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Alien languages? Baby, you have no idea...

 
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 3:33 pm    Post subject: Alien languages? Baby, you have no idea... Reply with quote

The Betamaze Alphabet is the creation by Terrana Cliff, an American art student in California. It is designed to draw mazes, which Terrana has been interested in for a long time.

    All the letters connect together so they can form paths.
    To make sure this happens, they all fit within a 3x3 grid. Letters are made from black squares and triangles in the grid. To allow the paths to connect, every letter has white space on the sides of the 3x3 grid.

    Paths can branch, terminate, and come together.
    The locations on the 3x3 grid that are not used for connecting are used for giving each letter its shape. Within each letter, the black space is used to close or alter the path between the white connection spaces. Some letters have more black space in the grid than others. Some letters only allow a 3-way path, some are 2-way, some turn the path 90 degrees, some close in all directions, and some open to all directions.

    Path structure can be altered without having to alter spelling, word order, etc.
    Every letter has a unique shape, unlike in the english alphabet, where some letters have the same shape (m and w are the same shape, just vertically flipped). Each letter can be turned upsidedown or flipped without a change in its meaning, so the direction of the path can be changed.




Transliteration: I think; therefore I am.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 3:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote



full alphabet from omniglot.

some of these, like u and v, appear to be effectively the same. probably because of the desire to have a set of 26 characters, but i think i'd admire mechanical purity over english language substitution. mazes have always intrigued me though.
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 4:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Chromaphonoglyphics (CPG) was created by Richard Brodie, a retired computer programmer now involved in translating Middle English poetry. His goal has been to create a writing system that combines the strong points of both Eastern logographic and Western phonetic language representation paradigms.

    Vowels are represented as pure color, filling the space enclosed by surrounding consonantal shapes.
    Consonant blends, sometimes referred to as consonant clusters, are considered individual letters, resulting in an alphabet of 210 symbols and 13 vowel colors.
    Words whose symbol plus punctuation count is 8 or less all occupy a single square, with the very small percentage of words longer than this accommodated by a continuation feature.
    Syllables within a word are stacked vertically from top to bottom, with their heights compressed as necessary depending on how many a word contains.
    Punctuation is indicated by black-and-white pattern-filled shapes appended at the bottom (or top) of the word after which they would be postpended (or before which they would be prepended) in normal writing.
    Digits are indicated by spelling out their first syllable, with numbers assembled by stacking up to three digits per word square.





Translation: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 4:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

so you're pretty much just quoting pages straight off of omniglot is what you're doing then.
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simplicio
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 6:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

And posting them identically on multiple web boards, no less.

I don't like that second one you posted though. It seems to abandon too many subtleties of language ("being" there would be pronounced "beeng"), while the iconic elements seem to be simple transcriptions of letter combinations and don't offer the possibility of adding complexity or meaning to the language.

The first one's better, at least offering different interpretations through "pathways" for the same language.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 12:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

simplicio wrote:
("being" there would be pronounced "beeng")


To be fair, this is probably how it's pronounced the majority of the time. I mean, technically it's a two-syllable word, or can be glossed that way; these kinds of words are invariably slurred as a single-syllable word in common utterances, so this would be a perfectly appropriate transcription.

And how would you add "complexity and meaning" to a language through an alphabet system? I don't really understand the "different interpretations through pathways" comment either. You mean that it would create additional semantic content through the 'paths' that you get from the created mazes? That's...kind of interesting, except it brings up all sorts of weirdnesses like semantic content changing when you change the font size or other typographical concerns. Which seems unlikely to really be related to language per se, it's more like a cypher.
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simplicio
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 2:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Scratchmonkey wrote:
simplicio wrote:
("being" there would be pronounced "beeng")


To be fair, this is probably how it's pronounced the majority of the time. I mean, technically it's a two-syllable word, or can be glossed that way; these kinds of words are invariably slurred as a single-syllable word in common utterances, so this would be a perfectly appropriate transcription.

