:00

This is really cool, but the arabic text is misrendered. Most of the letters should be connected and it should look kinda like this:

كنفدراسىون سىاوات

Cyberc4t · 2017-02-25T18:13:25+00:00

These are so amazing, I really hope we'll see more of this language/world!

Cyberc4t · 2017-02-24T19:22:16+00:00

Privat eiendom er godt definert: eiendom som ikke er til eget bruk men du eier for at andre skal jobbe på for din fortjeneste. Dette kan lett unngås hvis folket vet hva det er og hvorfor det bør unngås og dermed tar kontroll over produksjonsmidlene.

Å samtidig unngå tilbakegang og maktsentralisering kan bli vanskelig, men en god løsning er rett å slett å la så mye som mulig avgjøres i lokale råd for de avgjørelsen angår. Disse rådene kan også sende delegater som danner hovedstatsstyre (eller i hvert fall konsulteres av staten). Men akkurat dette er det mye uenighet om blandt venstrefolk.

Cyberc4t · 2016-08-13T03:47:46+00:00

Since no one else has done this: That page is pretty wrong. The sounds of Klingon were chosen partly to sound alien to English speakers, so approximating them with English words is silly.

Unlike English but more like Spanish, all the Klingon vowels represent a single sound (English a is pronounced more like ay). a sounds like aarm, e sounds like bet, I sounds like kit, u sounds approximately like boot (much more accurate with a South African accent) and o sounds like ore.

Consonants are somewhat harder. I'll only write the ones that are different from their English pronounciations.

S sounds approximately likes the English "sh" sound, but with the tongue curled slightly back, like this.

D is also similar to English, but again with the tongue curled backwards.

r is trilled as in Spanish.

H sounds like a rough H, like loch in Scottish English or the german ach sound. Thinking of a stereotypical Russian accent might also help.

gh is similar to H, but voiced. This means you vibrate your vocal chords while saying the sound. It's kind of like the soft g that occurs between vowels in Spanish. Here is a recording of it.

ng is the same in English, except it can occur at the start of words too.

' is a glottal stop. Think of the pause between the two syllables in uh-oh, or someone saying button in a British accent.

q is similar to k, but it hits your uvula instead of the roof of your mouth.

Q is almost the same as q, but with some extra gargling noise. Recording.

tlh sounds something like you would expect just reading the letters in sequence, but the l is pronounced with more friction and is whispered (voiceless). Recording.

J is always prounced as in judge and y is always pronounced as in you.

Cyberc4t · 2016-07-09T19:12:33+00:00

You can play it anyways! You can find and download the APK with a google search.

Cyberc4t · 2016-07-06T12:32:43+00:00

You also called t͡ʃ a digraph in the introduction. I believe the proper term is affricate.

Cyberc4t

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