Logogram Project/Stage 1

Japanese to Ancient Greek

• Logogram Project/Stage 1/Introduction to Japanese
• Logogram Project/Stage 1/Introduction to Ancient Greek

Idea Repository

Variety of Japanese used?

We can be flexible between Modern and not-so-Modern Japanese.

Type of borrowing?

Ran's original proposal:

Adapt to the historical fact that Ancient Greek does not contain any Japanese loans. The best scenario to follow is that the Ancient Greeks simply borrowed the idea of writing but were not heavily influenced by the Levantine Japanese otherwise. As such, it would be good if the Greeks could independently devise some (30% to 70%, depending on how things look) of the Greekograms based on what they already know about Japanograms and Sinograms.

A good way to imagine this, I think, is to imagine that there is a group of Ancient Greeks, fully bilingual in Modern Japanese and Ancient Greek, but familiar with no writing system other than the Japanese one. They initially correspond with each other in Japanese, but soon they begin to switch to Ancient Greek by adapting ideas from the Japanese writing system. Their system is then learned by monolingual Ancient Greeks. The Japanese readings would drop away (Greek has no Japanese loans), while new Hellenograms arise to fill gaps and resolve ambiguities. A mature writing system soon emerges.

The inventors would be heavily constrained by the quirks (or should I say features) of the Japanese writing system, such as:

• A dual system:
  • Logograms for content words and a large proportion of function words
  • Syllabograms for the remaining function words, as well as inflectional affixes
• Mismatch between the Logograms and actual morphemes
  • One logogram can map to multiple morphemes
  • One morpheme can map to multiple logograms
  • One logogram can map to a sequence of morphemes
  • One morpheme can map to a sequence of logograms
• Crossovers -- Japanese syllabograms becoming Greek logograms, and Japanese logograms becoming Greek syllabograms, would of course make things even more interesting. For example, there is a Japanese "syllabogram" whose only use is to mark the direct object. Ancient Greek has an accusative case. Perhaps the Greeks would see the connection.

The best analogy of the process of the Greeks inventing new Hellenograms based on the idea of Japanese characters is probably the obsolete Chu Nom script of Vietnam. Chu Nom made use of the principles of Chinese characters, as well as actual elements from Chinese characters, to create new characters for native Vietnamese morphemes. The following techniques can be used:

• New pictograms can be drawn
• Existing characters can be combined to express a combination of ideas in a single morpheme
• 90% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds. Most Chu Nom characters appear to have been made in the same way. In semantic-phonetic compounds, one half of the character is a "radical", which gives hint to its meaning, and another half is the "phonetic", giving hint to its pronunciation. For our Hellenograms, the radicals should be based on extant Japanese (Kanji) radicals, while the phonetics should ideally be based on the Greek pronunciations of adopted Japanograms and invented Greekograms.

Ollock's suggestion:

Just as a side note -- I don't have any historical background for it, but for Yeltax I built the Kedeke script starting with symbols for CV syllables that get arranged into blocks such that all but one of the symbols in the block (which can have up to three glyphs) will lose its vowel association. A similarly convoluted situation could work here -- one position is part of the onset + nucleus, another position is the coda, and clusters are resolved by breaking up the respective sub-blocks. Might also make for a very backward phonological theory for a while.

Division of Labor

Ran's original proposal:

As far as division of labour and authoritativeness goes: The Japanese people are responsible and authoritative as to things like:

• which character fits each meaning best
• how a logogram or syllabogram should be pronounced in the original Japanese
• the mechanics of the Japanese writing system
• what each radical is generally used for
• what kind of character-design makes intuitive sense

The Ancient Greek people are responsible and authoritative as to things like:

• what the Ancient Greek morphemes mean
• the final say on how to design the Hellenograms and the Hellenographic script
  • what radical to choose
  • what phonetic to choose, and what principles should be used to assign phonetics to each Hellenogram
  • (But please keep in mind that the designer of the script lives in the end of the Greek Dark Ages and would be literate in ONLY Japanese --- hence he would not know, say, what a phoneme is! So, please don't pull a hangul and dump the entire logographic script, that wouldn't be realistic nor fun at all =D)