Work with the Famous 1970s Pakuni Dinosaur and Myth Conlang and my Conlangs from This Past Year

[Bob]

Work with the Famous Pakuni Conlang and my Conlangs from This Past Year

Hello, everyone! I don't think I've been on the new Zompist Bboard for a year.

I'm a maker of invented languages (conlangs) and also an amateur (non-professional or independent) scholar, of 14 years now, specializing in the study of conlangs or pseudo-conlangs occuring in famous or once-famous books, movies, or television, which I call "famous conlangs". I also take a more general interest in the history and prehistory of all invented languages and similar phenomena. I have a BA in Linguistics from Michigan State University in 2009. My greater specialties, though, as an amateur scholar are all 42 known hieroglyphic (logographic) languages, all 20 or so ancient Biblical languages, and then the comparative study of human beliefs. These are listed from greater to lesser "major specialty". ( 42 sounds like a lot but only 3 have much written in them and logographic writing systems are not as limitless as most people think.)

I even have a facebook group about this but it is very slow:

History of Conlangs, Conlang Decipherment, Asemic Writing
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1559372287639844/

I also have one more generally on conlanging called
"Hieroglyphic Conlangs, Conlanging, Linguistics 𓋴 𓆣 𓂋 𓏫 𓏞 𓏫 人工語言".
It is also very slow.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/conlangsforfree/

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This past year, as in previous years, about every two months I take a few hours to make a very small conlang and conscript. About a year ago, I did posts here on the new Zompist Bboard on these small conlangs and on my work about that time on a "famous conlang", Pakuni.

This conlang is so famous or almost-famous that it was even discussed in the book "The Art of Language Invention" from about 2012 by David Peterson, the creator of the conlangs for the hit television series "Game of Thrones". The Pakuni Language or Paku Language itself was made by UCLA Professor Victoria Fromkin for a hit, USA, science-fiction, kids television series, but from 1974-1976, "Land of the Lost". It's based on West African languages, the Kwa Branch of the Niger-Congo Language Family. In the telvision show, it's a language of cavemen, actually more like pointed stick spear hominids like australopithecus.

The given dictionary and grammar, by the language creator, is only shared privately among fans. It only contains about 100 words used throughout the 3 seasons of the television show.

Over the last two years, I think I have found only 4 people who sometimes study or do anything with this language, including myself. Of them, at least me and one of the others knows much about language science. I know these people from facebook groups. From my memory, I don't think there's many more people who I have read to every do very much with the language. When the television show first came out, I have read there was much interest among fans but that it didn't leave much trace. Then I have read that there have been inquiries since then but not very many.

The last two months, I have posted about the language and didn't get much of responses from these people. But a year ago, I got quite a bit of responses, at least from one. I do watch to see if any of these people post anything about the language, and sometimes look around the rest of the internet and published works.

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About a year ago, though, I spent several months each on two projects involving translation and other work on the Klingon Language and on this Pakuni Language. I also spent some special time on one of Klingon's less-known "conlang siblings", Atlantean.

You see, since 2006, I have done seemingly rare and or unique work documenting and deciphering conlangs and pseudo-conlangs in books, movies, and television spanning the centuries. I have also done a lot of work "developing" and working with some of these conlangs and pseudo-conlangs. By "developing", I mean making up new or alternative words and grammar to fill out the language. Back from about 2006 to 2009, I did a lot of work developing and working with Marc Okrand's Atlantean.

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And this is how I find myself doing unique translation and language invention or "development" work on the Pakuni Language, despite few people caring. You see, with conlangs documented and deciphered by someone else, like the Avatar film's Na'vi Language, all I have to do is study what they make. Klingon is also like this.

But for Atlantean, Pakuni, and about 10 others, I had to "watch every episode" and it took months to do. So I've spent some time over the years actually doing something with these languages.

And what do I do? Well, with the Klingon and Pakuni projects, I select various short texts in various ancient and modern languages and then translate all or part of them into Klingon and Pakuni. Then I also study existing words and invent new words. I also associate various topics of study with these languages and choose the short texts according to these topics or themes. The overall theme of my Klingon project was that of ancient civilization, whereas my Pakuni project focuses on human and or hominid (cavemen) prehistory and paleontology (very ancient plants and animals).

This year I returned to my Pakuni project perhaps because it's more interesting to me: Hieroglyphic writing systems are the earliest starting at 2500 BC, the beginning of the end of global prehistory and regional illiteracy, so to speak. So my top scholarly specialization is actually focused much on prehistory.

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And I have put some of these projects online, on my website. My approach to working with conlangs is unprecedented. But it's also reminiscent of the work of the Klingon Language Institute in making and publishing a number of translations or abbreviated paraphrases of classic books from all over the world. Though they don't also include the original languages or even study them in much depth usually when making their translations, as I do. And their explorations of the Klingon Language differ from my own explorations of these languages.

I also hope to soon put online, using digital photographs, all or most of these recent huge works of mine on Klingon and Pakuni.

What makes my work especially unique is that I have working abilities with a great number of languages, even the hardest ones, the world's major hieroglyphic writing ones.

Here is the guide to my websites. Just search it for the language name you want.
Guide to "Any Language at All" Encyclopedic Website and Other Websites by Me
https://anylanguageatall411.blogspot.co ... w=flipcard

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My style of conlanging in the past has been generally met with criticism for not being realistic enough. I instead focus on a few aspects of conlanging and otherwise cut corners. When I invent a new word for these languages, I try to make a note if I put any special etymology in it, and then re-use many such words. In defense of my style of conlanging, I don't care to spend a lot of time conlanging and my own memory of all the language science ideas that I'm familiar with is not sufficient for me to apply them all exactly when making my own conlangs or "expanding" others. Not only that, I have a rare or unique specialty as a language scientist: hieroglyphic writing systems. So I especially like to make hieroglyphic writing systems and evaluate them. And I make the best I've ever seen. By far. And it's a tremendously complicated thing because I've spent my life so far studying all 42 known hieroglyphic writing systems in depth. So if my conlangs are quite unrealistic, I really could care less. I actually seethe to see the many failings of the conscripts or invented writing systems of others who have not spent a lifetime carefully studying writing systems, let alone hieroglyphic or logographic ones. That's the thing.

