Hangraphy

This is a project anyone can contribute to. Discuss changes on the talk page.

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Hangraphy (maybe 漢抓?) is a system for representing Indo-European roots with Han characters (漢字, hanzi). After having done so, we can add a kind of okurigana for inflections and such and we have a readymade scheme to represent all Indo-European languages. Oversimplificated? You betcha.

For an example, we can take the numbers, which are pretty basic.

1	一	*oi-[no-]	en: one, ru: один, la: unus, etc.
2	二	*dwo-	en: two, es: dos, grc: δύο, ...
3	三	*tri-	en: three, fr: trois, de: drei ...
4	四	*kʷetwor-	en: four, fr: quatre
5	五	*penkʷe	en: five, fr: cinq
6	六	*(s)(w)eḱs	en: six, fr: six
7	七	*septem	en: seven, fr: sept
8	八	*oḱtō	en: eight, fr: huit
9	九	*newn	en: nine, fr: neuf
10	十	*deḱm	en: ten, fr: dix

Since words get borrowed about so much, some diverse words in a language may be spelled with the same zi, e.g. 一 goes in English words derived from "one", such as "alone" or "only", but it also goes in words of Latin origin such as "unique" or "union".

Of course some of these words inflect, so the Latin word for "one", for example, won't just be 一, but perhaps something like 一us, 一a, 一um.

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Characters

I think a better approach would be to assign roots to each 字 first, and then flesh out the individual languages, rather than the other way around. The old stuff is still here, but commented out. --Vlad 02:40, 8 Nov 2004 (PST)

These assignments are not final - feel free to change if a better root fits.

zi	root, meaning	English	Latin	Greek	Sanskrit	notes
一	*oi-no-, one, unique	one, an, a	unus, una, unum
二	*dwo-, two	two	duo, duae
三	*trei-, three	three	tres, tria
四	*kʷetwer-, four	four	quattuor
五	*penkʷe, five	five	quinque
六	*s(w)eks, six	six	sex
七	*septm̥, seven	seven	septem
八	*oktō(u), eight	eight	octo
九	*newn̥, nine	nine	novem
十	*dekm̥, ten	ten	decem
百	*km̥-tom, hundred	hund[red]	centum			*Is this unfair to the langs who form their hundred another way? Are there any?
男	*wī-ro-, man	were[wolf]	vir
女	*gʷen-, woman	queen; quean		gyne; gynaik-
人	*man-¹, man	man
土	*dhghem-, earth	OE guma	humus; homo		मनुः (manuḥ)
不	*no-, no，not