Essarr LoreBook

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====== Adapting Kanji to English ======
A while ago I started wondering if English would benefit from being written in Chinese characters, as the English spelling system is already something of a mess, maybe a pure logography would benefit English.\\
While I'm not the first person to come up with this idea, the other attempts I've seen have been underwhelming, to say the least.
===== Notes =====
==== Kanji ====
I'm using Kanji over Hanzi or Hanja because I'm most familiar with Kanji over the other two, and because Japanese uses Kanji in a mixed script. If English were to adopt Chinese characters, then I believe it would likely use a mixed script.
==== English mixed script ====
While thinking about this, I realized English already appears to use a mixed script. It has two alphabets (uppercase and lowercase), similar to Japan's two syllabaries (Hiragana and Katakana), and a logography. However, there appear to be far less logographs in English, and they're all almost exclusively used for short-hand. The best example I can think of is the #, which can be read as 'hash'/'hashtag'/'number' depending on the surrounding context.
==== Yingzi ====
[[http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm|Yingzi]] was something created by a conlanger mimicking Chinese characters, and one of the other attempts at creating a logography for English. While I've gone through the article, I think that Yingzi is honestly kind of stupid, but that's only because the symbols the author chose are over-complicated, and thus uncomfortable for actual use.
===== Kanji Only =====
Kanji adapted to English but without a mixed script, so purely logographic.\\
Since I haven't had the time, I haven't bothered to work on this yet.
===== Mixed Script =====
Kanji adapted to English with latin used in addition to Kanji in a mixed script.\\
Similarly to the previous section, I haven't worked on this yet.
===== English Logography =====
Since English already contains a few logographs, I figured it would make sense to mix the existing symbols together to create a unique logography. I've already identified a few symbols that could serve as good logographs, which are listed below.
==== Logographs ====
  * Numerals
    * 0
    * 1
    * 2
    * 3
    * 4
    * 5
    * 6
    * 7
    * 8
    * 9
  * Currency symbols
    * $
      * Money, Currency, Dollars (american or otherwise)
    * ¥
      * Money, Currency, Yen, Yuan
    * ¢
      * Cents, pennies, small amounts of money.
    * €
      * Money, Euro
  * Other
    * #
      * Number, Hash, Numeral
    * @
      * At, location, area
    * %
      * Percentage, division
    * ~
      * 'Around'; 'Roughly'
    * ♪
      * Music; Playful tone.
    * X
      * In regular English it's already occasionally read as ‘cross’ or ‘Christ’.
{{tag>linguas}}