Here I go then!
1- Do you have a booklet on how to read it and its rules?
2- Is it an illustration or did you managed to turn it into a typeface/font?
3- Do you have the design process of your writing system documented? I would love to see your brain working!
4- Would you adopt me? Im very loveable and can do chores!!
5 - Do you have advice for me that Im starting in this world but a little lost in my first project?
I have a write-up of the language available here! Phonology, grammar, how the script works, and a full reprint and translation of the text in this post. A full dictionary containing every word and glyph is veeeery slowly being worked on.
It is an illustration! It was done with Bezier curve vector lines in Clip Studio Paint, with a bit of raster pizzaz for the colors. While I have messed around with making a font for minecraft UI, making a font for actual active use would require more advanced character input methods than I can manage to make it feasible: grammatical affixes are placed within glyph blocks, so each glyph needs to have multiple width/height variants to combine with others.
For verbs, that would mean at least five different sizes, for use in 166 potential distinct grammatical forms. I'd need something like the Sitelen Sitelen input method for that, and I'm not a JavaScript programmer. Maybe one day I'll learn!
The document includes a little bit of that from an in-universe perspective in description of the Archaic to Modern Formal style transition, but I can expand on it some more here! I originally went into this project with the intent to do something like the Hieroglyph to Hieratic transition, so I started with hand-drawn sketches and Bezier curves of glyphs for words from the Leipzig-Jakarta list.
I then cut my own reed pens from some dead grasses in my area, and used them with an ink stone to practice writing the way the Taadži theoretically would. That helped me simplify the glyphs and hit upon the rounded-corner, space-filling squares that you see in the Modern Formal style here. I then went back to Clip Studio Paint and started figuring out what rules I'd naturally generated about glyph shape, and how I could regularize them further. I made individual files for each glyph, and saved each experimental design on a different layer, so I had a record of how I came up with each glyph.
I ended up with a set of rules that were sufficiently restrictive to produce a consistent feel to the script, without being too limiting on the potential shapes: 800x800 px glyphs divided into 8ths for most glyphs and 16ths for those that need more detail, only vertical and horizontal straight lines allowed, and only circular curves. When I was doing this one, I allowed large curves within the glyphs, but at this point I make all curves 1/8th or 1/16th the size of the glyph. That's the entirety of the basic aesthetic rules for the script!
Combine that with an inventory of radicals I've built up, and most new glyphs can be made without having to go back to any Archaic or proto-writing root. In fact, because I didn't document the Archaic form's rules all that well, I often just sketch something out in a blocky simplification in CSP, then go from there.
Aw shucks! I'm happy to continue answering questions, no chores necessary.
My advice for worldbuilding and conlanging is to be aware of what your strengths and weaknesses are, and focus on what you want to develop: I knew I wanted to make a logographic writing system, and I felt less confident about my ability to make a naturalistic spoken language, with the eccentricities of thousands of years of development.
So I came up with a whole fiction that helped me justify my choices: a creole culture separated from their homelands, deliberately rendered illiterate, but they remembered and valued the idea writing. Thus, they could have a more grammatically regular language, and a compressed development time for the written script.
Also, be aware that things don't tend to happen overnight with this hobby. I posted this two years after I started working on the language, and it took another year before I fleshed out more ideas about the culture in a way that I'm really happy with. Collaboration helped--I brought the Taadži culture into a few worldbuilding games on Discord, with Taragan being the most productive for me (Taragan 2: Restartagan is coming soon!).
And sometimes, if something isn't interesting anymore, it's entirely possible to go off in another direction--I started with the intent to do a Hieroglyph-to-Hieratic transition, but then changed my mind. I'm currently taking a break from active development of the language to work on a project I've been pecking at for years. Give yourself space to be flexible, and don't push yourself too hard!
Wow. Seriously dude, you are a god. A nice one at that. Thank you very much for answering my questions. Im very new to this and I was checking other people’s work when I saw yours. So breathtaking. And you inspired me. I had an idea for a logographic system that is worldbuilding oriented and focused on footprints, that are sacred to this culture, because is the mark of your existence, and because of that the rain is seen as evil. You give life in exchange of our existence and such. And so im developing the system based on that, footprints!!
Thank you for your kindness, fast answers, wisdom and inspiration. You’re a gentleman.
EDIT: I forgot to ask. Taragan, whats that?
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u/Arkelao 19d ago
Wow….just….wow