Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

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Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

I was doing some research and came across a statement by Peter Daniels that if he were to devise a writing system for Valyrian that it would follow the logic of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. On Omniglot I found that someone had already devised an alphabet for Valyrian.

According to my research (I know very little about hieroglyphics), hieroglyphics did not have a specific alphabet as we would understand it. Hieroglyphics only represented consonants, not vowels, similar to Aramaic scripts (which are descended from hieroglyphics). The Egyptian proto-alphabet consisted of logograms for monoconsonantal words, and there were additional proto-alphabets for diconsonantal and triconsonantal words. Since these logograms were then used purely for their phonetic value in a manner called "rebus principle," another set of logograms without phonetic values were used to clarify semantics called determiners.

This has important implications for any hypothetical Valyrian hieroglyphics. Its proto-alphabet would at least consist of logograms for monoconsonantal words used for their phonetic value, and there would be a set of determiners (at least a hundred or so) used to indicate the semantic class of any given word. Should the proto-alphabet explicitly represent vowels? If not, should it indicate long vowels with glides ("matres lectionis")? With which glides would it indicate the long vowels /ē/, /ō/ and /ȳ/?

This would require a lot of thought and I would welcome any advice on the subject.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by sangi39 »

Egyptian Hieroglyphs do, as you state, have a phonetic element that represents consonants only, but it's not just alphabetic. There are also glyphs that represent biconsonantal and triconsonantal sequences and, IIRC, the odd quadriconsonantal sequence.

Without going into too much detail, from what I can remember Egyptian words are written in the following ways:

1) Logographically - A single character is used to represent the concept of something, e.g. a duck for "duck", a mouth for "mouth", a sun for "Sun"
2) Phonetically - A certain character is used phonetically, representing a word that is different from the concept it would depict logographically, e.g. a duck for "son" because the two words, presumably, have similar sounds, or a mouth for "to, at" for similar reasons
3) Through a combination of phonetic and logographic - This is where Egyptian writing becomes interesting as hell because it can be very flexible. The word is written out using a combination of phonetic signs, put together in various ways, followed by a determinative, similar to the phono-semantic compound characters of the Chinese Script. The phonetic signs can either be uniliteral, biliteral, triliteral, etc. and some of those signs can actually be there to kind of "complement" other phonetic signs, e.g. md+d+w where the d is a phonetic complement to md and has no individual pronunciation of its own. Phonetic complements can appear before or after the phonetic signs they complement.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs do share a lot in common with other complex scripts like Sumerian Cuneiform and Chinese characters in this regard. They start off relatively pictographic, then you get something akin to the rebus system coming in to play while some characters might also be expanded in their semantic scope or simply be applied to a new meaning entirely and then associated with that particular set of sounds instead. From there you start to see various phonetic combinations being used alongside semantic signs to build up the lexical repertoire of the written language.

How exactly the written language builds up phonetically can vary. In Egyptian is was consonantal, in the Chinese script phonetic elements were chosen almost on a "sounds like this word" basis, for example an existing character pronounced something like /krjam/ in Old Chinese could be used in the creation of a new character representing a word pronounced /gram/. In Mayan hieroglyphs the phonetic elements were syllabic, representing CV sequences despite the language allowing for closed syllables, having to develop rules to indicate that a given vowel was not to be pronounced ("disharmony", IIRC).

These sorts of scripts can take a lot of work, but there are some principles which seem common amongst them.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

Valyrian has the heavy inflection of a Romance language and the permissive phonotactics of a Germanic language, both of which pose great difficulty for a logographic system to handle. There's a reason why every language which was written with logographs was largely limited to CV or CVC syllables.

I would start by taking monoconsonantal words, making logographs for them, and use those as the monoconsonantal proto-alphabet. For example, /Valar morghūlis/ would be represented as <vl-r mrx-vl-s>.

