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Re: Curvey Scripts

From:Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
Date:Friday, December 18, 1998, 3:16
Keenan wrote:
>Nik Taylor wrote: >>
>>Well, one man's rubish is another man's treasure, I guess. I've >>always felt that the Arabic script was the most beautiful script >>I've ever seen. All those beautiful curves, I don't think there >>are any sharp angles in it, are there? That's what I don't like >>about letters like "k", "A", "L", "N", "M", etc. in English - to >>many angles. On the other hand, a script with *only* sharp >>angles (e.g., runes) doesn't look that bad to me (but no >>competition to the curvy arabic script).
Yes, the Arabic script is beuatiful. But with regards to curvy scripts, I have always thought that the Javanese script was more beautiful than Arabic. In fact, the Javanese script is even more curvier than Arabic. You'll probably like the Javanese script even more if you had the chance to see it. I'm also not particularly fond of a script that connects _all_ the letters. The Javanese script doesn't do this. But it does connect _some_ letters (conjunct consonants) and subsrcipts in a vertical direction while the rest of the letters are written horizontally.
>>
>>On a related note, has anyone here invented a flowing script >>like Arabic or our cursive, where all the letters are joined? I >>find that very hard to invent, and have given up several times.
Like I said, I'm not really fond of scripts that join all the letters. But the Boreanesian script is indeed curvy.
> >Many times. Creating alphabets was what I did on my way to >becoming a conlanger. The trick is in having the ending stroke >end where the begining stroke of the next letter will be. You can >just go wild on everything in between.
This is indeed what the Javanese script does. Each letter always starts with an upstroke and ends with a down stroke. Between these two strokes are numerous curves in various directions. I have followed this model for the Boreanesian script with beautiful results, IMHO. Regards, -Kristian- 8-)