On Hanying and Creole Adjustment

[Mornche Geddick]

An unusual spelling bloop:

In OH, a possessive experssion was a relative clause,..

Duplicate glosses:

Liu bai tẽ gẽna (dewala) (bai Mariya).
gift by past give (he) (by Mariya)
The present was given (to him) (by Mariya).

Dewala bai tẽ gẽna (liu) (bai Mariya).
he by past give (gift) (by Mariya)
The present was given (to him) (by Mariya).

Should the last gloss be "He was given (it/the present) (by Mariya)."?

[So Haleza Grise]

I think the column spacing for <mænu> in the Modern Hanying page is wrong.

I think these two are the first published Zompworld conlangs we've had in a while. It's good to see! I haven't read through all of them completely yet.

I like Modern Hanying, possibly because I like agglutinating languages with complex verbal morphology for some reason.

Obviously it works within the fictional context of the Incatena, but I wonder if a creole ever would develop on Mars - my limited understanding is that creoles develop when speech communities come into contact in a situation where neither of them has the opportunity and/or the motivation to have formal language learning take place. I have no idea what a Martian colonial environment would look like. I could imagine some kind of collective order that everyone speaks the same language maybe.

Of course, future languages are going to have to change in some way, and I really have no idea how, but it is fun to speculate. And personally I like that Brazilian Portuguese features in the earlier stages because its a language that I am at least a little bit familiar with.

[zompist]

Typos should be fixed.

As for creoles, I don't think ordering people to learn a language works! The pidgin stage, OH, developed when there were only a few thousand colonists, thrown together during a disaster— effective loss of support from Earth during the Collapse.

[Yalensky]

Not an error, but the Old Hanying word for the Collapse--Dafakap--has an etymology meaning "great ruin". I chuckled.

[akam chinjir]

Not an error, but the Old Hanying word for the Collapse--Dafakap--has an etymology meaning "great ruin". I chuckled.

大fuckup?

[So Haleza Grise]

compare bagarap (bugger up) which features prominently in Tok PIsin.

[alynnidalar]

millennium hand and shrimp

[Pedant]

millennium hand and shrimp

Nicely done.

[Pedant]

A query about the new alphabet: what writing utensil was assumed to be used for its creation? Was it primarily via tablet and stylus, or was there a stage in-between where it transferred to something else?

[zompist]

It could be several things... but hey, sometimes you gotta drive the authorial fiat. So...

At some point, probably in the late Douane era, some devices took gestural (or hand-drawn) input. For speed and to simplify the input space, letters had to be single strokes. The look caught on, helped by the relatively small population.

[Pedant]

Seems reasonable...my word, did neurimplants change a lot. Don’t suppose this has affected other writing systems as well? Only you mention romaji and kanji in use on Okura...dear oh dear, if Latin characters have changed over 2,000 years, I imagine the style of 50C Chinese glyphs must be rather alien to the readers of today...

[zompist]

Neurimplants were developed in that era, but I expect they weren't the devices in question, because they weren't universal yet.

And yeah, other scripts would continue changing too. A crazy person would work out Bèwà, then redo the Chinese writing system with a new set of radicals and phonetics. It's about time-- the current set is way out of date! No promises, though.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

And yeah, other scripts would continue changing too. A crazy person would work out Bèwà, then redo the Chinese writing system with a new set of radicals and phonetics. It's about time-- the current set is way out of date! No promises, though.

That would be sooooo easy for me.

[bradrn]

It could be several things... but hey, sometimes you gotta drive the authorial fiat. So...

At some point, probably in the late Douane era, some devices took gestural (or hand-drawn) input. For speed and to simplify the input space, letters had to be single strokes. The look caught on, helped by the relatively small population.

This sounds intriguing. The dominant input device today is the keyboard; how then did some devices come to use gestural/hand-drawn input?

[zompist]

Well, the dominant device was the keyboard; now it's the screen. Already we have near-universal gestures for selection, rejection ("swipe left"), movement, and zooming in/out. VR will likely produce a new vocabulary of gestures.

But gestural interfaces don't have to be dominant to influence font design; really they only need to look cool to font designers.

Or maybe teachers. I could see the principles I used for Hanying-- single strokes, no letter confusions or mirroring-- being adopted to teach the alphabet.

[bradrn]

Well, the dominant device was the keyboard; now it's the screen. Already we have near-universal gestures for selection, rejection ("swipe left"), movement, and zooming in/out. VR will likely produce a new vocabulary of gestures.

Actually, I would say today that even though we use screens far more than actual physical keyboards, we still use the keyboard as our dominant means of input, whether it's physical or rendered on a screen. Even on the tiny screen of an Apple Watch, a quick Google seems to confirm that the easiest way of inputting text today is to use a keyboard.

But gestural interfaces don't have to be dominant to influence font design; really they only need to look cool to font designers.

Is this how it works? I would have thought that - at least for body text - font designers would stick to generally-established letter forms for legibility, and would only change the whole font design if a new alphabet becomes well-established enough to be used commonly.

Or maybe teachers. I could see the principles I used for Hanying-- single strokes, no letter confusions or mirroring-- being adopted to teach the alphabet.

That's a really good point. But again, I would have thought that new letterforms would only start to be taught once they're well-established.

[akam chinjir]

Even on the tiny screen of an Apple Watch, a quick Google seems to confirm that the easiest way of inputting text today is to use a keyboard.