The books indicate that there are logograms for "fire" /perzys/ and "doom" /vējes/, which would result in triconsonantals <prz> and <vjj> before inflection. "Doom" is a rather odd word to have a dedicated logograph unless it's used as a determiner for related words like fate, destiny, chance and luck... or the determiner for "doom" is the root for death-related words and distinguishes it from the homophone "fate."
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by clawgrip »

MoonRightRomantic wrote:Valyrian has the heavy inflection of a Romance language and the permissive phonotactics of a Germanic language, both of which pose great difficulty for a logographic system to handle. There's a reason why every language which was written with logographs was largely limited to CV or CVC syllables.
I have heard people say similar things before, and I feel the need to point out that it's not true. If you look at Old Chinese phonology, you will see it has a maximal CCVCC syllable structure, with plenty of ridiculous words like *ɡraːmʔ, *pʰˤrak, *l'eŋs, etc. The problem though, is that you're looking at this from the perspective of alphabetic English, and applying principles that seem second nature to you in places where they don't really apply. It doesn't matter if your word for horse is stíqiw or , because in the end you're just going to draw a picture of a horse and be done with it.

Inflections can be ignored early in the language's history, and added as needed. Sumerian did this to a greater or lesser extent for basically its entire history as a language. To quote Jerrold S. Cooper:

"Sumerian is an agglutinative language in which nouns take suffixes and verbs both prefixes and suffixes. Virtually no trace of these affixes can be found in the early archaic texts, but they begin appearing after 2900 BCE. Curiously, they are used in what can only be described as a skeletal way for centuries; and only in the early second millennium, when Sumerian was probably extinct and spoken only in the schools, are the affixes fully expressed."
I would start by taking monoconsonantal words, making logographs for them, and use those as the monoconsonantal proto-alphabet. For example, /Valar morghūlis/ would be represented as <vl-r mrx-vl-s>.

The books indicate that there are logograms for "fire" /perzys/ and "doom" /vējes/, which would result in triconsonantals <prz> and <vjj> before inflection. "Doom" is a rather odd word to have a dedicated logograph unless it's used as a determiner for related words like fate, destiny, chance and luck... or the determiner for "doom" is the root for death-related words and distinguishes it from the homophone "fate."
Again, you are looking at this from an alphabet user's perspective. There wasn't a pre-literate Egyptian person thinking "man I want to write something down...I guess I will start making signs for all the words that have only one consonant in them", because they likely had very little concept of consonants and vowels as separate components making up words, the way you do. They just made pictures of things they felt needed to be recorded, and expanded from there. I suggest doing the same.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

clawgrip wrote:
MoonRightRomantic wrote:Valyrian has the heavy inflection of a Romance language and the permissive phonotactics of a Germanic language, both of which pose great difficulty for a logographic system to handle. There's a reason why every language which was written with logographs was largely limited to CV or CVC syllables.
I have heard people say similar things before, and I feel the need to point out that it's not true. If you look at Old Chinese phonology, you will see it has a maximal CCVCC syllable structure, with plenty of ridiculous words like *ɡraːmʔ, *pʰˤrak, *l'eŋs, etc. The problem though, is that you're looking at this from the perspective of alphabetic English, and applying principles that seem second nature to you in places where they don't really apply. It doesn't matter if your word for horse is stíqiw or , because in the end you're just going to draw a picture of a horse and be done with it.

Inflections can be ignored early in the language's history, and added as needed. Sumerian did this to a greater or lesser extent for basically its entire history as a language. To quote Jerrold S. Cooper:

"Sumerian is an agglutinative language in which nouns take suffixes and verbs both prefixes and suffixes. Virtually no trace of these affixes can be found in the early archaic texts, but they begin appearing after 2900 BCE. Curiously, they are used in what can only be described as a skeletal way for centuries; and only in the early second millennium, when Sumerian was probably extinct and spoken only in the schools, are the affixes fully expressed."
I would start by taking monoconsonantal words, making logographs for them, and use those as the monoconsonantal proto-alphabet. For example, /Valar morghūlis/ would be represented as <vl-r mrx-vl-s>.

The books indicate that there are logograms for "fire" /perzys/ and "doom" /vējes/, which would result in triconsonantals <prz> and <vjj> before inflection. "Doom" is a rather odd word to have a dedicated logograph unless it's used as a determiner for related words like fate, destiny, chance and luck... or the determiner for "doom" is the root for death-related words and distinguishes it from the homophone "fate."
Again, you are looking at this from an alphabet user's perspective. There wasn't a pre-literate Egyptian person thinking "man I want to write something down...I guess I will start making signs for all the words that have only one consonant in them", because they likely had very little concept of consonants and vowels as separate components making up words, the way you do. They just made pictures of things they felt needed to be recorded, and expanded from there. I suggest doing the same.
You are completely right. I am terribly biased due to learning a derivative of hieroglyphics separated by several thousand years rather than being an illiterate person trying to invent writing from scratch. It fascinates me to no end when I compare conscripts on omniglot.com and notice that the conscripter's first writing system generally biases their conscripts.

