mije Wi wrote:sona sina li suli a!
pona! mi wile sona e ni: sina wile ala wile sitelen kepeken nasin ni? mi wile lukin e sitelen sina.
janKipo wrote:a! pona! As a longtime fan of Mayan, I find this is a very comfortable and familiar system. Where the glyphs come from I'll not ask, but the combinations are quite pleasant. I look forward to carved stelae with these inscriptions praising the tp equivalent of 7 Jaguar and the like.
Several of the glyphs do come from mayan:
kon,
mun,
pimeja (and by variation, all of the other colors). I'm usually not one to miss higher numbers in toki pona, but names like 7 jaguar and Mayan calendars do make me itch to develop a more complex numerical system. The way numbers are organized is still not very fleshed out in these glyphs.
janKipo wrote:sina nimi 'suwi' e nasin ni tan seme?
ken la mi ante e nimi ni. taso la, sitelen mi li kama lukin suwi kin. mi ken ala pini e suwi!
jan-ante wrote:interesting. but i have some criticism, if you dont mind.
1.
e is a good container,
pi is so-so,
li is not good, it is not expressive. try to make it more beautiful, as beautiful as
e is
2. to me,
tan and
lon are too similar, especially when they are containers. it is difficult to read, perhaps i need more practice.
3. could you please show
o as a container?
4. when you write
here mi awen ala awen, why the gliphs are arranged clockwise? isnt it contrary to you rules?
5. why
la is not a container?
6. to me, it is quite hard to understand the motivation of american people, but the usage of TV show dialogues as an exapmple is probably not the best idea
---
but despite all this criticism, i have to say this is a good job. i was thinking about a writing system of such type, but my progress is far not that good.
1. Early on
li was much more elaborate, but I kept finding it got in the way of legibility. It's not as decorative, but so far I have liked how it becomes almost transparent, allowing the other glyphs inside and around it to breathe.
2. These were some of the first ones I started working with, and I think I lost track of how similar they are when first viewed. Thanks for the fresh perspective--What do you think of this for
tan?
3. I don't know why I didn't think of
o as a container, but it really is appropriate. Since it calls attention to itself I would probably give it the same jagged line as
kin and
! -- maybe something like (
"jan ante o lukin e ni!"):
4. Good eyes! the
x-ala-x question structure is the one exception to the block order rule. This is to avoid having the verb glyph repeat on top of or next to itself, which creates a visual imbalance. The four block structure is read as a single block, with the diagonally-doubled glyph creating a visual X. Hence the X inside of
ala.
5.
la originally was a container, but there is still some question whether it is affecting the front end or the back end of the sentence ( ......... la, ......... --or-- ........., la ..........). It was easier to just treat it as a barrier between the two halves. The top part can easily expand over the beginning of the sentence though, if you like.
6. Yes, they make terrible examples, but they are the only substantial drawings I had on hand. My original motivation working with this text was to see how the drawings would hold up with TV speak and ungrammatical sentences ( I don't have a TV but I found this transcript on-line to work with). I probably should also move these translations into another topic on this forum and get some help with them, but I've been reluctant to ask other people to spend time with such vapid and disposable text. If you have some text you think would work well, I'd be happy to try drawing it out.
Thanks for the careful analysis. I want to tell you, too, that in organizing all the pictures on-line, your two-letter codes really came in handy for naming the files!
{edit 9/6/11: updated image files}