I might eventually do what the ancient Egyptians did, and simplify the glyphs into a demotic shorthand. That is, I might reduce each glyph to a few core squiggles. Right now, I'll aim for maximum recognizability rather than ease of drawing.
Just as a quick example, look at the Formal and Demotic versions of "West Virginia", the Sunset Virgin Queen Standing Domain.
Formal | Demotic | |||||||||
|
It still looks rather complicated, but by my count, it takes 21 strokes to write the demotic version of West Virginia, while it takes about 38 strokes to print "West Virginia" in English (11 in West and 27 in Virginia.)
I'm not saying that we can make every demotic word shorter than it's English equivalent, but we can probably keep it competative.
In some cases, we can simply use pre-established alternate symbols as the demotic version:
Word | Iconic | Demotic | Source of demotic |
bull | astrology | ||
count | |||
horse | runes | ||
lion | astrology | ||
scales | astrology | ||
sun | alchemy |
Last updated May 2005
Copyright © 2003-05 Matthew White