But I digress. Did the formation of hanzi not use a scheme where the semantic and phonetic components were hints? The formation of uniconsonantals seems closer to that of bopomofo.

Are there any guides for devising logographic scripts from scratch? I am having trouble finding resources for conscripters since most seem biased in favor of alphabets.

EDIT: Since it's really unwieldy to invent logograms from scratch and share them online, I'm going to adapt existing Unicode characters as a workaround.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by clawgrip »

MoonRightRomantic wrote:But I digress. Did the formation of hanzi not use a scheme where the semantic and phonetic components were hints? The formation of uniconsonantals seems closer to that of bopomofo.
As I believe was mentioned above, Chinese compound characters are a combination of semantic and phonetic components. The phonetic component is something that sounds similar or identical to another word.
If we use the English word "goat":
In a Chinese-style logography, you might have the sign for "sheep" (semantic) combined with the sign for "coat" or "go" (phonetic).
In an Egyptian-style logography, you might have a "g" sign plus a "t" sign plus a picture of a goat.
In a Sumerian-style logography, you might have a picture of a sheep with some extra marks added to it to differentiate the two.
In a Mayan-style logography, you might have a picture of a goat plus the phonetic sign "to".
Are there any guides for devising logographic scripts from scratch? I am having trouble finding resources for conscripters since most seem biased in favor of alphabets.
No guides really because not many people do them. It's really up to you how you want to set it up. You can either copy an existing real-world one, slightly modify one, combine some (Mayan is like a mashup of Chinese and Egyptian), or maybe come up with your own ideas.
EDIT: Since it's really unwieldy to invent logograms from scratch and share them online, I'm going to adapt existing Unicode characters as a workaround.
Making your own characters is the most enjoyable way, though.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by lsd »

clawgrip wrote:Again, you are looking at this from an alphabet user's perspective. There wasn't a pre-literate Egyptian person thinking "man I want to write something down...I guess I will start making signs for all the words that have only one consonant in them", because they likely had very little concept of consonants and vowels as separate components making up words, the way you do. They just made pictures of things they felt needed to be recorded, and expanded from there. I suggest doing the same.
I totally agree, logograms are the first forms of writing ...
The addition of phonograms is only one way to effortlessly add roots ...
I think this is a first deviation from the system--
The syllabic writings come from the simplification of the phonographic deviation by peoples who adopted writing without having the same language ...
The alphabet appeared only once in history by simplifying the syllabic systems to adapt it to inadequate languages ...
To believe that these successive simplifications are progress is to forget that the peoples that invent writing have constantly made it more complex rather than simplified ...
This is a lack of imagination of those who had not been able to create a system of writing by themselves and finally adopted this ersatz they claim universal and preferable ...
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by sangi39 »

clawgrip wrote:As I believe was mentioned above, Chinese compound characters are a combination of semantic and phonetic components. The phonetic component is something that sounds similar or identical to another word.
If we use the English word "goat":
In a Chinese-style logography, you might have the sign for "sheep" (semantic) combined with the sign for "coat" or "go" (phonetic).
In an Egyptian-style logography, you might have a "g" sign plus a "t" sign plus a picture of a goat.
In a Sumerian-style logography, you might have a picture of a sheep with some extra marks added to it to differentiate the two.
In a Mayan-style logography, you might have a picture of a goat plus the phonetic sign "to".
Clawgrip, you utter, utter genius! [:D] (just in case, no sarcasm).

It might also be worth pointing out that one of the fun things about Chinese characters is that, as far as I've become aware, there isn't a set number of "basic characters" that are used in combination. I mean, there are, like the 200-odd semantic components, but I mean that characters are created, written as single units, and then those newly-created characters can be taken as a whole and combined with other characters.

In Egyptian Hieroglyphs, on the other hand, you've got the determinatives and then you've got the phonetic readings for signs as well and, to a point, you just sort, well, spell out a word.

So, just to use English as a kind of not-so-great example, if you were to use a Chinese approach you could start with a logogram [coat], then use that as a phonetic element alongside a semantic element [sheep] to form [goat]. You could then use [(coat_sheep)] alongside another semantic element, say, a [grain] to indicate a [groat] ([(coat_sheep)][grain]).

