Commonpaw: written counterpart to Commonthroat

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lurker
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Commonpaw: written counterpart to Commonthroat

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The phrase translates to "Go, spread your light to the stars, and ye shall become brighter yourselves" which is the last line in The Great Commandment.

Not sure I'll develop this very much, documenting a purely visual language in a way that I can look up words later would be a nightmare since it's not a linear segmental system that can be collated and indexed.

Anyway, I've been waffling on whether the yinrih still use the purely written language, or if the written and spoken languages have merged over the millennia such that it looks like the written form of Commonthroat I've been developing. If they still use the written language day to day, that would make the written form of Commonthroat more of a phonetic notation system like Juyin.

The language is called "Commonpaw" by analogy with "Commonthroat". "Paw" is used in a similar way to "hand" in the sense of a style of writing. It's not the primordial written language that emerged out of the yinrih's scent marking behavior, but a descendant used as a written lingua franca.

A couple things to note: The general direction is top to bottom, right to left. It makes heavy use of reduplication. Position matters. The morphemes in a compound are arranged horizontally, with the head on the left, as in the example "hearth star", were "star" is the head on the left, and "star hearth" where "hearth" is the head on the left.

You make a noun plural by reduplicating the sign and arranging the two signs beside one another. There is also a collective number meaning "all the subjects under consideration" that is formed by arranging three copies of the noun in a triangle shape.

Prepositional phrases may be formed by putting the preposition sign to the left of the noun that is its object.

Like Commonthroat, Commonpaw uses deictic markers on each noun. A dot to the right of the sign indicates the second person. If you put the dot to the left, it becomes possessive, such as the phrase "your light" in the example. A circle to the left indicates the third person definite, and it forms a ligature with the preposition "to" which also goes to the left in the phrase "to the stars".

You can repeat a noun vertically to emphasize it, as in the example "ye yourselves". As in Commonthroat, there are no pronouns, and the above pronoun is indicated with the sign for "yinrih" in the collective number, so it means more "all ye yinrih". You can change an adjective or noun into a verb meaning "to become ___" by placing an arc below the head noun/adjective, as in the example "become brighter".
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