You know what analytical/isolating, agglutinative, and fusional languages are, I presume. You’ve heard about heads and dependents and word-orders, you can tell the difference between head-initial and head-final. You know what SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV mean, and which ones like prepositions and which ones like postpositions. Maybe you know what an ergative language is. Is that all? What else do you know about your language? Some things to think about:
Does your language have vowel harmony? OK, but does it have consonant harmony?
What restrictions does it place on the shape of roots? Are they different from restrictions on the shape of words or syllables? Can the same phoneme occur twice in a root? Are phonemes from the same class required, or banned?
Is its prosody stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed?
If it’s tonal, does it have contour tones? Is tone lexically determined? Does each syllable have marked tone?
Does your language mark grammatical relations in clauses? Does it bother to mark them at all?
Is your language accusative, ergative, tripartite, transitive, or neutral?
Is your ergative language totally ergative or split-ergative?
Does it have active-stative alignment? What determines the alignment of intransitive subjects? The semantics of the subject? The semantics of the verb? Something else?
Is it a topic-prominent language?
Does it use some other system, like an Austronesian ‘trigger’ system, or direct-inverse marking? What determines the order / marking of the arguments? An animacy hierarchy?
Does it mark experiencers of experiential verbs like agents or patients or something else?
Does your language have any ditransitive verbs? Is it dechticaetive or secundative?
Can a sentence omit any argument of the verb? Only the subject? No arguments at all?
What is the word order, and what determines it?
Is it consistently head-final or head-initial, or mixed? And where does the split occur?
Is there V2 order, or another unusual order?
Do certain structures, like subordinate clauses or questions, require different orders?
Does something other than syntactic relations determine word order?
Do relative clauses precede their head, or follow their head, or does it have internally-headed relative clauses?
Does it use a relative pronoun, another linking word, a special inflection, or no marking on the relative clause?
Does it allow gaps in a relative clause, or require resumptive pronouns?
Does it use some less common relativization strategy, like correlative constructions?
Is your language highly deranking? Are coordinate or subordinate constructions more marked?
Do you allow serial verbs?
Is your language head-marking or dependent-marking? Or double-marking? Or zero-marking? Or marks relations on something else?
Is your language inconsistent in marking type? Where does the split occur? Is there a pattern? (E.g., head-marked clauses and dependent-marked noun phrases in Bantu.)
Is your language synthetic?
Does your language have derivational morphology, but no inflectional morphology?
Do morphemes tack on to each other like legos, one after the other, in linear order? Or not?
Does it have portmanteau morphemes?
Does it have non-concatenating morphology?
Does it have templatic morphology (e.g., Semitic triliteral roots)
Is there a limit to the number of morphemes you can tack onto a root?
Do the morphemes occur in a fixed order, or can you change the order, say to indicate scope?
Do you allow multiple roots in one word form, or does each complex word have only one root, no matter how many derivations and inflections you apply to it?
Can verbs incorporate multiple verb roots?
Can verbs incorporate nouns?
If a verb incorporates a possessed noun, does the possessor get marked on its person-marking
How many different arguments are indexed in your verbs’ person-marking? None? Only subject? Subject and object? Indirect objects too? Non-core arguments?
How do you construct comparatives?
Do you use a case form or adposition, or a particle like ‘than’?
Do you have ‘exceed’ comparatives, positive-negative comparatives, or topical comparatives?
Are motion events verb-framing or satellite-framing?
For satellite-framing languages, are the motion verbs manner-conflating or figure-conflating? Or even ground-conflating?
Do you mark evidentiality?
Do you distinguish alienable and inalienable possession?
Does your language have a copula? Multiple copulas? Does it have a separate existential verb? Does it have a ‘have’ verb?
Does it have separate words for ‘tree’ and ‘wood’?
This probably deserves a far longer response (it probably deserves a book), but I’ll take a stab at it.
This is going to be broken up because it’s so long. I’ll talk about my conlang Yuk-Tepat & its logographs (Tepatic glyphs) but also the real-world logographic writing systems. I’ll get into some specific advice later. Of course, if you (readers) have logographic scripts please add on whatever you can about how yours work & how you made it, in order to make this more comprehensive. Or if you just have something to add / correct.
This goes on. (TLDR Logographs =/= pictures, they don’t represent translinguistic ‘ideas,’ they have a phonetic component that reflects the spoken language, and use semantic signs to disambiguate words. To be continued.)