To me, as I have said in the past, conlanging is like an experimentation allowing me to study things I would otherwise not get to study, especially with regard to language science, to the academic discipline called "linguistics".

And so I have found myself forever begging the patience of other conlangers, seemingly the majority, whose approach to conlanging is quite different. It seems most conlangers also focus on making a few conlangs and fleshing them out very much for grammar and vocabulary or lexicon.

So let's see.

[Bob]

I took a few days off from this one but I'm going to get back to it now. I'm planning soon to take photos of my notes and put them online. But first I want to finish adding the Chinese myth of The Divine Archer and the Ten Suns.

Then a week or so ago, I started adding invented words to all the texts I wrote out to be translated into Pakuni. I started with body part vocabulary.

The texts are myths from China and the Younger Edda (Germanic Mythology) where the choas gods are taken apart and made into the universe.

I made a conlang based on Old Norse for the Younger Edda text. Then I've been reading Old and Middle High German ever since then, in bilingual presentation. So we're having a lot of fun with all this.

I was actually hoping to spend all December working on Pakuni because December is a better month for straight prehistory in my mind. Now I've been doing it in January and February. Which I'm okay with, it's been a nice re-visit to something more like straight conlanging. And then I have been reading around in this forum and visiting various facebook groups related to Pakuni Studies: Land of the Lost, Paleontology, hominid groups, prehistory groups, Science Fiction groups, this sort of thing. I've been studying a lot of Classical Chinese "Art of War" texts for it but there's not much for facebook groups on Classical Chinese. There's Taoism, though, and some slow ones for Chinese history. So maybe I'm asking for too much. I joined some Chinese languages one too much I can't read it so well. But if I was working on this project for another month or so, I'd probably be trying.

Again, I've pulled texts for translation into Pakuni from many different ancient languages and often I include the original languages, along with the English translation, so I see them when I add words or translate the text. My favorites are hieroglyphic languages like Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Classical Chinese, and recently Sumerian.

But I wish I could work on Pakuni a bit longer so I could do more with the Bantu language from west Congo, the Nyangu Language of the 1960s documented and published "Mwindo Epic". It's from deep in the western jungles of the Congo and it's all sorts of old for mythology. But working on Pakuni, I got worn out early on alphabets and have gotten into Classical Chinese a lot.

See, the delay is that I really don't ever feel like taking a bunch of digital photos of notes.

[bradrn]

My greater specialties, though, as an amateur scholar are all 42 known hieroglyphic (logographic) languages, all 20 or so ancient Biblical languages, and then the comparative study of human beliefs.

A question about this: I thought that there were many less than 42 logographic scripts (e.g. Wikipedia only lists 15), so how do you get such a large number of logographic scripts?

[Bob]

bradrn:

I have a list on academia.edu . I don't think I ever made a webpage of this but maybe I did. You can find that on my website, EBlogger Any Language at All. I have never tried to get it published. People who want to acknowledge all my hard work, I like that especially.

Google: Larry Rogers Logographic
https://independent.academia.edu/logographic155

Check it out, it's a very detailed listing going into all the particulars of writing system mechanics.

But recently discovered another like 5 from Vietnam from some bilingual book on obscure peoples from Vietnam. So then that's about 47 now. I haven't added them. I did a post about them to my facebook group Hieroglyphic Writing System Linguistics.

For sure, there's about 47 in total known by anyone. I've also searched the academic literature. I have access to university computers and know many languages.

Not only that, I've studied them all in depth and comparatively and done lengthy projects on some of them. I've been at it since about 2000. But especially since 2007. I may be the first person to ever do this for all the logographic writing systems. Though other specialists in single ones have studied one or two others in depth. It's not a specialized thing yet, scholar of absolutely all logographic writing systems. But it will be in the future, I strongly suspect. Though Chinese and Japanese will probably go all alphabet in the next 100-500 years. Still, there will always be historic writings and museum pieces. Unless the world goes logographic somehow. Anything could happen. Look how popular emojis are. People like nice little pictures. I sure do.

I'm fine to stick out like a sore thumb and send love to all my benefactors and admonishments to all my ... anti-benefactors.

You know, many scholars worked many lifetimes making writings in the past and now most of these writings are gone and the few that survive have few people to study them, let alone people of competence and dedication. And for thousands and thousands of years, humans did not have writing. And what oral traditions we have written down, have few people to study them, let alone people of competence and dedication. But I have studied all such things for decades now. And have been one of very few. So I made the website and try to do what's right. But ignorance is not bliss.

... Anyway, it gets to your head, being the only person who studies what you do and then reading all the old stuff that nobody reads anymore. And they're all like, "Old time stuff, listen up! Hear ye future people! " Which is sobering because I look around and it's just me. There's some other professional and amateur scholars who do similar things but they're none of them exactly like me for interests and abilities. But this is part of why I chose this specialization, even knowing that it might not be marketable enough for even academia and that I'd have to pursue it as a hobby and work it into my career otherwise. I was like, "Whoa! That sure needs to be done." Now I don't get a lot of applause and recognition and it's disappointing. But if you read enough, it's not that disappointing, it's actually typical for how the systems are rigged. Even American academics, what do they get for all they give? Ah, think about it.

