allthingslinguistic:

sopih:

dedalvs:

I did create a logographic script for Kamakawi. You can check it out here. It can serve as a fair introduction to how to create a certain type of logographic script. There are lots of different ways a logographic script could work, though. The important thing to bear in mind is those logographic scripts that graduate out of the pure pictographic stage usually have some sort of either phonological or morphosemantic element to them. That is, it’s no longer purely one picture = one semantic concept. There will still be glyphs like that, but there will also be subsystems (e.g. some glyphs that say “means this, but sounds like this” or “sounds like this with a tone like this” or “means this plus this, kind of”). There are many ways to incorporate these subsystems, though, so how you do it is up to you.

Yes. All logographic writing systems are MIXED systems, with some combination of signs indicating meaning, and signs indicating sound. There are no true writing systems that only spell pure meanings, with no reference to sound. (Some people talk about emojis, but this isn’t a full writing system. People can’t (as far as I’ve seen) spell any and every sentence they can think of in emojis, although it might be possible using rebuses, see below.)

First I have to ask, have made the spoken language of the people who use the writing system? At least made the phonological system and some vocabulary? If you haven’t, do it now, because you won’t be able to complete your writing system without it, assuming you want to make a naturalistic logographic script. (If you do want to make something wholly unnatural, then go ahead and do the opposite of my advice.)

Cuneiform, Hieroglyphs, and Chinese characters, have at least 2 specialized kinds of signs:

1: A set that indicates a category of words of related meanings. These are called determinatives in Egyptian and Cuneiform, and radicals in Chinese.

2: A set that indicates sounds in some way. These are called phonetics in Chinese, syllabograms in Cuneiform, and variously called uniliterals, biliterals, or triliterals in Egyptian.

In practice, these two sets may not be easy to distinguish. A sign may be used semantically or phonetically in different contexts. In Chinese, the semantic and phonetic elements are combined into single character, and if you haven’t studied Chinese, you probably won’t know how to divide the character.

The semantic determiners often derive ultimately from pictures of objects or concepts, so you can start by drawing a lot. In the course of the evolution of the writing system, they may end up looking like nothing in particular, so don’t stress too much, even if you suck at drawing you can make logographs. Egyptian hieroglyphs often still resemble pictures. Maya glyphs sometimes have identifiable faces in them. Chinese characters and cuneiform – good luck trying to guess what they mean.

So, how do you get signs that represent sounds? The usual way is what’s called the REBUS principle. (Highlight that, because that’s your most important tool to expanding your writing system.) Basically, you take one of your picture-signs representing a meaning, and start using it to write another word that sounds the same or similar. For an example in English, you could use a picture of an eye to spell the pronoun “I.” Or like, how people writing text messages will use 2 for “to” and 4 for “for.”

As you can see, that’s why you can’t separate a logographic script from the language it’s used for. Different languages will have different words that resemble each other. In another language, the picture “eye” won’t work for writing “I.”

Here’s an example from Chinese: 其 used to be a picture of a basket. Old, old Chinese had a 3rd-person possessive pronoun – which is kind of hard to draw – but it sounded like “basket,” so they started using 

其 to write it. Then when people weren’t sure whether you meant “his” or “basket,” they added the bamboo radical 竹 to the top because baskets are made of bamboo or something. That combination became 箕 “basket.” This kind of thing happened many, many, many times.

Do this over and over and you get a bunch of symbols with associated sounds. This set acts mostly like any other writing system based on sound; it can be an alphabet, abjad, syllabary.

For example, Egyptian hieroglyphic phonetic signs spell only consonants. It works like an abjad, with some extra signs indicating two or three consonants. Maya glyphs make a syllabary of consonant-vowel symbols. Cuneiform signs spell the beginnings of syllables (consonant-vowel) or the ends (vowel-consonants), and spell a full consonant-vowel-consonant syllable by combining two signs that have an overlapping vowel. Chinese character phonetics usually represent a series of syllables which all rhyme (in ancient Chinese) although the first sound in the syllable may only roughly match.

Or you could just make up totally random phonetic symbols if you really wanted to.

For the most part, logographic systems represent sounds less precisely than modern alphabets. Think of it like this: wholly phonetic writing systems distinguish words by making the representation of sounds more precise. Like, “No, not tree, not free, I mean three!” Whereas logographs are more like, “What’s a number and sounds like tree? That’s right, it’s three!” They give a clue to the sound and the meaning.

The details are complex and you should read up on systems you like. I liked Bill Manley’s Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Complete Beginners and Michael D. Coe’s Reading the Maya Glyphs. (There’s also Breaking the Maya Code, although that’s really about the history of figuring out how to read glyphs.) For Chinese characters, look online. Over a billion people still use them, and 10 minutes on Google will bring up more resources than you can use in your lifetime. Cuneiform, I’m not sure of any good beginning books. Cuneiform is definitely the least popular of the popular of the four; wedges don’t match most people’s aesthetics, I guess. There is a Sumerian-language blog on Tumblr so maybe ask @sumerianlanguage.

You can also look through my blog for the glyphs I created for Yuktepat (search for the tag ‘Yuktepat’). I don’t have a comprehensive description of the writing system online, but there are lots of examples.

As I was recently speculating with some linguists on twitter about, in order to make emoji work as a logophoric writing system, you’d want to combine a phonetic element with a semantic element. 

For example, ⭐💰🧜‍♀️☕  “star cash soundalike with the mermaid and coffee determinatives” would be Starbucks the coffee chain, but  ⭐💰🐳🔱  “star cash soundalike with whale and trident determinatives” would be the Starbuck character in Moby Dick. (It’s unclear whether the moneybag 💰 or the deer 🦌 emoji is a better soundalike for “buck”.)

Another really cool explanation can be found on The Zompist! 

You might also want to consider what percentage of your language is ideographic, and what is phonetic. Most Mayan scribes had an inventory of around 300 meaning based signs, and wrote the rest using sound based signs. Chinese has 1000s of meaning based signs.

How well do the phonetics of your language and writing system match up? One of the coolest, and most frustrating, things about Mayan is that they used syllabic symbols to record a non-syllabic language. To write ‘nab’ they would use the symbols for ‘na-ba’, and to record ‘nahb’ or ‘naab’ they would use the syllables for ‘na-bi’ or ‘na-bu’ – the vowels wouldn’t match up so you knew the vowel in the word was complex. Does your language have final consonants? Consonant clusters? Complex vowels?

How long are most words? Chinese is mostly monosyllabic, and that may have had some effect on how much information is contained in each glyph. Mayan words are often polysyllabic. Instead of using phonetics contained in a glyph to hint at pronunciation, separate symbols would be written before or after to hint at starting or ending sounds.

How many homonyms does your language have? Logographic languages seem to LOVE homonyms. This is point 2 in lopih’s comment. But I haven’t seen a logographic language that DOESN’T like replacing glyphs with similar sounding ones. Remember that scribes get bored, or are lazy, or want to show off how well learned they are. There’s going to be wordplay. Maya has ‘chan’, which means ‘sky’ ‘snake’ and ‘four’. All have specific glyphs, plus there are multiple phonetic glyphs that can be used. Scribes writing names often use a different combination of glyphs every time the name comes up.

I would also LOVE to see a conlang that has adapted a logographic script from a different conlang, similar to what Japan did. So complex, but also incredibly interesting!