A Minecraft SMP Idea

Methods of Writing

One idea I've thought of for a while is the islanders creating their writing system. It would start as a logography carved into trees or stone with flint, the system transitioning to being written with ink on paper crafted out of sugar cane. I'm envisioning boustrophedon as the writing direction to add some flair to the culture.

The system would utilize the rebus principle. And there are the different types of writing systems to keep in mind, the way they operate in relation to each other, and the languages they're generally best suited for.

Logographies encode entire words, not sounds, and are best suited for analytical languages. Alphabets encode every consonant and vowel sound simultaneously and are suited for pretty much all types of languages. Abjads encode only consonants with vowels inferred from context, and are best suited for languages with low-enough vowel inventories for the reader to infer the correct vowel. Syllabaries encode entire syllables. Abugidas use diacritics to indicate different vowels or a total lack of them following the consonant. Both of those systems are ideas for simple enough syllable structures. There are hybrid systems like logoconsonantal or logosyllabic scripts.

One thing people running conlang tutorials, save for a few, fail to point out is that whatever phonetic writing system the logography would transition to would depend on the language's phonotactic constraints. If you ask me, there are only three phonetic writing systems a logography would naturally transition to: abjads(like Egyptian hieroglyphs to Semitic writing), alphabets, and syllabaries(like Chinese writing to Japanese writing). Alphabets can also be derived from abjads, and abugidas, if you ask me, are only derived from abjads. I don't see abugias directly deriving from logographies.

And given the phonotactic constraints of the protolang, it would stand to reason that the CV/(C)V syllable structure would influence the transition from a logography to a syllabary. Given what the logographs would look like and the words they'd represent, it would make sense for those words to probably serve as names for the glyphs, via acrophony. The speakers of this language might give their script a name as well. The term "abjad" is derived from the first four consonant sounds of the Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician scripts. Might be the same thing for the term "abugida", but I'm not sure. The term "alphabet" is derived from the names of the Greek letters "alpha" and "beta", the first two of the system and script. Hangul's name translates to "people(Korean)'s writing". Dunno about the etymologies behind the names Cyrillic, Hanzi(where "hanja" and "kanji" are derived from), Man'yogana, Katakana, Hiragana, etc.

There is also the organization of glyphs in some pattern, via a line or a grid. I don't know why the Proto-Sinaitic glyphs were ordered the way the Phoenician glyphs would eventually be, but it would influence the order of glyphs in Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew writing, and so forth. If you know the history of the origins of the Latin alphabet thanks to Xidnaf, UsefulCharts, Khanubis, and jan Misali, you'd know interesting information about it. The glyphs of Sanskrit are organized starting with vowels: a, i, u, e, o, and others at varying points in relation to those five, then the back consonants, and further to the front of the mouth, saving all the approximants for last. Vowels could be for the rows and the consonants for the columns. This order influenced the syllable glyph organization for Japanese writing. With this in mind, what are the odds of the speakers of Proto-"Junglecraftish" even organizing their syllable glyphs based on anything? And what about what they'd name their script?

Aside from the logographs still being used alongside the syllable glyphs to reinforce the intended meaning, they might fall out of use at some point. And there's also the sound changes to keep in mind. Given that for one set of sound changes, I'd be getting rid of vowels between stops and liquids, and between various consonants and pharyngeals, among other sound changes that are most likely to occur, even in ways that would lead to sounds like post-trilled and pharyngealaized consonants becoming phonemic, there's a lot that could be done for the syllabary to represent the new distinctions. Similar story for the other set. Maybe.

One aspect of spelling reform involves the utilization of diacritics, and various diacritics across the writing of various languages possess their own unique names: the dakuten for voicing and handakuten for fortition in Japanese writing, the kipsatsta for sound deletion in Ilothwii, among other examples. What might the speakers of the "Junglecraftish" languages dub their diacritics?