[bradrn]

Thanks for the link Bob! I’m looking at https://www.academia.edu/11961098/List_ ... _Phenomena now, and I do have one question about it. You define a logographic script as:

"Logographic (Script)" : Any script composed of pictures, not descended from Wadi El-Hol Script. Modern and historic conscripts not included.

However, I was under the impression that a logographic script is a script where the majority of graphemes represent words rather than syllables or individual phonemes. Am I mistaken? Or are you simply using the term in a different way to the standard definition?

[Bob]

~~ A Dinosaur Conlang Side-Project: Naming Geological Eras and Ten Prehistorical Animals and Plants from Each Era ~~

Well, I'm still working on Pakuni.

Next, for a change, I'm going to name the major geological eras and the ten or so animals illustrating each one from the excellent 2002 "Facts on File" "Encyclopedia of Prehistory" by Lambert.

Again, this will be unusual because this year I've mostly been adding and translating various ancient language myth texts with their English translations.

It was last year that I made Pakuni words for many dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals as well as plants.

I made a list last year or this year of things that animal etymologies do. But it might be more fun for me just to go off the shapes of the animals because they don't occur in pictures but as separate pictures. Their size isn't even clear.

But then, if their names are based on their shapes, what would they look like to a caveman (a hominid)? Pakuni, if I remember, are something like early hominids. I think they're once shown with a chipped stone spear but generally they just have pointed sticks. Which might be 3 million years ago or more.

Maybe some of those animals - they're all like weird little shell bugs and worms - occur in some of my other books, maybe in pictures even. That would be great. Maybe it would show them in their habitats or doing something.

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The joys of Pakuni are simple ones: One of them is that it has very short words for words like dinosaur names and prehistoric tool names which are very lengthy in English. This is something real languages do all the time, though, especially if the animal or tool is a frequently discussed one. For a dinosaur name like triceratops, Pakuni has something usually VCVCV like imenda (a rare canonical dinosaur name). We also have a canonical word for "spear", epundo, I think.

I also remember going through all the dinosaur names and just trying to make them interesting by varying the etymology and using my reading into real (and maybe real and folk) etymologies. It's been a neat experience. I think it could benefit science, also. We end up having names for (dinosaurs) which are very long not very consistent for word part language source composition. I realize in speaking, paleontologists probably abbreviate them.

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Modern science terminology is also otherwise littered with the ignorance of scientists in realms literary and philological, starting with the lackluster 1800s and going on into the intellectual television vacuum tubes of the present. "Cambrian" is named after Wales because that's where that geological strata was first found. How un-profound. And these words and this cosmology is supposed to be a replacement or match for the myths of the ages, which in every word speak profundities and flow like sweet poetry?

But don't ever mention anything like that to any facebook paleontology groups, all the scientists have no idea what you're talking about and start showing what little they know of any foreign language. I tried that a year ago with some posts discussing the etymology of past and recent dinosaur names and how they're etymologically inconsistent and sadly goofy. They started out all Latin and Greek word parts, in the 1800s, like modern medical terminology. Which was goofy but whatever. But recently, they've been adding more and more personal and place names in different languages and stuff. And the modern paleontologists have no clue how much of a disaster this is. Monolingualism has its stronghold in the sciences. Hard scientists scoff at ignorance and yet are replete with both it and a lack of perspective on humans modern or ancient. All this brought to us by the modern and past interpretations of scholarly specialization and professionalism. Ah, mid-1800s professionalism ... wait a minute, isn't it supposed to be getting the job done? Then why are there so many problems? Maybe the idea needs to be reworked. Or we could all just wait for a collapse of the system.

My choice of texts has been in part intended as a commentary on this sort of thing and on the Star Trek Original Series writers behind most of the episodes of Land of the Lost, the popular 1970s kids television series for which Professor Victoria Fromkin made the language.

Anyway, so it should be easy enough to get the best of Star Trek the Original Series writers. But academics? Well, if you come at them from a different discipline than theirs, it's also not that hard. One of the big concepts in all my work, as I focus on the study of ideas, is that society fills people's lives with so many tasks, ideas, and things that they sometimes can't even do a good job. No doubt, paleontologists don't concern themselves with how their terminology was originally all an orthographically consistent Greek and Latin built on a 2,100 year tradition of Greek and Latin study in the Middle East, Europe, and everywhere.

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So it's fun because they really do present their ideas in these books as authoritative and perfection when the next generation is just going to re-write it all and maybe explain its pronouncements even less well. But it's useful stuff to get into, like the old writings, because this both are what people think is important but seldom study or even study in depth. And then the question is, Who even reads their old writings? Current science couldn't exist without their science. But who reads their writings? It seems no one. And their writings are far more than just the science behind them. There's also ideas, ideology. I've read quite a bit of it.

But they did give us the vaccination and modern medicine, so at least the world's richest minority lives longer than previously. Supposedly. If advances in medicine had kept pace with technology's ability to poison our bodies and environments, perhaps our minds and lifestyles as well. I have read of people living to 80 and beyond in Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, though, and they didn't have penicillin or the rest. 100 years of misery of 30 years of bliss? The ancients all knew well the preferable alternative. Perhaps all today's horses and all today's men can't figure it out.

So, to really have fun with the project, I've also been doing readings into the 1912 Lost World novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H G Wells' Outline of the History of the World from about the same era (1919). I've thought of including quotes from them for translation into Pakuni but I'm already going to have a lot of quotes to possibly translate. The latter I've also been mining for ideas about cosmology or astrophysics as we may be calling it today. And then whatever else that I can find from previous eras. I recently somehow secured an 1870s course catalog from the nearby University of Michigan. Wow, it is very strange and shocking!

And then the really ancient side of paleontology, which I've been studying the past two years inside and outside of Pakuni, is that it seems that humans and or hominids of all eras have always found giant fossil bones of various sorts. And they worked these into their myths and myth-derived fairy tales or folklore! So the Cyclops of the Odyssey, the Roc of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights' Entertainment ... others you've heard less of. (There are many clear ones in the books "The Spirit of the New England Tribes" and "Algonquian Legends of New England" from 1986 and 1880.)