Logographic systems work quite a bit differently from most ‘phonetic’ writing systems. Your inventory of signs will be much larger than other systems. Think a couple of hundred. Tepatic glyphs ended up with about 200 distinct signs, which is appoximately the number of Chinese radicals.
However, it also works similarly to ‘phonetic’ systems, or more similarly than you might expect. Some of the stuff you need to do will be the same as for any writing system / conlang - for example, consider the writing medium (paper, stone etc.) and tools (brush, etc.) and how they affect your system. Also, know your conlang’s phonology and basic grammatical structure – logographic or not, this will be important (as you’ll see).
First, I would like to talk about what logographs are, and how they work. Since you, Anon, asked the question, I’m guessing you might already know what logographs are, hence you are asking, but in case you don’t, I want to go into what logographs are, because I think many people don’t quite get what they are, and unless they are Chinese (or Japanese), don’t know how they work, and this is going to cause problems in making the script work if they try to make logographs for a conlang. In case you already understand logographs well (or you’re Chinese) you can skip over what I’m writing. Or read it anyway, if you want to hear about how other systems work. I advise you reading up a lot about how other systems work.
Earth has at least four families of logographic writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Chinese characters, and Maya glyphs. They’re all very different, but have some similar principles, and one of them is they have a phonetic component, just like any other script. Also, logographs (also called logograms) are not ideographs or pictographs (‘picture writing’).
Many people think that hieroglyphs or Chinese somehow represent thoughts directly through some kind of picture, bypassing “words” and spoken language, but they don’t. This is no doubt exacerbated by the fact most hieroglyphs undeniably LOOK like ‘things.’ So it’s natural to think that an obvious picture of an owl must represent the idea of an owl, but often it doesn’t. Confusion about this will make you not get how to make your system work especially when expressing something abstract that you can’t draw. Logographic systems are intimately tied to the languages they are used to write. Hence, yours will be tied to your conlang. You should already have a good idea of your conlang. It doesn’t need to be complete (when are they ever?) but you should know the phonology, and some other parts of the grammar may be helpful (is it very inflectional, word order, etc.)
Logographic systems contain signs that can represent whole words (or roots), which may or may not be recognizable ‘pictures.’ They also have phonetic elements (which may also look like pictures). The way the phonetic elements develop is usually by what we call the rebus principle, which means a sign is borrowed to write something else which sounds similar.
I’d like to illustrate this with an example. I wrote the following English sentence in pictures:
If you’re having trouble, try saying the name of each thing depicted. You should get:
eye can knot bear two leaf ewe.
Now try saying it faster and see if you get it.
What I’m trying to say is, “I can not bear to leave you.”
This is something I still didn’t quite get when I started working on Yuk Tepat.
You will note, that none of these little pictures are actually pictures of the concept referred to by the word they are used to spell. They are pictures of the thing whose word sounds like the word for the thing you want to represent, but can’t easily, so you get at it by using something that sounds similarly. (I know that sentence is hard to parse, please read it again.) This example only works because “I” and “eye” sound the same in English.
Now, imagine for a minute that English-speaking America is pretty much the same as in our world but English is written logographically. Nuclear war or something happens and the country gets buried under mounds of ash and dust and dug up hundreds of years later by archaeologists for some human civilization from elsewhere, unrelated to America, and their texts are deciphered. In this future civilization’s version of Youtube, people start making videos explaining their mysterious, cool writing system.
“The ancient American sages represented the word for oneself, I, as a picture of an eye. And if you think about it, the self is a perceiving self; without a subject able to look around and observe an outside, objective world, there is no self, no ‘I.’ The self begins with a perception of the world. This is the profound and mystical wisdom of the long-lost ancient civilization of The United States of America. Every letter hides a profound truth about the world.”
The simple, possibly boring explanation is just that ‘I’ and ‘eye’ sound the same in English, so they could be written the same way. But laugh as you might, there are tons of people online (invariably non-Chinese) making similar fluff about Chinese characters. Beware.
People may think to write ‘be’ logographically you have to think up some cool symbol of the concept of ‘being’ but the likely solution for an English logography would simply be to draw a bee (the insect that makes honey) and have it represents the copula.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that it is very common (even usual?) for the word the sign is borrowed for to completely take over that sign, and that a semantic indicator will be added to indicate the ORIGINAL meaning of that sign, or a new character created for it. The sign will completely shift over; it is no longer a picture-drawing of its meaning, even in a highly stylized way.
The typical development often goes:
- A picture is drawn to represent the word for the same thing that the picture represents. This is still pre-writing; you cannot draw a picture of everything you might want to talk about.
