Hieroglyphic Taalen with a couple samples
I've posted about the Taalen writing system before forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=294>here, but I've done some work on it recently, and I wonder what kind of scriptit would be categorized as. Basically, it's alphabetic, as described. However, there are now logograms, of sorts. There's a stylized eye, for example, a rectangle with a little section marked out in the middle of the top inside (the iris). That glyph can stand for: - eitha 'to see' - sul 'eye' and a number of other words about vision and eyes. The glyph is usually followed by a single letter (usually, the last consonant) to clarify which reading is intended, but this isn't mandatory. Most glyphs are like this, representing a number of words in a vague "family" of meaning. There's one that refers to a handful of cloven hooved animals, one for a bunch of birds, or for things that hang from plants (leaves, fruit, certain kinds of insects, flowers), one for the face/nose/head/space in front, and so on. For now, I'll use @ to indicate the "eyes" glyph, and roman letters to indicate various other letters. "@T" is read 'eitha' but "@l" would be 'sul', according to the rules above. With a line underneath, it could be used syllabically too, to be read as 'su' or 'ei', depending (the first syllable of the words). Not sure that the syllabic thing is very common at all, though. There are also a bunch of glyphs that are purely morphograms, indicating past tense, plurals, etc. The doubler falls in this category. So you could have a word written like "ns@T8" where n, s, and T are plain alphabetic letters, @ is a logogram indicating 'eitha' (together with the clarifying T), and 8 would be the past tense glyph, making a word pronounced 'tseithan', meaning "I saw you". (n 1s.AGT + s 2s.PAT = spelled 'ns' but pronounced 'ts') What would this be called? Logoalphabetic? Logosyllalphabetic? A mess? :) Any cool features you can think of that should be added, or anything that should be limited, removed? I will try to get a sample soon, so you can see how it works better.

Well, off the cuff, I'd call it "hieroglyphic". Wikipedia">...a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements.

Which would make sense, since the logographs were inspired by Egyptian, and are a combination of Egyptian heiroglyphs and determiners in one. The complement (i.e. the "T" of "@T" 'eitha') is direct from Egyptian as well. The thing is that heiroglyphs is pretty generic - it applies to mayan scripts, cuneiform, and a slew of others as well. I'm not sure what the characteristic features of a heiroglyphic system are. Wikipedia basically says that heiroglyphs are basically any character in a logographic or partly logographic system. On logographic systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logographic), they say that Egyptian is considered logoconsonantal, as opposed to the logosyllabic title applied to all the other systems. So logoalphabetic seems appropriate. Ultimately, I think I'm gonna go with your idea, and just call it heiroglyphic.

Thanks Eldin. I always spell that particular word wrong. "Hiero-" seems like it should be pronounced /hi:ro/, not /hajro/... I know, it's from Greek, not German, but still...

Hopefully these are fairly self-explanatory. Though in the title of the tsolu, I just noticed a typo. The glyph incorporating n and s should be reversed. RIght now, it says Snolu. Ack.

Quite a nice chart. I am curious to see these logographs though, any chance of that happening? I can't remember seeing a phonolgy for Taalen either, that would be cool. Now, does this version come with a handy "handwritten" counterpart as well?

I will get a pile of logographs up tonight. Same for phonology, and a quick sketch of the morphology. And, yes, there is a handwritten version. A couple actually. One is fontified, and has been posted before, but I can put it up again. The other is still in development - it's sort of arabic in style, and my preferred version. Neither of these account for logographs, though.

These are some of the logographs. If you go here, you can see the meaning associated with each of them - just scroll over the glyph. A sample of the blockscript, purely alphabetic and not including some recent changes: A sample of the handscript - this is fontified, so consider it an expert scribe's work... And another version of a hand drawn script - this is how I wrote it for years, and the font used in this came from scans of my handwriting. The same, but bigger: And now I'm gonna go find my notes on phonology and morphology and get them on here too...

Actually, this is easier... http://wiki.frath.net/Taalen It's not fully up to date, and I haven't worked on it / added details in AGES, but it gets the idea across.