[Bob]

bradrn : Oh, good, someone who's maybe a bit interested. Well, brace yourself:

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See, it's a lot more interesting if you study them all day in and day out and then puzzle over them and the definitions.

But just talking about it all ends up being too full-strength. So bear that in mind. It's like talking about grammar or some linguistics thing.

In real life, you can just take one part and then work on it whenever you want, over years and years.

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Well, Brad, scientists do their own thing and so do I. I thought the definition given was a good one, at the time. I've studied this a lot over the last 10 years, even using books by language scientists and other specialists. They taught us how to make our own terminology and theory in school, so I did what I was supposed to.

It's been a while since I wrote that. I may have included in it or with it a list of terminology that I made.

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This is all very difficult work to do: I cannot remember and get right my own designed terminology at the drop of a pin. I can try here but that's what you're going to see.

To really get a best idea, you'd have to study as many of my writings as possible and then work with the phenomena to see what I mean.

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The definition you give is also completely wrong.

I don't know where you got it and I don't want to look up something by a linguist right now.

The majority of graphemes in any "logographic writing system" are usually what I would call "(orthographic) syllablograms" representing a CV "orthographic syllable".
I may not like the term "grapheme", seeing as I do now the definition Wikipedia gives of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme

Which is, "In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language." I may use different terminology for my presentation of logographic writing systems. This isn't splitting hairs, it's actually a dumb definition made by people who haven't studied more than one logographic writing system in depth.

Graphemes almost never represent words in most logographic writing system.

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Instead, I talk about writing systems being composed of "signs" and "sign groups" with signs having "sign parts". And I also talk about phonetic and semantic values and stress that there's no fine line between the two, that phonograms probably have "minor" semantic values and semantograms probably have minor phonetic values.

What's more common in logographic writing systems is that there's semantograms that indicate something about the meaning of the word which goes along with all the phonograms and context to give the reader the idea of what the word is or might be.

But it varies. "Logographic writing system" is actually a modern or somewhat modern blanket term used by people who haven't spend decades comparatively studying these things because there's institutional bias against it. These writing systems have a lot more "signs" and "common signs" than other sorts of writing systems. The average for all of them is about 250 "common signs" with varying numbers of less-common signs. In the defition of mine you quoted above, though, "pictures" is an identity which is actual but not visually apparent to the untrained eye: Almost all writing system signs or letters do not look like pictures but actually are.

Middle Egyptian doesn't use syllables, though, it's the only one to use consonant phonemes but no vowel phonemes.

Cuneiform has CV but also VC and maybe so does Mayan, I forget.

Sometimes Mayan will have signs that more or less correspond to a word or word part. This is more of where the "major semantics" is worked in: The rest is just spelled with CV signs, maybe VC signs sometimes.

I forget how Linear B works. Maybe it's like Egyptian.

Cuneiform uses determinatives less than Egyptian. Egyptian has them in all (orthographic) nouns and verbs but not in lesser particles or word parts.

I forget exactly how Tangut works. I think Tangut ends up doing some weird thing where it makes its characters half and half of two other characters with related meaning and yet still has phonograms, making a big semantic medala or something.

A lot of logographic writing systems (I usually call them hieroglyphic writing systems because it registers better with non-scholars, is more semantically transparent) are undeciphered or I have ideas about them which are hard to prove.

Then there's a lot of finer points about comparative mechanics that scholars, besides myself, have never gotten into. I have to think it's interesting because it's my specialty.

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Another very problematic thing is that even our own alphabet often includes semantograms. So like in signs where the letters are colored or shaped or position to reflect meanings, like an add for a Burger King whopper shaped like a burger.

Another thing, Brahmi scripts include many different signs and sign variants but it's not usually classified as logographic and I wouldn't do that. It lacks the usual semantograms or types of semantic values and longer phonetic values (or even word values maybe) found in regular logographic writing systems.

Ah, but I agree on the standard definitions of writing that would exclude symbol systems like Dongba Symbols. These, "mnemonic symbol systems", contain phonograms but don't manage to write out every syllable or word or word part in any language. They just get some salient parts to be a mneumonic device. So they end up more like iconography than logographic writing systems.

But then other ideas in the current linguistics or language science of writing systems, I have taken increasingly serious issues with over the last 10 years.

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That's all I can think of now regarding your question. And all, again, with reference to just what I can remember now without having any reference to anything I wrote at any point.

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Maybe I should say that a sign, even in some cursive form, is almost always certainly or probably a picture of something. Then it's assigned values deriving from the meaning or phonetic value of words somehow associated with that picture. So the example from James Allen's "Middle Egyptian" is English belief as bee-leaf, which would be two signs. But it's not such a good example because most logographic writing systems spell things like bee-lee or bee-lee-fah where the -ah is not pronounced. But it gets really complex and convoluted. The different Chinese scripts, in particular, make all sorts of visual puns and references by combining signs in different ways. This is a bit like monograms for the Roman Alphabet. And then individual syllabograms in Mayan have all sorts of semantic references to different words using that syllable.

The signs come together to spell a word or word-part in a "sign group". This is like a Chinese character or an orthographic word in Egyptian Hieroglyphic. Signs can act like sign parts, though, like in Sumerian "nest" where a bunch of signs are all like semantograms or parts of a picture. Chinese does that too with "semantograms".

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( See, to regular modern people, it sounds stupid what they did back then. But my research indicates that probably the script inventors were trying to make a point with all the complications where writing reflects reality. And it's "mythic realities" of these people from the end of prehistory and beginning of prehistory. Logographic writing systems are more like somewhere between iconography, non-writing art, and the sort of alphabetic, abugida, or simple syllabary writing that we're familiar with.

