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Jan. 20th, 2004 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesWell, I finished all by one of my internship applications. I'll do that one on Thursday.
Why must I make my life so frickin complicated when I write? I already decided to work out Darynese as an actual language for my writing. Now, I'm working on a writing system -- just for coolness sake -- and got down a nice one. I have letters and even numerals.
Then we learned a bit about the Chinese writing system in history today -- mainly how the lack of a phonetic alaphabet allowed a continuity of place and time that the Western world lacked. If you put a speaker of Cantonese and a speaker of Madndrian Chinese ina room, they will be unable to speak to each other -- but they not only will be able to communicate in writing, they will be able to read Zhou Dynasty (1000 BC) writing. They might even be able to pidgin out a written conversation with an educated Japanese speaker. This let what we think of as Chinese civilization span an enormous area and last for a long time -- things changed, but the written language didn't that much.
Now, I think that would be a nice written language trick for Darynese, because I already decided that one language is spoken by the majority of the planet -- and I know how bloody impractical that is. This lets me have my cake and eat it too -- I can use the most common dialect of Darynese for my spoken language, and (should I need written Darynese in my webcomic) have the character system and history that works so well for their culture. Problem is, Darynese has the wrong structure for that sort of written language. Chinese is highly dependant on word order -- the same charcter can be used as a verb, a noun or an adjective, depending on where in the sentance it is. It also has no verb tenses or other ways of modifying words. Darynese does. Darynese also has longer words than Chinese, though many of them can be written as compund characters.
I might just go with a hybrid system -- kinda like Japanese -- where major words have characters and tacked on stuff (the gender modification of adjectives, verb tenses, and plural nouns) and foreign or borrowed words (which have a fixed pronoucation) spelled using the alphabet. That still doens't quite allow for the universiality I'm looking for -- any alphabet eliminates it, while allowing for at least some pronouciation of the word. Problem is, I really don't want to throw out the work I did on that damned alphabet.
Why must I make my life so frickin complicated when I write? I already decided to work out Darynese as an actual language for my writing. Now, I'm working on a writing system -- just for coolness sake -- and got down a nice one. I have letters and even numerals.
Then we learned a bit about the Chinese writing system in history today -- mainly how the lack of a phonetic alaphabet allowed a continuity of place and time that the Western world lacked. If you put a speaker of Cantonese and a speaker of Madndrian Chinese ina room, they will be unable to speak to each other -- but they not only will be able to communicate in writing, they will be able to read Zhou Dynasty (1000 BC) writing. They might even be able to pidgin out a written conversation with an educated Japanese speaker. This let what we think of as Chinese civilization span an enormous area and last for a long time -- things changed, but the written language didn't that much.
Now, I think that would be a nice written language trick for Darynese, because I already decided that one language is spoken by the majority of the planet -- and I know how bloody impractical that is. This lets me have my cake and eat it too -- I can use the most common dialect of Darynese for my spoken language, and (should I need written Darynese in my webcomic) have the character system and history that works so well for their culture. Problem is, Darynese has the wrong structure for that sort of written language. Chinese is highly dependant on word order -- the same charcter can be used as a verb, a noun or an adjective, depending on where in the sentance it is. It also has no verb tenses or other ways of modifying words. Darynese does. Darynese also has longer words than Chinese, though many of them can be written as compund characters.
I might just go with a hybrid system -- kinda like Japanese -- where major words have characters and tacked on stuff (the gender modification of adjectives, verb tenses, and plural nouns) and foreign or borrowed words (which have a fixed pronoucation) spelled using the alphabet. That still doens't quite allow for the universiality I'm looking for -- any alphabet eliminates it, while allowing for at least some pronouciation of the word. Problem is, I really don't want to throw out the work I did on that damned alphabet.