- The picture is borrowed to write another word or syllable in the language which cannot be depicted, but which sounds like the word. This is going to be different for each language because each language has different words and different words will be homonyms; hence you cannot separate a logographic script from the spoken language it was made for.
- Some of these signs develop into phonetic signs.
- The system reintroduces ‘pictures’ (or their relics) to clarify the meaning of words which might phonetically be spelled similarly.
This has happened many times in Chinese characters. It is probably the main way Chinese abstract, grammatical words get characters. The character 水 is ‘water,’ from an image of 3 parallel water flows. 永, representing probably a person floating on water, meant ‘swim’ (Old Chinese *ɢʷraŋs). This was then used to write the similar-sounding *ɢʷraŋʔ ‘forever,’ an idea which is hard to depict visually, don’t you think? ‘Forever’ completely took over 永. Then when they wanted to actually depict ‘swim,’ they added three water dots (itself ultimately a form of 水) to the left side to make a new character 泳. This is essentially ‘that ɢʷraŋ-ish sounding word that has to do with water.’
Signs like the three dots are called a radical in Chinese, and the remainder is called the phonetic. Some radicals are extremely common and form a great classificatory system, marking characters containing them as glyphs referring to words for people, animals, birds, plants, liquids, earth, etc. The vast majority of Chinese characters are of this type: composite characters made up of a part indicating roughly the sound, and a part assigning the meaning to some semantic domain.
Similar signs to radicals are found in hieroglyphs and cuneiform, the main difference being that they are called determinatives and they are still written as separate signs rather than being compressed into a single character like Chinese.
(I will note, radicals are basically a lexicographic tool for indexing characters, and not an etymological classification. But the radical usual corresponds to the semantic component of a character.)
If you understand this, you understand one of the key principles behind logographic writing and are ready to proceed.
So, logographic scripts generally have three components:
(1) Logograms (logographs) – signs that represent a word (or root) in the language
(2) Phonograms – signs that indicate sounds
(3) Semantograms / Determinatives – signs that mark
The way this works out in particular scripts varies. Not all of them will have all of the parts. I think Maya doesn’t really have a system of semantic determiners. And it may very well be that these may be functions and a language may use the same sign in each of these functions – but perhaps with a system for indicating when it is working as a logogram, a phonogram, or a taxogram. In Chinese and Maya, signs are generally compressed into a ‘block’ to indicate they are functioning together – as we saw in the Chinese example. In Egyptian, a particular sign may perform any of the functions, but when it is used as a logogram, a small vertical mark is added to it to indicate it is a logogram.
Systems can get vastly more complex: Old Persian or Japanese. Japanese is probably the most complicated writing system ever – certainly the most complicated in use now. But I will set that aside, and notably both of those systems are the result of existing logographic systems being repurposed to suit completely unrelated languages.
You can tweak this overall system a bit. In Yuk Tepat, I have incorporated a class of marks I have variously called ‘operators’ or ‘modifiers,’ which are attached to and modify the meanings of logograms. For example, adding various different marks to the sign ‘hand’ forms signs for finger, knuckle, thumb, palm, have, lack, etc. You see this sporadically in Chinese, for example the characters 刀 ‘knife’ and 刃 ‘blade,’ or 木 ‘tree,’ 末 ‘branch,’ and 本 ‘root.’ In Chinese though, this is a sporadic thing, while in Yuk Tepat this kind of marking is very systematized.
Since logographic systems are still at least partly phonetic, the phonetic / phonemic part can be classified by the different ways it works, same as phonemic writing systems. Hence, you can have logo-alphabets, logoabugidas, and logosyllabaries. Egyptian hieroglyphs are logoconsonantal (an abjad). The other systems are syllabic. While I don’t know any logoabugidas, you can always make one. Think about which one suits your language. Egyptian, e.g., is logoconsonantal probably because it’s Afroasiatic and abjads seem well-suited to their style of consonantal roots. The only difference between these and fully phonetic writing systems is that the phonetic part of logographic systems usually has much less phonetic precision, hence why semantic signs are needed to disambiguate similar-sounding words.
Your system doesn’t have to work just like any of these. You can figure out your own type, although it will likely mix logograms, phonograms, and taxograms in some form. I’ll grant that, of course, you don’t have to do even that. If you want something ideographic, you can try to make it. People constantly imagine fantasy languages that work completely differently from any real language, and that’s their prerogative. But if by ‘logographic,’ you meant a system like Egyptian/Sumerian/Chinese/Maya then it will be somewhat like I describe.