Oh, and then one of the major concepts of "Hieroglyphic Studies", according to me, is that somewhere along the line the Chinese lost most of the idea of how their writing worked whereas this happened to none of the other hieroglyphic peoples. So the Chinese and Japanese are not good examples in that way. There was some disconnect somewhere, some weird break in tradition. So a lot of their major and minor sign etymologies are totally wrong without anyone but me having an idea of what the signs were originally pictures of. Which is tricky and totally against the rules of comparative anthropology but matches all the evidence so there you go. They have the basics of how the writing system works but they use Classical Chinese sign groups and spellings which are really awful and sloppy compared to the old Bronze Script Chinese and Oracle Bone Script Chinese spellings. It could have even been The First Emperor's Burning of the Books. But that might be mythologizing it.

Oh, but greater than all this said previously is that having the spellings be complex like that allows them to teach things about all sorts of topics which alphabetic spellings could never teach. So within the spellings are all sorts of old ideas. They're not jam-packed but there ends up being a lot of clear ideas as well as implications. Now, Egyptian Hieroglyphic actually could have been written with an alphabet or abjad from the beginning. Maybe the others could have also though that's speculation. Whatever it was, the spellings as they come to us were taught and re-taught over thousands of years and end up built to last, containing all sorts of wise or old or even despicable ideas which reference a variety of anthropological realities attested in recent ethnology as well as ancient texts.

Unfortunately, the books that are out there on what these ideas are, are often not done well. So we'll see what sort of books I manage and if I can both share my notes and find anyone to read them.

But it's been worth it. These logographic writing systems are absolutely unique treasure troves of "scientific" (pre-scientific, something) ideas from the dawn of writing and end of prehistory. Much of which I am the discoverer of. Woo-hoo! The big trick to what I do, though, is using ideas of comparative anthropology to compare these scripts and use that to guess better at what signs may be pictures of. Which is a lot of work and strain on the memory. )

[bradrn]

bradrn : Oh, good, someone who's maybe a bit interested. Well, brace yourself:

I’m always interested in discussions of writing systems! I doubt I’ve done as much research as you have into this subject, but I’ve always been interested in the classification writing systems, and have done a lot of research into the subject for my own interest.

The definition you give is also completely wrong.

I don't know where you got it and I don't want to look up something by a linguist right now.

It’s actually quite common. For a couple of online sources, here’s Wikipedia:

In a written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or phrase. … The use of logograms in writing is called logography, and a writing system that is based on logograms is called a logographic system.

And Omniglot (always a good resource for writing-system-related terms):

Pictograms or pictographs resemble the things they represent. Logograms are symbols that represent parts of words or whole words.

In fact, I quite like this division between ‘pictograms’ and ‘logograms’: the two terms are conflated far too often.

Omniglot actually uses what I think is quite a nice classification of writing systems, which I will paraphrase here for convenience:

• Alphabets have (ideally) one symbol per phoneme. Examples include Latin, Korean, Georgian. (Abjads are the same, but have no vowels.)
• Abugidas have one symbol per consonant; vowels are represented by (usually) diacritics, so individual ‘letters’ systematically represent CV syllables. Examples include Devanāgarī, Lao, Khmer, Tibetan, Balinese.
• Syllabaries have one symbol per syllable; the symbols are not necessarily constructed regularly. Examples include Japanese kana, Cherokee, Yi.
• Logographies have (mostly) one symbol per word. Examples include Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mayan hieroglyphics.

I think this has quite a nice progression of systems, from one symbol per phoneme to one symbol per syllable to one symbol per word. As I understand it, you use the term ‘logography’ to refer to both ‘syllabaries’ and ‘logographies’ (as I define them above); this is fine, but I can’t help but feel that your definition loses a bit of granularity compared to mine.

The majority of graphemes in any "logographic writing system" are usually what I would call "(orthographic) syllablograms" representing a CV "orthographic syllable".
I may not like the term "grapheme", seeing as I do now the definition Wikipedia gives of it. … "In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language." I may use different terminology for my presentation of logographic writing systems. … Instead, I talk about writing systems being composed of "signs" and "sign groups" with signs having "sign parts". And I also talk about phonetic and semantic values and stress that there's no fine line between the two, that phonograms probably have "minor" semantic values and semantograms probably have minor phonetic values.

I think the term ‘grapheme’ has its uses, especially with alphabets (as I defined the term above). But I definitely like your terminology a lot better here; in particular, I like how it gives a much more granular way to talk about scripts such as Korean and Devanāgarī, where one ‘sign’ is consistently made up of multiple ‘sign parts’ in a regular fashion.

But it varies. "Logographic writing system" is actually a modern or somewhat modern blanket term used by people who haven't spend decades comparatively studying these things because there's institutional bias against it.

I’d be curious to know: why do you consider ‘logography’ to be a blanket term, and what are your preferred term(s) to replace it?

These writing systems have a lot more "signs" and "common signs" than other sorts of writing systems. The average for all of them is about 250 "common signs" with varying numbers of less-common signs. In the defition of mine you quoted above, though, "pictures" is an identity which is actual but not visually apparent to the untrained eye: Almost all writing system signs or letters do not look like pictures but actually are.

Now I’m a bit confused about your definition (i.e. that a logographic script is ‘any script composed of pictures, not descended from Wadi El-Hol Script’): does this mean that you consider any script not descended from Wadi El-Hol to be a logographic script, given that all scripts I’m aware of started out as pictures originally, even if they do not look pictorial now?

[Bob]

bradrn :

Well, first off, I've been thinking about it, and I think that in my terminology I use "sign" maybe in place of "grapheme".