Using the Egyptian method, you might instead have a phonetic -kt- (perhaps an image of a cat) and maybe a phonetic complement -t- (perhaps a teacup) followed by a determinative for -clothing-, thus -kt_t-clothing- (coat). For goat you could have a phonetic -gt- (a gate, say), followed by a determinative for domestic animals, or a sheep, thus -gt-sheep- (goat). And finally you could have a phonetic -gr- (maybe a spear (gar)), followed by a phonetic -t- and then a determinative for -grain-, thus -gr_t-grain- (groat). You couldn't, though, as far as I can tell, do something like -kt_t-clothing-sheep- (goat) as you can in the Chinese system. Newly derived words don't seem to become new singular units that you can use in forming even newer words.

I can't say I've looked into Sumerian much, but it sort of seems to fall between the two systems, and Mayan seems to mostly follow the pattern seen in Egyptian, but using syllabic phonetic elements rather than consonantal ones.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by lsd »

With constructed language, it is not unthinkable to recover the purity of a totally ideographic language without any phonogram added ...
The languages so called philosophical (in fact a priori in the philosophical sense) are an interesting attempt...

For languages out of our world, alphabet seems a civilization relex...
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

lsd wrote:
clawgrip wrote:Again, you are looking at this from an alphabet user's perspective. There wasn't a pre-literate Egyptian person thinking "man I want to write something down...I guess I will start making signs for all the words that have only one consonant in them", because they likely had very little concept of consonants and vowels as separate components making up words, the way you do. They just made pictures of things they felt needed to be recorded, and expanded from there. I suggest doing the same.
I totally agree, logograms are the first forms of writing ...
The addition of phonograms is only one way to effortlessly add roots ...
I think this is a first deviation from the system--
The syllabic writings come from the simplification of the phonographic deviation by peoples who adopted writing without having the same language ...
The alphabet appeared only once in history by simplifying the syllabic systems to adapt it to inadequate languages ...
To believe that these successive simplifications are progress is to forget that the peoples that invent writing have constantly made it more complex rather than simplified ...
This is a lack of imagination of those who had not been able to create a system of writing by themselves and finally adopted this ersatz they claim universal and preferable ...
Technically, the (proto)alphabet was invented twice. Once by the Ancient Egyptians and once by the Persians. Old Persian cuneiform was originally intended as a syllabary with occasional logograms, but the scribes gave up halfway through and used alphabetic principles to fill the gaps.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by lsd »

Proto- means it was not...
Their family links is not a sure issue but the degradation that make it possible ...
...and its reengineering in evolution skill...
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

lsd wrote:Proto- means it was not...
Their family links is not a sure issue but the degradation that make it possible ...
...and its reengineering in evolution skill...
I don't believe that writing systems develop along a hierarchy any more than other memes do. The paleohispanics turned an alphabet into an alphabet with plosive syllabograms, so clearly the same process may travel in the other direction.

I have been speculating on how a writing system could change from one type to another. If a syllabary might become an alphabet through progressive simplification (such as with Cuneiform and Bamum), then it stands to reason an alphasyllabary that distorts consonants in an irregular manner might after enough handwriting iterations become a true syllabary.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by masako »

MoonRightRomantic wrote:with plosive syllabograms
Pardon me, but what the hell are those?
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MrKrov »

A syllabogram with plosives in it.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

MrKrov wrote:A syllabogram with plosives in it.
Yep. The paleohispanic languages apparently didn't allow plosives to begin clusters. Initially they wrote plosives independently, using different forms depending on the following vowel as with the Etruscan C/K/Q distinction. Later they stopped writing the following vowel and changed the consonant variants into syllabograms. Some variants used a horizontal strikethrough to indicate voiceless plosives, an inversion of the creation of G from C.

I'm currently experimenting with a syllabary that has different modes for dealing with codas. The number of syllabograms is always going to be high unless you take shortcuts, which is why I imagine there are so few constructed syllabaries on the internet. Almost every advertized "syllabary" turned out to be an alphasyllabary which build pseudosyllabograms by combining phonograms (pseudoglyphs perform further distortions to obscure this, but same idea). Even consonantaries are vanishingly rare. The overwhelming majority of conscripts are either vococonsonantaries (alphabets) or alphasyllabaries, which are functionally if not formally identical anyway.
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

Back on the topic of devising a logography for Valyrian... For reference, I will use the following terminology: phonogram for purely phonemic graphemes, semantogram for purely semantic graphemes, and logogram for hybrid phonemic/semantic graphemes.