So to wrap up, logographs =/= pictures, they don’t represent translinguistic ‘ideas,’ they have a phonetic component that reflects the spoken language, and use semantic signs to disambiguate words. Once you know this, you basically understand the mechanics of logographs.
With that, I’m going to stop for a bit, then get back with Part II where I will get to some more particular points about making a script.
And of course, if you (readers) have a logographic script that you’ve made I’d like to know how you managed the overwhelming whole of it. Add a comment or reblog and add what you did.
Made a little ink painting during the heatwave~ this is a Nium, a domesticated kulla that is used to transport letters between cities, like a messenger pigeon!
Hear me out but Repo! The Genetic Opera may be one of the most accurate dystopias of our generation. Do I actually think there's going to be organ repossession? No. But the more things I see on Looksmaxxing and insane cosmetic surgeries it begins to feel scarily accurate. Extreme procedures of course existed when Repo was being created and likely served as inspiration but I don't know if they could ever predict the commoness of them today.
I think the reason this feels so accurate is because its not a dystopia that relys solely on the horrors of technology getting out of hand but rather beauty standards.
First one is an orc warlord bearing it's tusks. He's served in human conflicts and set up a small human-influenced chiefdom in the orc's native region.
The second is just a young orc woman.
Btw I'm thinking of making a yt video about the orcs once I finish exams. Wish me luck.
Although almost the entire surface of Hah is a barren wasteland constantly ravaged by erosion, there are stable regions where life can thrive.
These areas are found in very specific locations across the world’s geography, where storms are tolerable and biomass can accumulate. These characteristics are usually found in regions sheltered by geographical features such as mountain ranges; as well as being inland, where storms lose their intensity. They are also regions with a stable water supply, whether from aquifers or from the moderate rainfall they receive.
The general appearance of these biomes is that of a marsh or wet meadow, where water forms shallow lakes that are rapidly colonised by algae and other organisms, creating a place where life and decay alternate continuously.
Nowadays, many of these areas have been gradually absorbed by megacities, transforming the marshy environment into farmland. However, it is still possible to wander through these ephemeral lands, which serve as a prelude to the immensity of Erosion.
according to An Immense World, apparently giant squid eyes are, like, UNREASONABLY large, even for something their size living at those depths. the next largest eyes on earth, blue whale eyes, are less than half the size, and swordfish, who live at similar depths as giant squid and have the largest eyes of any fish, have eyes that could fit inside a giant squid's pupil.
eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??
turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.
sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale lurking around
and also I gotta say, the imagery... the huge lurking threat betrayed only by the ambiguous glowing shape of its movements through the water, is really evocative, if spooky deep-sea games aren't already using that to make things extremely ominous then they should really start
When Zuko apologized to uncle Iroh in the tent cause he was so ashamed of his actions and what he’d done to the only person who unconditionally believed in his ability to do good >>>>>
So okay, I’ve given this rant before but this is another good time for it.
Structurally speaking, ATLA did something important with Zuko that, in a purely mechanistic sense of narrative development, I think a lot of people don’t notice immediately, and that even fewer people who want to emulate what was done with him get.
Which is Zuko is made a protagonist VERY early, and the show goes out of its way to continually place Zuko into situations where the audience empathizes and roots for him.
This happens in literally the second episode of the series, if we count the two-part premiere as a single episode, which I think we should. The A-plot of that episode, “The Southern Air Temple,” is Aang reckoning with the genocide of his people… but the B-plot?
The B-plot is the introduction of Zhao, and more specifically, his introduction in a way that is calculate to shift the audience, whose introduction to Zuko did NOT engender a ton of sympathy to him, directly and forcefully onto his side. They want Zuko to kick Zhao’s ass.
This continues all through book one and book two. Remember, Zuko is never, ever the main villain of this series. That’s initially Zhao, followed by Azula and Ozai. (Plus various temporary players like Long Feng.) Whenever Zuko isn’t placed into direct conflict with the other protagonists, he’s always written and presented in a way that is careful, VERY VERY careful, not to make him too monstrous, and to make us root for him. He’s placed right next to Iroh, who is designed for people to like, and that reflects back onto Zuko; we want Zuko to be better than he is because we want Iroh to have good things.
Put aside for the moment whether any specific character, including Zuko, deserves their redemption. If you’ve decided you’re going to do that, you have to erect the proper narrative scaffolding around them, and it extends to far more things than “did this person not do things that were too horrible” and “is this person genuinely sorry and is working really hard to atone.” There’s a difference between protagonist and white hat, but if you want someone to eventually wear that white hat, you REALLY need to establish them as a plausible protagonist early on.