If you get me interested enough, I might review my notes and writings a bit and try to give you more of an explanation of what I have on my academica.edu account for terminology and list of logographic writing systems. But I would rather not, they're supposed to be fairly stand-alone works which I put some effort into at the time to be my best attempt at the thing. I pointed you toward my websites and facebook group, you could try to find more there if you're much interested in the linguistics of writing systems and the linguistics of logographic writing systems. If you don't like what you read or you aren't so interested in reading the works of someone with only a BA in Linguistics, no PhD, and no professional academic career, ... I understand that. I read all sorts of stuff but actually have rarely found amateurs or non-professionals specializing in my "sub-field" or related "sub-fields" who had anything to say about it. Well, actually, I have read a lot of amateur writings related to my "sub-field" of the linguistics of logographic writing systems. But I remember it as being ... pathetic stuff, to not put it delicately. And some amateur scholarship is not so pathetic, even when it is pathetic. Logographics are hard work.

[Bob]

bradrn :

So I see you've responded quite a bit more. I should be so delighted, I have gotten few replies of substance to my webpages or facebook posts regarding the linguistics of logographic writing systems. And it seems to me this is because few people care.

...

...

A lot of what books and websites say about logographic writing systems is garbage. And even the best books by top scholars. It's a very under-studied topic. It's not like alphabets but it understudied by people who really spend almost all their lives with alphabets or similar things. The hieroglyphic is a different beast.

...

I am familiar with the sort of ideas you've quoted, very much so. Go study all 42 logographic writing systems or at least 2, then we can maybe talk about things they do.

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Well, I don't want to replace "logographic writing systems" but by saying it's a blanket term I mean that each logographic writing system is very different from the other and they do get lumped together because people don't care very much. I'm been studying them all for 10 or so years now and there's also a lot they don't have in common and differences that are under-described.

Given my definition or the other definition, though, there really isn't much controversy over which writing system is and isn't logographic. So it's not really one of the most important terms I define and present.

....

Well, usually it's writing systems descended from Wadi El-Hol Script that aren't logographic. But, again, usually logographic writing systems have about 250 common signs and have not "simple syllabaries" but syllabaries with an average of 3 or so sign variants. They end up doing a lot of things that alphabets and such don't do, mostly for having signs carry semantic values.

...

Well, I don't have anything else to say, though. But, again, I prefer in my facebook posts to call them hieroglyphic writing systems rather than logographic writing systems because the usage is more semantically transparent to non-specialists. Which is almost everyone. Even linguists really hardly think of logographic writing systems. And ones specializing in a language using one? Well, they don't study other logographic writing systems all that much. And I know because I've read tremendous amounts of their writings over the years.

Which, again, is why I did it in the first place. I just look around in academic and non-academic writings to see what ideas about the linguistics of logographic writing systems come up, then compare them with my own. And I think I've got the farthest of anyone. But if a person really isn't into the linguistics of logographic writing systems or lacks the practical experience of studying and comparing them, then they won't know what I'm talking about. But that makes sense.

[bradrn]

If you don't like what you read or you aren't so interested in reading the works of someone with only a BA in Linguistics, no PhD, and no professional academic career, ... I understand that. I read all sorts of stuff but actually have rarely found amateurs or non-professionals specializing in my "sub-field" or related "sub-fields" who had anything to say about it.

Honestly, I don’t really mind how much formal education in linguistics you have, and I think that most of the other members of this board feel the same way.

If you get me interested enough, I might review my notes and writings a bit and try to give you more of an explanation of what I have on my academica.edu account for terminology and list of logographic writing systems. But I would rather not, they're supposed to be fairly stand-alone works which I put some effort into at the time to be my best attempt at the thing. I pointed you toward my websites and facebook group, you could try to find more there if you're much interested in the linguistics of writing systems and the linguistics of logographic writing systems. … Well, actually, I have read a lot of amateur writings related to my "sub-field" of the linguistics of logographic writing systems. But I remember it as being ... pathetic stuff, to not put it delicately. And some amateur scholarship is not so pathetic, even when it is pathetic. Logographics are hard work. … A lot of what books and websites say about logographic writing systems is garbage. And even the best books by top scholars. It's a very under-studied topic. It's not like alphabets but it understudied by people who really spend almost all their lives with alphabets or similar things. The hieroglyphic is a different beast.

It sounds like you think a lot of existing materials on logographic scripts are inadequate; would you be at all interested in writing up something more correct about logographic scripts and posting it to this board? I know I’d be fascinated to learn more about logographic scripts, especially if you’re focusing on aspects which other scholars get wrong. And I think you’d be surprised at how many other people would be interested in this as well. (For example, I’m doing something similar about ergativity, and I was surprised at how much interest I got even before I posted anything of substance!)

Well, I don't want to replace "logographic writing systems" but by saying it's a blanket term I mean that each logographic writing system is very different from the other and they do get lumped together because people don't care very much. I'm been studying them all for 10 or so years now and there's also a lot they don't have in common and differences that are under-described.

This is a good point — logographic scripts really are quite different to each other, although I do think that there is some merit to the idea that they should be considered a unitary category of writing system.

Given my definition or the other definition, though, there really isn't much controversy over which writing system is and isn't logographic. So it's not really one of the most important terms I define and present.

This is true. But even so, there are some differences between your usage and other usages — for instance, you seem to consider Linear B to be a logographic script, whereas I would say it is not a logography but a syllabary (i.e. a script where 1 grapheme = 1 syllable)

Well, I don't have anything else to say, though. But, again, I prefer in my facebook posts to call them hieroglyphic writing systems rather than logographic writing systems because the usage is more semantically transparent to non-specialists. Which is almost everyone. Even linguists really hardly think of logographic writing systems. And ones specializing in a language using one? Well, they don't study other logographic writing systems all that much. And I know because I've read tremendous amounts of their writings over the years.