Is this true for Chinese as well? (On phones and tablets I mostly use handwritten input, but I don't really know how common that is.)

[zompist]

But gestural interfaces don't have to be dominant to influence font design; really they only need to look cool to font designers.

Is this how it works? I would have thought that - at least for body text - font designers would stick to generally-established letter forms for legibility, and would only change the whole font design if a new alphabet becomes well-established enough to be used commonly.

Font designers love novelty. Every new display font nudges the design space slightly, and some fonts affect hundreds of later ones.

Just looking at the font used for posts on the ZBB, I notice that lower case L has a little tail, even though it's a sans serif font. That's a nice touch... perhaps the designer looked at the London Underground font. If other designers took that up, it might become part of the prototype of the letter. And maybe another font enlarges it and that takes off. In a thousand years, you get the Hanying L...

Again, these are things that happen out in the world. We may get a distorted picture with the Roman alphabet, because in the Renaissance it became fashionable to re-import ancient Roman letterforms, which became our upper case. We can read the letters on Trajan's column, but it's not because we kept the letterforms pristine for 2000 years, it's because the ancient forms were purposely re-adopted. But pretty dramatic changes still occur, such as the flowering of sans serif fonts.

Or maybe teachers. I could see the principles I used for Hanying-- single strokes, no letter confusions or mirroring-- being adopted to teach the alphabet.

That's a really good point. But again, I would have thought that new letterforms would only start to be taught once they're well-established.

Again, there's precedent for this, e.g. the British ita (initial teaching alphabet), though that one eventually died out.

[bradrn]

But gestural interfaces don't have to be dominant to influence font design; really they only need to look cool to font designers.

Is this how it works? I would have thought that - at least for body text - font designers would stick to generally-established letter forms for legibility, and would only change the whole font design if a new alphabet becomes well-established enough to be used commonly.

Font designers love novelty. Every new display font nudges the design space slightly, and some fonts affect hundreds of later ones.

Just looking at the font used for posts on the ZBB, I notice that lower case L has a little tail, even though it's a sans serif font. That's a nice touch... perhaps the designer looked at the London Underground font. If other designers took that up, it might become part of the prototype of the letter. And maybe another font enlarges it and that takes off. In a thousand years, you get the Hanying L...

Again, I'm not sure that's how it works. For comparison, serifs have been around since the Romans, and yet they still aren't part of the prototype.

Again, these are things that happen out in the world. We may get a distorted picture with the Roman alphabet, because in the Renaissance it became fashionable to re-import ancient Roman letterforms, which became our upper case. We can read the letters on Trajan's column, but it's not because we kept the letterforms pristine for 2000 years, it's because the ancient forms were purposely re-adopted. But pretty dramatic changes still occur, such as the flowering of sans serif fonts.

True, the Roman alphabet has been a bit distorted. But my personal hypothesis is that once you have printing, letter prototypes stop evolving - and that's even more true when you're using computers.

Or maybe teachers. I could see the principles I used for Hanying-- single strokes, no letter confusions or mirroring-- being adopted to teach the alphabet.

That's a really good point. But again, I would have thought that new letterforms would only start to be taught once they're well-established.

Again, there's precedent for this, e.g. the British ita (initial teaching alphabet), though that one eventually died out.

The important part there is that that one eventually died out. As Wikipedia notes, it's just too different to the modern English alphabet to be useful for teaching.

[zompist]

For comparison, serifs have been around since the Romans, and yet they still aren't part of the prototype.

I can't agree, when before 1800 every printed font had serifs! Sans serif fonts seemed so odd when they were introduced that they were called "grotesque". (I don't mean people said they were ugly, I mean that was the actual category name.)

Even in handwriting, people preserved things like the straight bars in lowercase u, m, n. Many people always write the serifs in capital I.

(Cursive is really a whole 'nother category which has prototypes of its own. There's nothing odd about different writing styles having different prototypes-- compare italic and roman a or g, for instance.)

But my personal hypothesis is that once you have printing, letter prototypes stop evolving - and that's even more true when you're using computers.

I agree that printing can exert a conservative influence. We still like the early humanistic fonts. But we also like variety, and there's been a load of new font ideas since 1500. Computers only add to the variety possible.

But compare those with Fraktur and other black-letter fonts. That was Gutenberg's own prototype, and basically those are gone except when we want an old-timey display face. Germany kept printing books in Fraktur well into the last century, but it would be extremely eccentric to do so today.

Even a little thing like the use of the long s seems very weird to modern readers; to me, it's a flaw in the otherwise astonishingly beautiful web version of Byrne's Euclid.

Besides the change from Fraktur, note the simplified characters for Chinese, or for that matter changes of alphabet in Turkey and elsewhere, or the switch to all-Hangul in North Korea, all post-printing developments.

Here's a simple question: does the prototype for capital A include the crossbar? I have a Letraset catalog from 1977, and it's in every font, including the wackiest display fonts. Yet there are several modern fonts that omit it, and as I noted designers of 'future alphabets' love to leave it out. If these things look normal to us now, the crossbar is at least weakened within the prototype.

As Wikipedia notes, it's just too different to the modern English alphabet to be useful for teaching.

That's a poor lesson to take! There's fashions in teaching just as there are in font design. The ball-and-stick letters often taught in grade school are even more influential. For another example of a teaching alphabet, consider the use of pinyin in China. My understanding is that pinyin is taught first as a step to literacy, with characters introduced later. (The idea is not to replace hanzi.)