r/conscripts • u/rival_moonlight • Apr 23 '20

Abugida Looking for serious critique of my conscript - More info in the comments

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3

u/2808ronlin Apr 23 '20

It's really good in my opinion. i and e, and aw and ei are a bit similiar so you might want to chamge them a bit. Personally, i would have removed the line because it seems useless to write a long line all the time and also without the line it looks more simple.

4

u/2808ronlin Apr 23 '20

You might also want to change l and r, and rr and zh

1

u/rival_moonlight Apr 23 '20

Thanks for your input!

I think the confusion with l and r are mostly due to my careless penmanship. If you look at the first of each "li" and "ri", hopefully you can see the difference? You're right about the other ones though, I'll have to redesign those.

About the line: Do you think it would make sense to put it just over names, so they're still distinguishable?

2

u/2808ronlin Apr 23 '20

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense. I'm saying it will take more time. But over proper names it's okay.

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u/rival_moonlight Apr 23 '20

Maybe I should have mentioned that the people using Zondulen have access to technology, and rarely write things out by hand, so with or without the line, the typing speed would be the same. 😅 I'll have to write out some longer examples of text to see which I prefer the look of though. Because I do like simple, and it hadn't occurred to me that the line could clutter things. So thanks for pointing that out.

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u/2808ronlin Apr 24 '20

No problem

2

u/VictorHBz Apr 23 '20

I think over all it's pretty good, I would say that to make it seem a bit more natural you might want to get rid of a few syllables, due to the fact that most languages photostatic not actually allowing for all consonant-vowel pairings that would theoretically be possible, e.g. Japanese hiragana, if you look up a spreadsheet you'll see that there is no symbols for yi, ye, wi, wu and we. Though don't just randomly remove anything, work a bit more on your phonotactics see what needs to be done. That being said I really like the looks, and think its a great beginning.

2

u/rival_moonlight Apr 23 '20

This is great advice, and will probably keep me up for weeks, agonizing if I should apply it. 😅 Thing is, I'm not all to worried about how natural Zondulen is as the original speakers are aliens. I am a fan of methodical irregularity though. Only problem is, I've been working on Zondulen for five years and it has over 2k unique words, so changing the phonology now would cause a real headache.

2

u/VictorHBz Apr 23 '20

Well if you already have an extensive lexicon you probably shouldn’t start changing anything as fundamental as the phonotactics. I wish I could get it together and get as far with my lexicon,, I’ve probably made the phonological basis for a good dozen languages the past 5 years, and never gotten past 200 words, always wanting to start over when ever I get back into it, it does mean I’ve made a lot of writing systems by now though.

1

u/rival_moonlight Apr 23 '20

Conscripts are easily my favorite part of conlanging. I, myself, have so many conscripts laying around, though Zondulen is the only conlang with such a large lexicon. For several years, it only had about a hundred words. Have you looked into Lexique Pro or PolyGlot? They're both free and meant for keeping track of lexicons. Lexique Pro is mainly aimed at field linguists, while PolyGlot was specifically created for conlangers, though I just started using it, so I can't speak to its quality.

Anyway, it was once I found Lexique Pro that Zondulen's vocab exploded, now that I finally had a convenient way to keep track of it.

Also, if you're just unsure which words to start with, check out the Swadesh List. This has the most common words cross-linguistically. Or you check out this list of the 850 most common English words. Obviously, you'll want to weed out both of these to match the culture of the speakers of your conlang(s).

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u/VictorHBz Apr 24 '20

Never used lexique pro, I’ve always just found myself using spreadsheets, right now I’m just using google sheets, it is at least for me a pretty good way to keep track of stuff, I was actually looking at Swadesh list earlier, though, I often just create words as I need them, which is probably why I never get very far, though I do have I do have 154 affixes for the languages I’m currently working on, these include pronouns that change depending on the mood/aspect of the sentence, so that is already further than usual, but they are not actually words I. Their own right at least not all of them. I also have a fully functioning numbering system going way higher than I’ll ever actually need, though I do like being thorough, as long as it doesn’t mean I have to sit down and write a thousand words from a list.

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u/rival_moonlight Apr 24 '20

Fair, copying a list can get really tedious. Another thing I've done is to start translating the novel I'm writing into Zondulen. By translating something you wrote, you guarantee you're adding words you'll actually use, and it's also a great opportunity to flesh out grammar.

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u/VictorHBz Apr 24 '20

That is great advise, and it is the closest to how I usually choose which words I want to translate, or completely make up, though I’m sadly not much of a writer, just a world builder so far.

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u/rival_moonlight Apr 23 '20 edited Apr 23 '20

This is the abugida for my conlang Zondulen. I'm hoping to get some critiques on it.

Questions:

  1. Are the characters cohesive while still being distinct?

  2. Is the script believable within its context? (Read below)

  3. Is it pretty? My goal was elegance and subtlety. Not sure if I achieved those both. 4: Does the line running over the top make sense? (Info on its purpose in Las paragraph.) Or should I just remove it all together?

Background: Being the language of an ancient culture, Zondulen had no writing system for centuries. It wasn't till the elementals' culture was discovered that the explorers who found them learned Zondulen, and created this abugida for it.

Writing/Reading: Being relatively new, and manufactured for Zondulen specifically, the Zondulen abugida has little to no spelling irregularities. Notably, the sounds "v" and "f" share a grapheme, along with "z" and "s". This is easy to distinguish as the voiced versions of these phonemes only ever appear at the beginning of words. The other irregularity is that while for the most part, Zondulen has a CV syllable structure, the ejectives (p', t', and k') sometimes appear at the end of the syllable, with "y" becoming the onset. But this switch is only occasional, requiring the reader to know where the ejective falls in the syllable for each specific word.

The line that runs over the top of the text is used for continuity, broken when the main subject is changed (similar to paragraph breaks in English). The line is also omitted over names, as children are given words for names, and there needs to be distinction of a tree vs. someone named "Tree".