On this board, I think that everyone is reasonably familiar with the term ‘logography’ — I’ve seen a couple of logographic conscripts being presented, using that term, and I don’t remember anyone ever asking about what the term ‘logography’ means. But your point is valid in contexts where you are presenting your work to non-linguists who have never heard of the term.

[Bob]

So I've set aside a little what I was doing with the Pakuni Language. Now I've been spending a lot of time making up names for about 20 animals and plants, or geological occurences, from the 20 or so major geological eras of earth's past. ( The point of this is the study of the etymology of plant and animal names, their modern science(s) and their "historic sciences". )

Last year, I named a bunch of dinosaurs and hominid tools, so I thought that I'd do this for this year.

It adds science to this year's work with Pakuni for me to do this.

It's a lot of work, though, and will take me some days. I'm thinking of what I can do to make it more interesting. I've thought of some things already but they're bizaare and some might be too time-consuming.

I'm especially thinking of the 1975 Siebert decipherment work on the 1600s "Jamestown Indians' language" dictionaries by Captain John Smith and Mr. William Strachey. Using modern science, he deciphered these dictionaries and found that Smith and Strachey made a lot of mistakes because they didn't know the language very well. But what's interesting about this is that while I have been one of few people to study the Jamestown, Plymouth, and Roanoke Indian languages, they and their associated body of lore is very compelling. Modern language scientists of Native American languages have avoided these 1600s languages because they usually focus on documenting dying Native American languages. These languages were not documented by modern language scientists, also, and this does not appeal to them. Academics also recoil at the Biblical and 1600s catechetical corpus of these languages. But in many ways, the 1600s colonies of peoples' minds is at odds with the 1600s colonies of reality.

And I'm almost at the end of writing out the Classical Chinese myths, too. Beyond that, it's up to me when I want to get my work online. I'm finishing The Myth of the Divine Archer and the Ten Suns. Which also explains who The Chinese Money Frog is. Now, at long last, I know. "Through eyes in tears at last I see ..."

So far I've made room for each entry up to the end of the Cretaceous period. I've divided the periods into three groups, Beginning to Carboniferous period, to Cretaceous period, then to the End. The first period lacks animals that look much like dinosaurs, the second has them, and the third also lacks them. Again, the book I'm using is the Encyclopedia of Prehistory by David Lambert and Facts on File from way back in 2002 in London. But it's not that bad and I've read a lot of books from England and even about England. No one else publishes much on certain topics, in English, like foreign languages and animals. The British find certain topics more interesting than Americans or the other (majority) English-reading countries. You totally get a different vibe from their books.

And I looked through my others books and found some images more exactly identifying the illustrated animals and plants as well as some images showing them together in a larger picture. Dinosaur books are fun because they're full of weird stuff. But I'm not sure how many people actually read them cover to cover. Plus, you know, it's maybe mostly kids and I don't think kids understand much of what they read anyway. Which is the irony of writing for children. And yet, it's customary that certain topics are mostly relegated to books for children. The concept of education is at least broad enough so that if you're young enough, you should get some almost useless notion of certain things. Ancient Egypt. Dinosaurs. There's a number of others. Even very crucial things.

Which reminds me of a c 1960s song:

"The Most Wonderful Day Of The Year" Misfit Song from the Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer Movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRIQFYMMNYY

Ah, The Great Age of Conformity. These people would hurt if they weren't all the exact same. Ah ha ha ha.

...

Anyway, I'm trying to get it all done but still remember my experience and do some reading and make it a real masterpiece. I don't know if anyone else will ever get into it but for me it's just such a great thing that they made the effort to teach kids - and everyone - about grammar and foreign languages and cultures. I also find the cooperation of so many different people in TV or movies to be a really interesting thing, whenever I'm working with conlangs from them. You see, from time to time, I study the comparative anthropology of theatre and so it helps me explore its mysteries across time.

Image:

This one is great and it's very zoomable.

https://deanbolton.ca/Geological-Time-Scale

Musical Interlude:

Sonic Robotnik Themes - Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, 3 and Final Boss Theme [METAL GUITAR COVER]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97CgzEmIio

3pm2kd.jpg (157.09 KiB) Viewed 6224 times

[Bob]

bradrn :

Well, maybe some day. Again, I've pointed you and others to my websites, my facebook group Hieroglyphic Writing System Linguistics, and my academia.edu account, Larry Rogers Logographic.

https://anylanguageatall411.blogspot.co ... w=flipcard

https://www.facebook.com/groups/glyphwhat/

https://independent.academia.edu/logographic155

I will do major or minor projects where I do work on "sign etymologies", making guesses or assignments as to what a sign might have originally been a picture of and then how it gets the values (semantic or phonetic) that it does, as well as what other "minor values" it might have.

( See, just talking about this stuff, I'm starting to drop and even coin terminology. )

I'm not doing anything like that right now but when I do again I'll try to post about it here.

You got my ear now and can ask me any questions you want. I'm especially working now very lightly on Sumerian. But it could be on any hieroglyphic word or Chinese type character. I could see what I remember or can look up. It's a convoluted skill set to be able to do this stuff ... at all.

...

But Linear B definitely has a huge range of signs that aren't syllables but can be used in place of words or as determinatives or something. So it's no like a stand-alone Japanese Hiragana or Cree Syllabary.

And so I went to Ancient Scripts. Which is something but really super vigorous.

http://www.ancientscripts.com/linearb.html

If I remember, they use these in place of words and I think always with some phonetic complements.

...

( By the way, for anyone reading, I'm working on the 1970s TV conlang Pakuni now but doing no invented logographic script for it. Instead, I've been leaning heavily on adding bilingual Classical Chinese texts, mostly from The Art of War, for present and maybe later translation into Pakuni. I have made a logographic script for it but haven't used it much during this year's "season". )

[bradrn]

But Linear B definitely has a huge range of signs that aren't syllables but can be used in place of words or as determinatives or something. So it's no like a stand-alone Japanese Hiragana or Cree Syllabary.