As a common utterance, perhaps, but are we talking about the creation of complex visual alphabets for their potential to be commonly uttered? If we're talking about transcribing a reduced alphabet, wouldn't it make more sense to match that with a simpler writing system, some form of visual shorthand to match a simplified language?

Quote:
And how would you add "complexity and meaning" to a language through an alphabet system? I don't really understand the "different interpretations through pathways" comment either. You mean that it would create additional semantic content through the 'paths' that you get from the created mazes? That's...kind of interesting, except it brings up all sorts of weirdnesses like semantic content changing when you change the font size or other typographical concerns. Which seems unlikely to really be related to language per se, it's more like a cypher.

In a way, yeah. But typography can change meaning. Look to all of House of Leaves for various examples there. If I come across multiple fonts used in a single work, I'll be looking for a reason and a meaning to it. I wouldn't say it's necessarily a cypher either, since the visual aspect of writing tends more toward the interpretive side of things.

Admittedly, that maze alphabet admittedly only provides links between letters; it doesn't have roots in pictographs like Chinese characters, and is thus a little short on creative possibilities as is. But if you were to combine something like that with the wordblocks of the second example, you could arrive at something with some interpretive possibilities.

I dunno. I'm not sure why people take the time to create these in the first place (the first thought that came to mind was some D&D guy wanting to imbue his dungeons with secret messages). But for visual alphabets they're pretty unappealing and rigid, not to mention totally ridiculous to write by hand.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 12:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

simplicio wrote:
As a common utterance, perhaps, but are we talking about the creation of complex visual alphabets for their potential to be commonly uttered? If we're talking about transcribing a reduced alphabet, wouldn't it make more sense to match that with a simpler writing system, some form of visual shorthand to match a simplified language?


"Reduced alphabet"? Wuh? It's not like English spelling actually represents the sounds of the English language on a 1:1 basis, so I don't see why having something that actually represents the language as it's spoken is such a big deal.

Quote:
In a way, yeah. But typography can change meaning. Look to all of House of Leaves for various examples there. If I come across multiple fonts used in a single work, I'll be looking for a reason and a meaning to it. I wouldn't say it's necessarily a cypher either, since the visual aspect of writing tends more toward the interpretive side of things.

Admittedly, that maze alphabet admittedly only provides links between letters; it doesn't have roots in pictographs like Chinese characters, and is thus a little short on creative possibilities as is. But if you were to combine something like that with the wordblocks of the second example, you could arrive at something with some interpretive possibilities.

I dunno. I'm not sure why people take the time to create these in the first place (the first thought that came to mind was some D&D guy wanting to imbue his dungeons with secret messages). But for visual alphabets they're pretty unappealing and rigid, not to mention totally ridiculous to write by hand.


I have to admit that I think it's pretty silly because written language is such a minor part of language as a whole -- which is probably why I'd consider that extra meaning to be more of a cypher or like House of Leaves, a collection of typographical tricks that give you a hard-on in the coffee shop when you figure them out while not having much to do with communication of actual semantics.
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simplicio
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 2:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

House of Leaves wasn't the best example. Think poetry, more properly, and all the visual means that can be employed quite soundly there. But then, your posts are giving me the feeling you don't care much about written language. But wait, if that's the case, why are you posting in a thread about visual alphabets?

Or perhaps we're running into a semantic issue concerning the use of "cipher". I reject the labeling of interpretive language as a cipher, because that's not encoding. Some poets have employed ciphers (Edgar Allen Poe did, I think), where a strict hidden message can be found by systematically extracting words from the work and such, but for the most part typography and such is used more creatively and interpretively.

What I'm trying to get at is for the most part exemplified by Japanese, where in many instances a single word can be written in multiple ways, and the various kanji available can each bring different meaning or weight to that word. Whereas most of the made up pictographic alphabets on omniglot seem to a way of writing "fuck the teacher" on graph paper and turning it in as an art project.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 3:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The reason that I posted in the first place is that "being" is actually pronounced in the way that the one alphabet transcribes it, so there isn't really anything being lost from a language perspective. Although it's different, I wouldn't describe it as "simplified".

