I love it! Thank you for sharing.
I guess my only issue would be that sentences/words would feel too long, perhaps it would resemble English in that sense and I don’t know if I like it…
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- It could be obvious based on context.
- There may be an exception to the type. For example, the word for bridge would use the location marker instead of the object marker.
- You could write the word in kanji if the other two options did not work.
Yeah, I did notice how it could make those sentences too long. I might change how markers work in the future, or add kana that are a combination of multiple other kana.
What if you made some small symbols to represent the different words, to fix this issue.
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I feel like if you’re already making characters which are comprised of [consonant element] + [vowel element], you could just incorporate the markers into the first symbol of a word as well.
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Hmm… I actually kinda like that idea…
The only problem with that is that how would you decide which one would be “this” symbol and which one would be “that” symbol. Maybe we could instead split up some of the markers into multiple more strict markers. The object marker is the most used currently as so many words fit into that category. Maybe there should be a separate one for living beings, food, etc.
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.. ..-. / -.-. --- -- .--. .-.. .. -.-. .- - . -.. / -.-. .... .- .-. .- -.-. - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / - .... . / .--. .-. --- -... .-.. . -- --..-- / .-- . / .- .-.. .-. . .- -.. -.-- / .... .- ...- . / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . ..--..
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Your script is very pretty and it’s development looks like a fun project!
This made me think you might enjoy looking into Japanese stenography (手書き速記). I used to study stenography in my native language and have no prior experience in Japanese stenography, but from what I could gather online it looks really interesting.
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It looks like you had a lot of fun making this, so that’s cool! Have you considered making an entire artificial language like Esperanto? I doubt there’s much of a practical market for such a thing but it seems like the next step and something you’d enjoy doing! Could be a fun thing for a fictional story of some sort.
It sounds like you’re running into roadblocks writing Japanese by hand. I used to have bad handwriting in Japanese (and English). You might try printing out and writing example sentences on 原稿用紙 as part of your daily practice. As long as you follow stroke order exactly, you’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll muscle-memorize handwriting radicals and keeping your kana monospaced. I personally like to keep it exciting for myself by imitating Japanese handwriting-based fonts or handwriting samples.
I tried learning shorthand a few years ago, when I had a committee post that required a lot of stenography, but I just couldn’t get a handle on it. The thing that sucks about putatively obsolete crafts is that it’s difficult to find reliable tutorials and whatnot even with Google and YouTube. I had the same problem trying to learn drafting and hand-drawing blueprints/designs.
In Secrets of Mental Math by Art Benjamin, he uses a sort of improvised shorthand for encoding numbers in his head when calculating without paper. It takes a lot of practice but when I was practicing every day, I saved a lot of time on boring arithmetic.
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Oho. I was trying to work out in Japanese had any sort of shorthand, but Google just kept giving me ryakuji, which isn’t quite the same thing.
Unfortunately, this isn’t always true. Even now, there exist employers in Japan who ask applicants to handwrite their application materials and use handwriting as a judge of the applicant’s character. I don’t think that’s a very wise practice, but, from an applicant’s perspective, 仕方がない。
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Update #1
There has been some issues with the writing system that needed to be addressed. I created this update to help shorten up the sentences and rework how markers work.Multi-kana
Having one kana for every sound can cause the sentence to become too long. In order to combat this, we will have multi-kana! Multi-kana are kana that combine 2 different kana into one single one! Multi-kana only work if they are right next to each other and have the same vowel. You can't do this if they are in different words that use different markers. Below here is a chart and some rules for multi-kana.
Marker Rework
I changed how markers worked in this update. First of all, they look completely different. Second, they are now part of the first kana instead of it taking up a whole character. There are also secondary makers which can replace primary markers to make it more specific. Below this is a list of all of the markers.
That is all what this change includes. As always, if you have any ideas or problems, feel free to post them!
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HA! That’s what you think. You’ve already posted your key to the internet, and I’ve already saved it! mwahahahahahahaha!
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Well I have nothing to hide so it doesn’t even matter… Well at least not yet.
This is so interesting. I’ve also have had thoughts about how I could improve the Japanese writing system. I think part of this comes from us second language learners reading so much before learning to speak. Like my nephew can speak english fine but he can’t write it. Most Japanese are fluent speakers and then learn kanji later to represent words they already know.
Writing is supposed to represent speech. Not the other not around. It some ways I think hiragana does a much better job at matching speech than english does, because the Japanese hear speech as mora. So when they word they can immediately write in hiragana… My nephew would say writing english is not so easy.
For instance when I play Pokemon with out the kanji the writing the hiragana is separated with spaces that help distinguish words, and just being fluent helps them to read with near perfect accuracy of understand. Except maybe if formal documents we written with no kanji.
I personally wouldn’t want to get rid of kanji now that I know so much. It really helps me to understand sentences. Although sometimes I wish Japanese was more like Korean when it comes to writing systems…
How cool to have your own code though!
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I also do like kanji. I don’t want it to be all gone. It is just that it can be quite annoying to write them down. I created this writing system to be an alternative that would make writing in Japanese much easier. Only using hiragana makes it a bit harder to read. I am a slow writer, even in English. I kinda needed this. 
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Let em cook. My favorite posts are the people who think they fixed Japanese or reinvented the wheel.
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One challenge you might consider resolving: I’m a mathematician, and I’d find it quite difficult to do mathematics in this system, since you use the 2 numeral a lot with notations that look like operands. What might resolving that ambiguity look like?
Yeah, this sort of thing is otiose by its very nature, but it’s a harmless lark and an interesting thought experiment.
Japanese is an intriguing oddity among languages, especially the merger of phonetic and ideographic glyphs. I have a theory that the language is the way it is because it’s mostly spoken in one country and that one country’s government is extremely hands-on with its education system. Everyone learns how to speak their native language in school, obviously, but it seems to me that the Japanese language is a product of deliberate revision and intentional design.
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This is neat! It reminded me that @polv was posting about some other constructed scripts for Japanese the other day, you might find them interesting as well! https://community.wanikani.com/t/cashs-chaotic-study-log-and-notepad/62908/10
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