I have revised my thinking after getting a better picture of how logographies develop. Each of the letters of the Valyrian alphabet began as a logograph representing a morpheme and later under the rebus principle served as a phonogram representing the same phonemes or a subset thereof.

For example, the logogram /a:bra/ ("woman") is used as a phonogram for /'/ or /a:/, the logogram /vala/ ("man") as a phonogram for /v/ or /u:/ or /o:/, and the logogram /jaes/ ("deity") as a phonogram for /j/ or /i:/ or /e:/.

Does that seem sensible?
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

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Why not pure sematograms ...
Logograms are deviations by use of multiple users that could not maintain and develop a purely sematographic system ...
Even if this complexification has tumbled into the cultural fact and has been able to bring connotations that can not give simple sematograms ...
Even if not very natural taste...
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by sangi39 »

MoonRightRomantic wrote:Back on the topic of devising a logography for Valyrian... For reference, I will use the following terminology: phonogram for purely phonemic graphemes, semantogram for purely semantic graphemes, and logogram for hybrid phonemic/semantic graphemes.

I have revised my thinking after getting a better picture of how logographies develop. Each of the letters of the Valyrian alphabet began as a logograph representing a morpheme and later under the rebus principle served as a phonogram representing the same phonemes or a subset thereof.

For example, the logogram /a:bra/ ("woman") is used as a phonogram for /'/ or /a:/, the logogram /vala/ ("man") as a phonogram for /v/ or /u:/ or /o:/, and the logogram /jaes/ ("deity") as a phonogram for /j/ or /i:/ or /e:/.

Does that seem sensible?
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by sangi39 »

So, yeah, I'd say look at the history of the script.

Most logographic scripts to begin with are ideographic and then the ideograms start being used phonetically. Egyptian, Chinese and Sumerian, from what I can tell, all start doing this without the use of any sort of semantic component, i.e. they use existing ideographs to represent similar sounding words (s3 "duck" for s3 "son" in Egyptian, ti "arrow" for til "life" in Sumerian and **ɢʷraŋ(ʔ)s "swim" for *ɢʷraŋʔ "forever" in Old Chinese).

Eventually the number of words being written down became greater and greater and phonetic approximation needed a bit of backing up. Logographic scripts seem to do this by use of semantic determinatives and/or phonetic complements. So, for example, you might an ideogram for "sun" which is read lek which might then be used to represent a similar sounding work leg, meaning "scatter". There are a few different ways to handle this. The "sun" ideogram on its own might always be read as "sun" lek, and "scatter" leg, might be used alongside an ideographic "hand" (indicating that the action is being performed by a hand), and in this instance "sun" would appear as the phonetic component.

On the other hand, you might have an ideogram for "man" which is read sip which might then be used to represent the similar sounding si, meaning "to wash away". One option here might be for si to become the default reading, without any semantic hint, and sip is only indicated by means of an additional marker pi, originally an ideogram representing "mouth".

There's also a third option in the latter case where "wash away" si is accompanied by an ideographic "water" while "man" remains to be used as a semantic determinative in other words for male humans, but must be accompanied by the phonetic complement pi when meaning "man", with the original "man" ideogram now no longer appearing in isolation.



From what I can gather "sounds like" seems to fairly common in the development of logographic scripts in the beginning and it kind of just goes from there. As Clawgrip points out, Old Chinese had a fairly complex syllable structure but it never went down the route of an alphabetic logography. Sumerian and Mayan both allow for closed syllables but neither represent consonants in isolation (Sumerian has signs for both open and closed syllables and Mayan has rules which, I think, are called "syllabic disharmony", meaning that all written syllables are open, but certain combinations of two glyphs indicate single closed syllables).



Egyptian was never really "alphabetic" either, even with the uniliteral glyphs, but that could always be a start. I think for something like Valyrian, if we're aiming for something that functions almost like Egyptian, is the following set of developments:

1) phonetic components represent approximations with certain signs beings used as phonetic complements "leg" = "lek+eg", "til" = "til+il", "staj" = "sa+staj", for example, where the original phonetic reading of a given sign is still there, but the ideographs have been used to represent so many other similar sounding words that they need confirmation that that's the reading they're getting.