I've actually done work on the linguistics of poetry and typography and such wasn't actually that much of a part of it -- line breaks are important; then again, those are basically equivalent to verbal elements like pauses, or bolding to speaking louder, or smaller font size to speaking more quietly, etc. Admittedly, I don't know much about the Japanese form of writing kanji, I would be interested to know if there was semantic content there that didn't have a verbal analogue. I'd suspect that there isn't.

Which is to say, I would think that semantic content that couldn't be translated from a writing system to a spoken system would be closer to a cipher than actually being part of a language, because if you could write something that would technically be in English (with an alternate alphabetical system) that would lose meaning if it were read aloud to an English speaker, than that would definitely be "encoding"* rather than part of the language.

* - From a semiotic sense, all language is encoding so this is technically meaningless.
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Bulkor
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 4:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

simplicio wrote:
What I'm trying to get at is for the most part exemplified by Japanese, where in many instances a single word can be written in multiple ways, and the various kanji available can each bring different meaning or weight to that word.


Huh? What instances would those be? I translate Japanese, and man would it be way harder than it already is if this were true.
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simplicio
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 4:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Scratchmonkey wrote:
Which is to say, I would think that semantic content that couldn't be translated from a writing system to a spoken system would be closer to a cipher than actually being part of a language, because if you could write something that would technically be in English (with an alternate alphabetical system) that would lose meaning if it were read aloud to an English speaker, than that would definitely be "encoding"* rather than part of the language.


Only if it were non-standard, I think. I would suggest that if you grew up with a visual alphabet/writing system, however, that such possibility and nuance would remain open even in spoken language as it'd be so well ingrained. But then, I don't have that experience myself, so I can't provide conclusive evidence.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 4:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

simplicio wrote:
Only if it were non-standard, I think. I would suggest that if you grew up with a visual alphabet/writing system, however, that such possibility and nuance would remain open even in spoken language as it'd be so well ingrained. But then, I don't have that experience myself, so I can't provide conclusive evidence.


I'm not sure how content exclusive to a writing system could be "open" in a spoken langauge. And an English speaker, or anybody fluent in any language doesn't have to know how to read/write in order to be considered fluent, so I think we'd still be dealing with something closer to a code.
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simplicio
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 4:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bulkor wrote:
simplicio wrote:
What I'm trying to get at is for the most part exemplified by Japanese, where in many instances a single word can be written in multiple ways, and the various kanji available can each bring different meaning or weight to that word.


Huh? What instances would those be? I translate Japanese, and man would it be way harder than it already is if this were true.


Am I just totally wrong? I could be; I'm going on vague memories of classes taken years ago, but isn't there a certain amount of fluidity in the use of kanji? Oh, I think I was a little off base. Same kanji, different words:

Because of the way they have been adopted into Japanese, a single kanji may be used to write one or more different words (or, in most cases, morphemes). From the point of view of the reader, kanji are said to have one or more different "readings". Deciding which reading is meant will depend on context, intended meaning, use in compounds, and even location in the sentence. Some common kanji have ten or more possible readings. These readings are normally categorized as either on'yomi (or on) or kun'yomi (or kun).
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FortNinety
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PostPosted: Wed May 09, 2007 2:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sorry to bump (yet another) old topic, but I once knew a guy in college who went to Klingon summer camp, which is somewhere upstate New York. Anyway, aside from learning to fight and other stuff in Klingon, you have to speak the language, though I don't know if they teach it to you there, or you have to learn beforehand, otherwise you get your ass beat.

Anyway, from what I understand, its a complete and perfect mixture of Yiddish and Russian.
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PostPosted: Wed May 09, 2007 2:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

soul cancer comes in many forms, it would seem.

klingon summer camp?
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