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1) |
Generally a word is built in three levels.
- The primary, or middle, level should be the single most descriptive glyph
in the combo.
- The secondary, or upper, level makes the meaning more specific.
- The bottom level adds grammatical inflection.
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| "Somebody asked where I lived." |
| secondary level: |
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| primary level: |
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| grammatical level: |
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| [some] |
[say] |
[question] |
[bed] |
| [person] |
[question] |
[place] |
[house] |
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{past}{he} |
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{past}{I} | | |
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2) |
Ideally, the primary level should be enough to convey the general meaning
by itself, even if all the other glyphs are stripped away. In the example
above, the primary glyphs ("person-question-place-house")
provide a clearer summary of the sentence's meaning than do the secondary glyphs
("some-say-question-bed") |
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| [person] |
[question] |
[place] |
[house] | | |
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3) |
With compound words, we could simply translate the individual elements of
the word. |
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rainbow |
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graveyard |
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starfish |
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waterlily |
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atom bomb |
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sleepwalk |
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4) |
It also works with words derived from foreign compounds. |
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geology |
"earth study" in Greek. |
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metropolis |
"mother city" in Greek. |
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Deuteronomy |
"Second Law" in Greek. |
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blitzkrieg |
"lightning war" in German. |
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conclude |
"closed together" in Latin. |
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inspect |
"look into" in Latin. |
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5) |
This is not an invariable rule. Sometimes it's easier (and more useful) to
illustrate the whole rather than the parts, highway rather than high-way,
lighthouse rather than light-house, hedgehog rather than
hedge-hog.
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... not ... |
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... not ... |
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6) |
You can construct a new word by picking the glyph that comes the closest to
symbolizing the concept you hope to express, and then planting
another glyph or two in the secondary level to
differentiate this word from all the other words that are built from the primary
glyph.
For example, the sideways 8 is used on weather maps to indicate haze, but
used in mathematics to indicate infinity. When we mean the symbol in a weather
context, we'll add a weather vane, but if the symbol is meant mathematically,
we'll stick an abacus over it. |
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pastor |
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haze |
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comedy |
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shepherd |
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infinity |
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tragedy |
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7) |
Another way to build a word is to assemble a simple picture from glyphs.
In these cases, each glyph by itself conveys something entirely different, but
together, they convey the intended concept.
Blind isn't the sum of the concepts [cool]+[old]. Law isn't
the concept of [scales] as it specifically relates to [swords]. These are
visual idioms. |
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blind |
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law |
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vampire |
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night |
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hunt |
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scribe |
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8) |
For collective nouns and intensive adjectives, we could double up
individual glyphs. |
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cemetery |
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ancient |
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excellent |
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forest |
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wolf pack |
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expensive |
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9) |
Or we could translate similes and cliches into pictures. |
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10) |
We can draw a pair to show the difference. For example, two squares of
different sizes, with an arrow pointing to the bigger one. This works easily
with simple differences, like upper/lower, but not so much with complex
differences, like pretty/ugly, young/old, warm/cool. If
you can draw something recognizably cool, old or pretty,
then it can probably stand by itself, without adding a contrasting warm,
young or ugly.
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11) |
Drawing the whole to show the part: For example, a person with an arrow
pointing to his chest wouldn't mean "about to die in battle against
archers", it would mean "chest". Although this type of glyph
design is common in other picture languages, it doesn't fit easily in mine
because it's not easy to precisely align the arrow pointing exactly at the
correct part of the body glyph using HTML tables. Also, I tend to shy away
from these combos because you often end up drawing way more than you need, such
as drawing a whole house just to show the roof, or a whole face just to show
the mouth.
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