Huh. This thread, besides being really interesting from a purely theoretical standpoint, actually did provide some really interesting knowledge about Seed's pictogram, which I'd known the original "coded" elements for from ages ago, but...Well, if you look at the code, you see 4 pieces. If you look at the pictogram, you see 3 glyphs clearly, and the 3rd, in terms of the code, is sort of hidden. After looking through the catalog, I've found it! It's the little downturned u.

Actually, what happened with "knight" is that the spelling didn't change when the pronunciation did. Back before the great vowel shift, "knight" would be pronounced...Well, actually, kind of like you're choking to be honest. Like, it's pronounced so you could hear every single last letter. But that is a lot of work to say, and gradually, it just sort of dropped away from people's speech. But they were just getting into formal spelling, and didn't bother changing it, so you have the word equivalent of a snake's hip-bones.

With Seed's, I've quietly noted in my headcanons that the blended, hidden glyph is also the only one (besides the one that's represented by a number) that's not represented by a capital. I have yet to fully decide what this means in my imaginary world where it means something.

@Seed

Oh trust me I know about knight and the old pronunciation. English language history and linguistics are stuff I've studied in school and I love them dearly. Some of my favorite subjects.

That's why I picked it as the example--its silent letters (like hidden glyphs) are still extremely to the word. To just say it as we say it now you get the meaning of the word, but only when you can see it and take it apart and understand the pieces do you understand the history of it and all that entails.

I picked it for the metaphor since blended glyphs are like that too, they can look like another glyph but you don't really know what's there until you look closely. I might actually add this stuff to the other pictogram page. Hmm.

@Night

I'm glad you like it! I'm not sure how I'd begin to sort complete pictographs but I suppose it would be a bit like sorting a dictionary.

This is really cool. Gonna sit here.

@Night You could sort them any number of ways really. I don't know how I'd do it in the end, I've only ever needed/wanted my one.

@Rikka You're always welcome here. :3 If you ever have ideas for things I should add or things you would like to know feel free to make suggestions or ask questions!

@Seed That would be cool! Out of character I think of them as a metaphor for language but in-character with La I think about them with more of a religious view. I'm not a religious person myself but La certainly is and she dwells on The Twin Gods and Pictos and philosophies related to names more than I do. She would love to read anything Seed has to say about it and hopefully talk with him at length about language/names/pictos/life/whatever with him. He wrote that story for her and she's totally hooked his work now.

It's been a very fun project, I like to sort things and give them names. I started this like three years ago but the bulk of the work has been recent.

I'm glad you were able to figure out the odd parts of your pictos, that's one of my favorite parts of putting this together, sort of to give people the option of looking at the picto as both a whole and as a sum of its parts. And then there's always the idea of name building and contemplating all of the possible names. I think that the impossible names are more interesting though, and I wonder if M&A plan ahead about which glyphs can appear together and which can't, or if they just shuffle them up and put them in randomly.

And I just like seeing the art of the pictos change over time, from Gen I with its abundance of right and 45 degree angles to Gen IV with its more organic curves. I think of it as being like the change from old runes to modern handwriting because I like to compare the glyphs to languages.

I think it would be interesting to come up with a writing system that uses these glyphs, but on the other hand I am scared to because when new generations come along I want their glyphs to be treated with the same importance as the older ones. There's a really sad hierarchy that some people hold to on the site with picto generations acting like some can be better than others. I think that's absurd--no name can be better than any other name.

If I was going to make them a written language, I'd want the writer to have a lot of artistic license in how they are written. I dunno if you've looked into Mayan Heiroglyphs but they of fascinating--it's a very complex writing system that was very hard to decode in part because of the amount of creativity scribes had when deciding what each glyph should look like.

And I agree with all the things you said, especially about English. I love it because it's a language that continually had the snot kicked out of it and now it's the third most popular language in the world so I almost like to think of it as an underdog story in some ways, but that's oversimplifying things way too much and kind of ignoring that English speakers went from being the ones being invaded to being the ones doing the invading. It's also my mother tongue and of course I am very biased because of that.

You know a lot about language stuff so you might know the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (actually I t hink they call it something different now) and if you don't no biggie since I was gonna type it out in case anyone else wanted to read our conversation. It's the idea that the language you speak/think with can affect the way that you think and act. Like in English, we talk and think about time the way we talk and think about money (eg spend time, waste time, etc.) and talk about debate the way we talk about fighting (eg shoot down an argument, counter something, etc.).

I imagine that deer language lacks an emphasis on time with slightly more vague tenses than English, has little emphasis on combat and strife, and has a very heavy religious component influenced by their gods literally being the ones to have given them their language.

I've also joked before that my deer La has a "deer accent" when she tries to speak other languages but I've been intentionally vague about what that would be.