Aspies For Freedom

Is anyone else interested in languages and orthography?  I've loved them both for as long as I can remember (they're almost certainly my most enduring interests).  I created my first personal script in seventh grade and never looked back; I've always been curious as to whether anyone else is inclined to create his or her own writing systems and actually use them frequently.

As far as languages go, I've studied French in the past and am currently seriously studying Japanese and sort of peripherally studying Korean, Russian, Esperanto, and Hindi.  How about you?

In the past I had a long special interest in russian.

I read the Hebrew & English alphabets. I'm now learning the Arabic alphabet (I already understand quite a lot of it). One day, I will learn the Greek alphabet.
I'm only fluent in Hebrew & English, but I do know a bit of Arabic, French, German, Dutch, Polish and Esperanto (as well as some other languages).

I had a friend who was an aspie and was deeply interested in that stuff. He would always expound the virtues of using a phoenetic writing system for English.

I've been studying Spanish since high school and since traveling to Mexico last summer, I'm nearly fluent. My writing isn't as good however. I've also studied a bit of Latin, Irish Gaelic (which I'm determined to learn, difficult as it may be) and American Sign Language.
At some point I may study another romance language- perhaps Italian or Portuguese.

I also have an Aspie friend who is a self-proclaimed "language geek". She double-majored in Spanish & German and also has invented several languages for her science fiction stories.

Whoohoo, how did I miss this one?  I have invented at least twenty different alphabets (some of which are sadly lost :cry: ) I've an incomplete vocabulary for a language with six grammatical genders (yes, six) and no number in conjugation, and two parts of speech--verbs and nouns.  I've played around a lot with different grammatical features, seeing how they might fit with one another.  

I have some reasonable competency in spanish and German; I'm working on learning Irish (right now, I'm on O Se's standard, as it's all I've got right now.  Next I'll go into the individual dialects), picking up a smattering of Scottish, trying to find Manx and Cornish, Hebrew, Breton...actually, anything I don't have resources on already.  I've got a welsh book, and Italian book (later, later, I must force myself to not study it!).  I've done a little Russian, and I know the letters with reasonable certainty.  

Several foreign scripts I've adapted to write MdnEnglish include Anglo-Saxon Runes, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and at one point I even turned the Linear B syllabary into an alphabet for English.  

I also invented a more phonetic script for Gaelic based on the Celtiberian syllabary, and later a more universal alphabet based on THAT, but still specifically for languages with palatized/non-palatized consonant distinctions.  I also adapted Cyrillic for Irish, resurrecting a lot of obsolete letters.  Oh well.  

Some time ago, I found a book titled The Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe.  It has the armenian alphabet, Georgian, glagolitic, as well as info on twelve (TWELVE!!!) different celtic languages, including lepontic, celtiberian, gaulish, cumbric and anything else you have never even heard of.  

I later found a website, Omniglot.com, that not only contains scripts from many and various cultures, but also codes and cants and inventions of visitors!  It lists a huge number of languages, with blurbs about their history, and if they use the latin alphabet it shows their version of it.  What I especially like to look at are the different semitic scripts and their evolution, and which letters corresond to latin and greeks ones.  

The arabic script, however, completely mystifies me, even though it is very beautiful.  I would like to learn this language sometime as well.

I LOVE omniglot.  I look at that site and think, "And I want to learn that one, and that one, and that one..."  xD  

Do you write in your alphabets a lot, or just sort of invent them for fun?

I sort of do both.  There are a couple I mostly use for art, two I use for simply writing, and a lot of others I've made up that aren't practical enough.  Most of these last are based on ideas I have, and am trying to bring to fruition; like a featural system to transcribe all possible languages.  I've got two or three of these lying arond that have a collection of marks enclosed in a cell.  I've only recently tried attaching them to a stem, and what I've got looks pretty cool as well.  I may use it in art.

I have a version of Anglo-Saxon runes I use a lot, I also use one I completely invented which also has separate numerals.  

A lot of my alphabets are just playing with ideas, though.  I'm planning to put several of them online; the notebook they're in is starting disintergrate :lol:

I've been obsessed with languages and alphabets throughout my life. The scripts I know: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari (North Indian), Bengali, the languages: German, English, French, Spanish and Hindi well, and the basics of Italian, Bengali and all the other Germanic languages.

You should this interesting forum here:

http://home.unilang.org/main/index2.php

Devanagari is a very beautiful script.

Do you have any of those alphabets or conlangs online that we can look at?

why not make an aspie language? could be cool lol...
i made up an alphabet once, but that was as far as I realy got, although I did think of designing a binary language, but decided it was FAR to impractical...

Well, my avatar is a sample of my syllabic alphabet.  It's the characters sä (a as in cat) and pi, with a dot over the sä meaning the consonant comes after the vowel.  Aspie!  

I've recently created a new deviantart account specifically for things involving my writing systems: http://www.scriobhann.deviantart.com .  I've got some other stuff on http://www.siochanna.deviantart.com , but I mostly upload photography to that one, so don't bother digging through unless you're interested in the pictures as well.  I'll be moving some stuff onto scriobhann pretty soon, once I get a new deviant ID.

None of my actual languages is digitized, however, and I don't really plan on putting them on the internet as I don't do much with them anymore.  Only one of them I've been able to find recently, and I think in time, I will finish the dictionary and forget about it.  

I have thought of an aspie language, question is, how do we get everyone to learn it?  I would like to add more inflections to English, however, and regularise the spelling.

I am very interested in languages, though more so in the past.  They were my strongest subject in school and university (though in university, I didn't major in languages and my degree isn't in languages).  

In the linguistic sphere, I'm probably most interested these days in the phonetic make-up of languages, and the International Phonetic Alphabet.

I used to think I could do that--then I met some Greeks.  And I also met some people who have made some serious study of ancient Greek, Koine, and Liturgical Greek.

The classicists' pronunciation of "Greek" actually has nothing at all to do with how Greek is or was pronounced.  It was invented by Erasmus of Rotterdam, centuries after Greek was no longer spoken at all in Europe.  What he did was assign Church Latin (an artificial dialect) sound values to transliterated Greek letters.  It might or might not have ended up resembling how one single dialect of Ancient Greek might or might not have been pronounced.  As far as can be determined, it did not resemble how Koine Greek (Greek of the New Testament era) was pronounced.  It is nothing at all like modern Greek.

It's a usable quick rule, but it's not the "best way".  The best way involves a lot of analysis.