And so I went to Ancient Scripts. Which is something but really super vigorous.

http://www.ancientscripts.com/linearb.html

If I remember, they use these in place of words and I think always with some phonetic complements.

Oh, I didn’t know that — I always thought Linear B was just a plain syllabary. Thanks for the correction!

[Bob]

Celebrate with me! I've been conlanging since 2006 but these years only conlang a few times a year for a few hours each time. Except for one to two months where I focus on mostly studying but also making conlangs. And since New Year's, I've been at this for three months! And going strong.

So I'm preparing Classical Chinese myth and military texts to translate into a very famous TV conlang, Pakuni, and inventing new words for the language for plants and animals from throughout "the geological record". There's 20 for about 20 eras.

This last one with the animal names has been very exciting!

...

First, I wrote down the names of them all, from an illustrated book.

Now, I'm putting their etymologies into English. I just reach the K-T Event again, a notable event in the universe's history.

Then I'm going to gloss the etymologies and make compound nouns out of this.

I'm also thinking of working in references to different mythologies from around the world but might not have space. There's also some other neat, quick things I hope to get in there.

And eventually I'm going to photograph and share online all my works on Pakuni.

...

I use my conlangs to explore books I otherwise would not. I recently read from large books made by top scientists from paleontology and astrophysics (like astronomy, modern cosmology). Very exciting and a nice break from my usual focus studies.

...

I was originally to become a geological engineer, a petroleum engineer. So I always wish to study geology and paleontology but mostly study ancient and obscure languages instead. So this has been so nice.

Maybe I'll work calculus into my next multi-month focus study on conlangs. Oh, I rarely get to use my calculus. I try. I donated my best books to public libraries! How I do miss them! But it's for the kids. I was once a child public library patron.

Excelsior!!!

...

( I wrote this post and its images for adding to this thread on Zompist Bboard as well as multiple facebook groups on topics such as paleontology and foreign language study. )

...

Musical Interlude:

Will Smith - Will 2k (Willennium)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Rms5J7nGI

Images:

I decided to go with an image of a scene from Juarassic Park.

Detail from a nice large image of the geological record.

This one is great and it's very zoomable.

https://deanbolton.ca/Geological-Time-Scale

3quy7p.jpg (101.35 KiB) Viewed 6144 times

3quxmn.jpg (148.4 KiB) Viewed 6144 times

[Richard W]

[*] Abugidas have one symbol per consonant; vowels are represented by (usually) diacritics, so individual ‘letters’ systematically represent CV syllables. Examples include Devanāgarī, Lao, Khmer, Tibetan, Balinese.

Do you realise that what you're saying can be quite false? Lao has moved so far from the original system that it actually has matres lectionis (consonants serving as part of the indication of vowels). Substitute 'prototypically' for 'systematically' and you're on much securer ground, though in Lao Unicode has decided its simpler to call nearly half the dependent vowel signs letters.

[bradrn]

[*] Abugidas have one symbol per consonant; vowels are represented by (usually) diacritics, so individual ‘letters’ systematically represent CV syllables. Examples include Devanāgarī, Lao, Khmer, Tibetan, Balinese.

Do you realise that what you're saying can be quite false? Lao has moved so far from the original system that it actually has matres lectionis (consonants serving as part of the indication of vowels). Substitute 'prototypically' for 'systematically' and you're on much securer ground, though in Lao Unicode has decided its simpler to call nearly half the dependent vowel signs letters.

This is true — Lao is a bad example. It’s somewhere between an abugida and an alphabet, since all vowels are explicitly written (like an alphabet) but they are written around the base letters rather than after them (like an abugida).

[Richard W]

This is true — Lao is a bad example. It’s somewhere between an abugida and an alphabet, since all vowels are explicitly written (like an alphabet) but they are written around the base letters rather than after them (like an abugida).

The formal definition of an abugida is actually quite unhelpful in describing writing systems. Bright's similar concept of alphasyllabary works better. For example, it covers Pali in the Thai and Lao scripts, whether it is written using an alphabet or using an abugida. (Both systems are in use in both scripts.) The big deviation is that the aksharas of Brahmi scripts also support CCV and CVC. The range of final consonants can be quite small, as in Devanagari, to large or unbounded as in older Lao and Khmer and as seen in some (possibly only a few dozen?) Tibetan contractions. (This CVC in older Lao is different to the modern writing CVCV with final V being null.) Some systems are rather like dyslexic Hangul.

[bradrn]

This is true — Lao is a bad example. It’s somewhere between an abugida and an alphabet, since all vowels are explicitly written (like an alphabet) but they are written around the base letters rather than after them (like an abugida).

The formal definition of an abugida is actually quite unhelpful in describing writing systems. Bright's similar concept of alphasyllabary works better. For example, it covers Pali in the Thai and Lao scripts, whether it is written using an alphabet or using an abugida. (Both systems are in use in both scripts.) The big deviation is that the aksharas of Brahmi scripts also support CCV and CVC. The range of final consonants can be quite small, as in Devanagari, to large or unbounded as in older Lao and Khmer and as seen in some (possibly only a few dozen?) Tibetan contractions. (This CVC in older Lao is different to the modern writing CVCV with final V being null.) Some systems are rather like dyslexic Hangul.

I’ve never heard of an alphasyllabary — how is that defined?

[Richard W]

I’ve never heard of an alphasyllabary — how is that defined?

"A segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary".

This definition neatly sidesteps the issue of a default vowel, instead of hitting the issues that some Thai and Lao script writing systems are 'alphabets' while others are 'abugidas'.