2) Some of those phonetic complements start getting used in more and more environments because more "suitable" alternatives don't exist, e.g. "sal" = "sa+il" because there's no "al", "vog" = "vog+eg" because there's no "og" , "stuk" = "sa+stuk" because there's no "su", etc. The missing alternatives might be build up as say "a+il", "o+eg" and "sa+u".

3) The extended use of those signs means that newer and words requiring a consonantal phonetic component use the ones that fill in the gaps, e.g. "prul" = "pru+il" even though there might be an "ul", "mag" = "ma+eg" even though there might be an "ag", "sko" + "sa+ko" even though there might be a "so", and so on.

4) Scribes might, for whatever reason, start using the more widely used consonantal complements in place of the older syllabic ones, e.g. older "so+po" for "spo" is replaced with "sa+po" and older "ta-ag" for "tag" is replaced with "ta-eg". This would still leave a situation where onset consonants and coda consonants are indicated by means of two different sets of signs, one descending from those indicating open syllables and another descended from those indicating closed syllables. Alongside the construction of syllables like "a+il", "o+eg" and "sa+u" this also sort of separated out the idea of consonants and vowels as increasingly distinct things.



And I suppose just work from there. What might stick out for me, though, is that you might have sort of a "central" phonogram that's just complemented be increasingly alphabetic symbols, e.g. "staj" never loses the "staj" element, but the complementary "sa-" simply gets read as "s" when not in isolation, where it's still read as "sa", which seems to be the way Egyptian sort of works. Like, the glyph for "mouth" never stopped having its isolated reading of... whatever, but it came to represent the phoneme "r" when used as a phonetic complement (and presumably "r"-only-containing-syllable-type-thing in other contexts). And the semantic components are never dropped either, wherever they might be.



As for inflection, as Clawgrip says as well, these might be marked incoherently to begin with, and possibly not even phonetically (so, for example, indicating of the past tense might be indicated by some variant of a sign meaning "before") while others are indicated phonetically but because they aren't phonetic complements they might never become marked alphabetically.



So, to take the example... hmmm... vys "world". It might also be used early on for the word vējes "fate, doom". Let's distinguish the two. Throw the semantic "road" (geralbar) onto vējes and leave it at that, but throw vēzos "sun" in front of vys for good measure. And actually that's about where I run out of a good High Valyrian source [:P] Anyway, my basic idea at that point was to almost say "ignore the nominative singular", since in a lot of nouns that seems to be more marked, so you could use vys, through vējes, as an onset complement for any word that might start with vēj or , including vēzos if you were feeling really sneaky (sun+world = vys vs. world+sun = vēzos).

Inflection might then be marked using these sorts of phonetic readings as well, somewhere around the semantic determinative, if at all, or they might derive from other ideograms, e.g. ondos, "hand", might be used to indicate the genitive suffix -o and this might be stylised differently depending on the graphical structure of the script. As in Egyptian, the plural might be indicated by an abstract ideogram, like a series of strokes, no matter what the pronunciation.

So, for example, "of the Doom" might be world+road+hand where "world" is the phonetic component indicating a pronunciation somewhat similar to vys, "road" is the semantic determinative and "hand" indicates the genitive.

There's not much of an alphabetic element in there, annoyingly, but I'm sort of struggling to apply what I'm thinking about to a language I don't really know [:P] Eventually, though, you might be able to use "hand" as for o and "world" for v given the right circumstances, but I wouldn't think those would be their only reading, or even their main ones.
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.
MoonRightRomantic
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Re: Writing hieroglyphics for Valyrian?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

sangi39 wrote:There's not much of an alphabetic element in there, annoyingly, but I'm sort of struggling to apply what I'm thinking about to a language I don't really know [:P] Eventually, though, you might be able to use "hand" as for o and "world" for v given the right circumstances, but I wouldn't think those would be their only reading, or even their main ones.
You are doing great. Egyptian uses the same logic as charades. Additional phonograms are used to clarify context just as you described. The same symbol could serve as a phonogram, logogram or semantogram depending on the context.

I would recommend buying a highly rated book on Hieroglyphics from Amazon, Barnes&Noble or iTunes. Unlike High Valyrian, there isn't a convenient wiki anywhere that explains how to learn it.
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