I know that it is silly, but I tried to use kanji to write in Esperanto.

What I did was very simple, I created an one to one association with some kanji and morphemes and I used hiragana for grammar.

The result is something like this:

ラ犬おん見あすラ猫お。
La hundon vidas la kato.
The cat sees the dog.

Obviously I have better thinks to do, like learn Japanese, so all I did was a list of maybe 50 pairs of kanji and morphemes. I also made a simple script to automatically convert basic sentences using word by word substitution and tricks to insert or remove spaces.

Glossary

ラ：the - la
犬：dog - hund(o)
猫：cat - kat(o)
見：to see - vid(as)
ん：denotes accusative
お：denotes a noun
あす：denotes simple present tense

john555 Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:The iConji thing shows the limitations of any attempt at a purely pictographic/ideographic system, and the difference between a code and a writing system.

The problem with a code (like iConji) is that you have to agree beforehand on what the symbols mean and how they are combined. The ability to create new meanings or symbols is very limited (or nonexistent) without discussing the meaning beforehand. A writing system, on the other hand, can be extended without limit -- because it represents a language, the "code" is already known to the writer and reader without needing to specifically arrange the meaning beforehand.

I agree that iConji is silly. I mean, how would you translate the following into iConji:


-I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

-It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.

(King Lear, Act I, Scene 1)

http://www.emojidick.com/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-cultu...180949825/

https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8446/80131...21f4_z.jpg

Moby Dick entirely translated into Emoji.

Oh, and it was accepted into the Library of Congress. God Bless 'Murica.

I know you probably didn't mean that seriously, but just in case, that's not actually a "translation" into emoji. It's just the text with some emoji for sentences that sort of express the feeling of the sentence.

That was indeed not meant seriously. Still a fun little experiment though.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Several of John DeFrancis' books talk about 16-19th century ideas about creating "universal symbols" or using Chinese characters for all languages, and 20th century attempts like the Bliss symbols.

This sounds fascinating, both the wrongfulness of DeFrancis' attempts, as well as his motivations. Is there a good reference on his work?

jahnke Wrote:I know that it is silly, but I tried to use kanji to write in Esperanto.

What I did was very simple, I created an one to one association with some kanji and morphemes and I used hiragana for grammar.

The result is something like this:

ラ犬おん見あすラ猫お。
La hundon vidas la kato.
The cat sees the dog.

Do you mean "The dog sees the cat"? This is very cool, I think very near the spirit of not just op but also various illiterate peoples within the Chinese sphere of influence over the millennia Is the attraction of using kana for grammar due to learning Japanese? Chinese gets by with using hanzi for grammar, I'm a bit of a fan of that, sacrificing unambiguity for uniformity.

Zephirot93 Wrote:For now, I will only cover the basics of this so-called “system”. Upon feedback from this community, I will update the thread with further aspects of the system as a functional whole.

It's crazy that modern web forums like this lack the "multi-threading" capabilities of the old news readers, letting op's initial idea get completely sidetracked by side-tangent. Many good engineering points have been raised but in the end what I gather is that Zephirot93 shouldn't try to build a language by committee . Start working on it with a friend or two, in public, have fun, and there's a 0.001% chance it'll amount to anything . Starting small and just playing around with it, rather than aiming to fulfill this large list of desiderata (multi-language support, international, etc.), increases its viability, because while it may not be the writing system for half the world, maybe it could become a writing system for a quarter of the world.

I'll be a curious onlooker till I improve my Japanese/Chinese skill. Have you finished RTK? What's your level of Japanese/Chinese?

aldebrn Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Several of John DeFrancis' books talk about 16-19th century ideas about creating "universal symbols" or using Chinese characters for all languages, and 20th century attempts like the Bliss symbols.

This sounds fascinating, both the wrongfulness of DeFrancis' attempts, as well as his motivations. Is there a good reference on his work?

DeFrancis is a 20th century linguist whose specialty was Chinese -- his two books that have the most information are Chinese Language Fact and Fantasy, and Visible Speech. He didn't try to create those symbolic languages.

(USENET had advantages!)

Quote:Do you mean "The dog sees the cat"?

No, I did that on purpose because I wanted to show that Esperanto don't have a fixed word order. In that case the endind "n" turns the word dog into a direct object.

Quote:Is the attraction of using kana for grammar due to learning Japanese?

No, I chose to use kana just because it was easy to make that simple script I mentioned before.

Maybe you will like to see this adaptation of hiragana to Lojban: http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Hiragana

To place the OP's question into a historical context, could we try to imagine what would have happened if native Japanese had been using English (or another Indo-european language) as their spoken only means of communication at the time they first came in contact with the Chinese culture and writing system ?

What kind of script could possibly have evolved? Would the same kind of process as the one which led to the present combination of kanji and kana possibly have taken place? Or would the flectional nature of IE languages have impeded it?

Mere speculation, of course…

jahnke Wrote:

Quote:Do you mean "The dog sees the cat"?

No, I did that on purpose because I wanted to show that Esperanto don't have a fixed word order. In that case the endind "n" turns the word dog into a direct object.

Quote:Is the attraction of using kana for grammar due to learning Japanese?

No, I chose to use kana just because it was easy to make that simple script I mentioned before.

Maybe you will like to see this adaptation of hiragana to Lojban: http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Hiragana

My objection to the use of "universal" languages like Lojban is that they are in effect a dumbed down version of each participant's own native language.

aldebrn Wrote:It's crazy that modern web forums like this lack the "multi-threading" capabilities of the old news readers, letting op's initial idea get completely sidetracked by side-tangent. Many good engineering points have been raised but in the end what I gather is that Zephirot93 shouldn't try to build a language by committee . Start working on it with a friend or two, in public, have fun, and there's a 0.001% chance it'll amount to anything . Starting small and just playing around with it, rather than aiming to fulfill this large list of desiderata (multi-language support, international, etc.), increases its viability, because while it may not be the writing system for half the world, maybe it could become a writing system for a quarter of the world.

I'll be a curious onlooker till I improve my Japanese/Chinese skill. Have you finished RTK? What's your level of Japanese/Chinese?

This is exactly what my original idea was. Maybe I should have phrased everything better since the beginning and not have let myself fly with the possibility of becoming a standard thing

I agree that asking for a whole community for help might not be the best idea, so maybe a better intent would be to just look for people who'd be interested, just for fun, and then throw in ideas or suggestions. Thanks to other comments on this thread I am now fully aware of the limitations and handful of other problems that would arise from a practical point of view, but this is still something I plan to continue, just for the sake of it. I think it'd still be something that would benefit my kanji knowledge. At the very least, I refreshed a lot my latin/greek root knowledge by researching the possible kanji combinations that could replace particular stems

As to my Japanese progress, I never really finished RTK. It just didn't work for me. Rote memorisation seems to actually work best for me, but learning Kanjis out of context and that weren't of immediate use to me kind of killed my motivation. As of now (mostly thanks to my Chinese) I can read a lot in Japanese, and that's basically how I continued learning. Read all kinds of stuff in Japanese, look up unknown words, repeat. Still, also thanks to the fact that I know a lot more Chinese, the proportion of known-kanjis to kanjis-whose-japanese-reading-I-know is quite unbalanced. That's why I need Kanjis that I can immediately use in a "normal" conversation. I just learn the readings by continuously typing new words in everyday use.

As an extra bit of personal opinion, I think that continuing to learn a language in your target language is the way to go. As soon as you can understand definitions of new words in your target language, things starts getting interesting. It might even be another language you're learning. Personally, I usually learn Japanese and Korean in Chinese, which actually helps me understand specific things a lot better.