Talk:Hangraphy

=) I'd be thinking of doing something like this for a while. --Vlad 23:56, 29 Sep 2004 (PDT)

Issues

• What's to be done about words that replace the original IE stem? If 犬 is to be English hound, then what will dog be?
• Will borrowed words from hanzi-using languages be written as in that language, like 大君 for tycoon?

  I should expect so. —Muke Tever | ✎ 07:15, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

• How do we distinguish between a native word and a borrowed word using the same character? Will they be distinguished at all?

  Hmm. We could use a kind of furigana/ruby to spell out the word... or maybe use a 字 that represents the source language as determiner/disambiguator? —Muke Tever | ✎ 07:15, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

• What do we do about concepts that differ between European and Asian langauges? There are hanzi for both older brother and younger brother while IE only has one, and there's no hanzi to distinguish cow from bull. I'm working from Japanese; there may be other characters in use in other languages.

  Well, *gwou- appears to not be gender-specific to start with, so it could just use　牛. Family terms may be a problem, we may just have to choose a "nearby" character arbitrarily and claim semantic drift. —Muke Tever | ✎ 07:15, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

• I disagree with the usage of 男 and 女. For hero, there is the perfectly good 英 (Japanese: ei; Mandarin: ying1). For queen, there's 妃 (Japanese: kisaki; Mandarin: fei1) [primarily used for princess in Japanese though]. We could invent some, for instance, by composing 女皇, or we could use digraphs like Japanese; for instance, 明日 does not decompose into anything (in contrast to, say, something like 神風).

  The roots of hero and queen originally had the basic meaning of "man" and "woman". So there. :) --Vlad 07:47, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

• What about taboo forms?
• Are there appropriate characters for prefixes and suffixes? A feminine suffix for regina and vixen would be useful, but not nearly as useful as the various suffixes Latin uses.

  A lot of the prefixes are just the regular prepositions, so we could use their 字 for them...—Muke Tever | ✎ 22:08, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

  Suffixes will be harder, as a lot of them outside a few basic ones like *-no- and *-to- they're pretty locally focussed. For example the suffix of vixen (*-i(:)n-) doesn't appear to be the same suffix as that of regina (originally *-niH2-, apparently)... For suffixes, then, perhaps we can break the root-correspondence and go for functional correspondence instead (but that'll mean establishing a standard set of correspondences, and finding a way to handle synonymous suffixes...)... Either that or just spell suffixes out. —Muke Tever | ✎ 22:08, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

• Japanese has no word for "in", expressing it as "at the middle of". Is there a 字 we could use for it?

  Hmm, there's 在, which is Chinese basically for "is located at/in". Prepositions may be another rough spot. However maybe we could some of the 字 that stand for locations that Japanese doesn't use prepositions for as prepositions (though probably not 中, which could maybe stand better for *medhyo, En. middle, La. medium, Grc. mesos). —Muke Tever | ✎ 22:08, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

Old/alt etc.

Out of the choices for *al- [old] that were put up, I suspect "老" would be the better choice, as its meaning from what I can tell is closest to the original (something like "grow [old]"). Besides "old" and "altus" it also shows up in "alumnus", "adolescent", "adult", etc. [If not actually another character entirely? hmm...]

古 seems more likely for, say, *sen-, la: "senex", whence senior, senate, etc. (though for such a simple character maybe it should go to a more common root) —Muke Tever | ✎ 22:24, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

• In Japanese, 古 (mostly) refers to the age of objects, not people, so I don't think it would be appropriate for senex. --Vlad 22:37, 30 Sep 2004 (PDT)

Problem

• Thirteen is three-ten, and thirty is thrice-ten. How do we distinguish pairs like these? It looks like this'll produce a whole lot of homographs. --Vlad 01:58, 2 Oct 2004 (PDT)
  • I like the word you coin for this. I suggest we fix this by writing down the infix, like in Japanese, ao(i)mori (green forest) vs. Aomori (place name). Maybe something like 三十 and 三回十 (or 三次十, or even 三ice十) (Granted, none of those will even look natural in Chinese or Japanese, the very fact is that they are ordering the morphememes in reverse is bad enough) - 刘 (劉) 振霖 04:59, 2 Oct 2004 (PDT)

  The -ty is not the same "ten" as |ten| is. It's from a Germanic element *tigu- (which may or may not be related) meaning something like "decad, group of ten" so we might use a separate character such as 拾 or perhaps better 什. [Similar goes for like Latin, where -gint- marks decads and -decim teens].

-to- suffix

For the suffix *-to-, which in most languages (except, um, Greek) represents a completed action, I suggest maybe 了, which in Chinese forms a similar function (marking perfective aspect). So for example en: "right" and la: "rect(us)" would be 「王了」. —Muke Tever | ✎ 06:35, 2 Oct 2004 (PDT)

• I'm not sure, but I'm guessing this developed into the Latin perfect participle. What about the thematic vowel? Would that be written, or considered part of the root? That would be nice, as it makes the conjugations appear a lot more orderly. :) --Vlad 22:05, 2 Oct 2004 (PDT)

Yeah, it's the participle. It's also the English participle and past tense in -ed, and also the ordinal number marker -th: 四了 = fourth/quart(us), and 十了 = tenth/tithe... I think we can get away with dropping the stem vowel when there's no (or little) ambiguity, but it may become a problem later... that and ablaut. It seems all fine to add letters to the end of a word but they don't look the same in the middle. We may have to import Bopomofo or some such. ;) —Muke Tever | ✎ 06:44, 3 Oct 2004 (PDT)