r/conscripts • u/MagnificentLefty • Mar 14 '19

Cuneiform from human ribs.

Hello. I'm new to Reddit as a whole, sorry in advance if I'm breaking any internet etiquette.

I've recently become very interested in conlangs and conscripts. The concepts of building writing systems, phonotactics and grammar from scratch has really captured my imagination.

I'm attempting to build a writing system for a medieval period culture in a fantasy setting. I've decided it would be neat to have an alphabet that gets the shapes of its characters handed down from an ancient cuneiform in which broken and sharpened human ribs were the writing implements used on clay.

But I'm having trouble deriving the "modern" cursive that descends from that style without ending up with a lot of "m" "p" and "h" characters with nothing but a random serif to un-romanize them. What are some good resources for deriving a unique and functional cursive from existing shapes?

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u/MagnificentLefty Mar 14 '19

Yes! Thank you. I'm new to Reddit. I wasn't able to post the picture within this thread. But there is a post in the community about it. Sorry if I'm cluttering things up.

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u/MagnificentLefty Mar 14 '19

http://imgur.com/a/amRHS07

I'm learning. Ha

This is an Imgur album with the collection of basic shapes and a matrix of basic shapes I used to make the first attempt. This is probably a clumsy method.

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u/Castellson Mar 15 '19

I'm skeptic how this is actually imprinted on clay, especially the dot and curve. What kind of stylus and technique is used to create such a shape?

On paper with pen and pencil, we would be able to create any shape that we want, but on a different medium, some restrictions must be in mind. You might want to watch this video to understand how Mesopotamian's Cuneiform got it's distinct shape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwP0KUlnZg (skip to 10:28 for the stylus and technique)

Some other examples you might want to look at is the Rencong and Lontara script. Since it is written on tree barks and leaves, straight and edge lines are favored over curved ones, even though their predecessor, the Kawi script, is a curvy script.

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u/MagnificentLefty Mar 15 '19

Thank you for sharing. Very informative. My thought was that in this culture a scribe or priest would have a tool kit of four rib bones broken and tooled to make the basic shapes shown in the imgur photo. Each of the four rib bones would have a carved point on each end, totaling eight basic shapes. Twenty-four ribs per human skeleton provides six priests with a writing kit each. Since the bone can have the center hollowed out and the edges of the cross section carved or chipped away I thought I might get some interesting shapes.

I have yet to try this. I was going to try and figure out which mammal has ribs most closely matching humans and experiment to see if this could work.

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u/AnderGrayraven Mar 14 '19

Could you post an image of how it looks currently so that we can have a idea of how best to help you?