Yeah, it was made obvious from the get go that Zuko is definitely nowhere near Zhao’s level of nasty, which in turn means he’s nowhere near Azula’s and nowhere in the scope of Ozai’s.
1.)
He made a deal with Aang to leave the Southern Water Tribe alone if Aang went with him. When Aang escaped with help from two of those tribe members, Zuko didn’t demand they go back and destroy what was left of the tribe as revenge. He didn’t even think of it as an option. There was no split second where he went, should I/shouldn’t I?
2.)
This is repeated. He corners the Avatar somewhere, causes some damage to the area in the ensuing fight, but does not stick around to raze the village/monastery to the ground and kill the people when he doesn’t get what he wants. Doesn’t consider this a necessary action even once.
3.)
The Iroh&Zuko relationship is juxtaposed with the Zhao&Zuko relationship. Both older men have more power over him. Iroh is a retired War General and Prince who is not banished. Zhao is a Commander in favor of the Firelord, who is also not banished. We could tell early on that Iroh is wise and despite being on the bad side, seems to be pretty chill. We took a liking to him immediately. Zhao is the opposite. He is very much like early!Zuko. Impulsive, rude, loud, cocky, etc… But why is he more annoying? Why do we root for Zuko as opposed to him?
Because we see what Zuko is like with his Uncle Iroh. Iroh does not rub in the fact that he’s banished. He doesn’t use that when reprimanding him for his attitude or his failings. That is a hot iron and he knows it. It’s to the point where Iroh can bend fire in Zuko’s face and Zuko is perfectly relaxed over it and doesn’t once believe his uncle will hurt him. There is a lot of faith in Iroh, from this angsty teenager, and it’s very obvious with their interactions.
Zhao is not trustworthy from the start. We’re shown this by how both Zuko and Iroh are hesitant to interact with him and don’t want to linger in areas he has control over, for too long. They even lie to him despite him obviously having more favor in the Firelord’s eyes than either of them do. Zhao’s personality opposes both Zuko and Iroh. And as we like Iroh, we want him to win and have nice things, as stated above. But Zuko&Iroh is a package deal. And as Zhao reveals himself more and more to be nasty even if it’s subtle, we want Zuko to win even harder.
And even when Zuko wins and he’s in the prime position to do to Zhao what Ozai did to Zuko for also ‘speaking out of turn’… he doesn’t do it. He walks away. He is the bigger man in that scenario. And Iroh further puts shame onto Zhao when he goes against the sacred rules of the Agni Kai because he can’t handle a loss to a banished teen. We are shown that Zuko follows rules and has honor, which is reinforced by Iroh’s, ‘even in exile, my nephew is more honorable than you’. Iroh’s Word is basically Law at this point. Sf he says it is so, then he must be right and the audience accepts that. He knows Zuko better than us and hopefully we’ll get to understand more as the story progresses.
Already by the 3rd episode, we’re shown that Zuko is in no way the worst person from the Fire Nation. In fact, we’re given a sort of scale now from the four major Fire Nation people we know of. Iroh–Zuko——-Zhao–Firelord.
We’re also hoping that Iroh rubs off on Zuko enough for him to also become wise and learn to chill out.
4.)
When “The Storm” finally rolls around, we’re pretty invested by then in the Iroh&Zuko relationship and that episode gives us so much more info into Zuko’s character and we are shown that Iroh is right. He has honor and he cares for others. And yet it’s obvious the Firelord doesn’t because we see Zuko do the right thing(protesting the plan to treat new recruits as cannon fodder) in the wrong place, and then his face gets burned off by his father because of it. And further, he’s banished for refusing to fight his own father. What sane parent wants to do battle with their own child? What sane parent banishes their child for speaking out of turn at the defense of their own peoples’ lives? What the fuck is wrong with the Firelord?
Zuko was punished severely for showing compassion and having a kind heart. And Iroh(and the ship crew even) is properly mortified by the punishments his nephew received for it, which in turn affects the audience’s perception of this situation. Iroh doesn’t like it, it’s especially bad then.
Now we start wondering why does Zuko wants to go back to the guy who burned his face off?! Iroh, talk some sense into him! PLEASE!
Halfway through S1, they got us to the point of wanting Zuko to have a redemption arc.
Making the audience want a character to be redeemed is also very important in this. We were shown he has redeemable qualities. We want that pay off! Do it justice!
