Zompist Bboard Again

Man in Space wrote: ↑Sat Sep 27, 2025 9:01 pm

RyanChangHill wrote: ↑Sat Sep 27, 2025 7:53 pm

keenir wrote: ↑Fri Sep 26, 2025 8:14 pm

I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of the contents of most if not all Siniform scripts aren't copywritten. Specific combinations, such as in company names, might be legally protected - but thats true of what you'd find in any script's users.

I think sequences of words or characters are not copywritten or copywritable, but perhaps glyphs may be if made for artistic purposes by an individual. Conlang copyright is murky in general. I don't think I would get into trouble if I used any glyph shapes that are too similar to some rare Chinese character variants, but there would be more issues if I did that with a character from Xu Bing's A Book from the Sky.

IANAL, but the way the relevant legislation reads:

17 USC § 102(b) wrote:In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

It was held that shorthand could not be copyrighted (Brief English Systems v. Owen). More recently, in 2004, the USCO held, on appeal, that D’ni writing glyphs would be denied registration (PDF).

You probably could—whether it is, to understate, a good idea or not is a different matter.

"Ms. Dadant explained that the shapes of the characters were not "complex pictographs containing pictorial content not essential to the purpose of the character." She further stated that each character "consists of but a few strokes that create the basic shape of the character."

RyanChangHill wrote: ↑Sun Sep 28, 2025 12:55 pm In any case, it was more fun to design them from scratch, even if the characters for common words had to be fairly complex.

quinterbeck wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 6:41 am If I was doing a similar project, to avoid the copying trap, I think the pressure I would have imposed on myself would be the writing medium and implements.

If Angloji arose IRL without influence from CJK then I'd expect writers to use some simple shapes, and those shapes might converge on CJK shapes (without having similar meaning).

The decipherment challenge has concluded, and the long-awaited answers to the Angloji ciphers are finally here. Even though a total of seven people have successfully cracked the email address in Post 2, no one was able to solve Post 1. However, there were still a number of admirable attempts. I would like to thank all of the participants for putting effort into the texts and compiling their own impressive character dictionaries in the process.

For my next posts, I will provide character tables and necessary supplementary explanations all of the posts that I have made.

sasasha wrote: ↑Fri Oct 03, 2025 4:37 pm Just want to chip in to say I appreciate the work that has gone into this, and the aesthetic is lovely to look at. Like Tangut, its density is very attractive, when combined with its unique aesthetic.

However, I am glad it’s not my native script. I understand your rationale for going for complex characters across the board, but I am pretty sure I would struggle to learn this.

Still, looking forward to more documentation.

Noun (D5-E5): “name” + “word”. Jukujikun-style construction, from 名詞. The Chinese word 名詞 for “noun” was created as a modern linguistic term during the late 19th to early 20th century, when Chinese scholars were translating Western scholarly vocabularies. “Noun” came to be represented by 名 (“name”) and 詞 (“word” or “phrase”), literally meaning “name-word,” echoing the traditional Western idea of nouns as the names of things. One can observe this notion from the fact that such English words as “noun” or “nominal” ultimately originate from the Latin nomen (“name”). Initially, Ma Jianzhong (馬建忠) coined the term 名字, which was later supplanted by 名詞, with 詞 inspired from traditional Chinese philology to mean “developed into the feeling that a text was constituted of words with a rather concrete meaning” (The History of Modern Chinese Grammar Studies, page 14).