symbol project

Here's a cool project I stumbled across today: symbolproject.org.

Symbolproject.org is a multilingual wiki project for collaboratively designing ideographic glyphs, working from our own list of core universalist concepts. The idea, in a nutshell it to borrow heavily from Han Chinese characters, using what is usable, and continually polished each design over time.

If I'm understanding correctly, it's rather like an esperanto-like effort for written script.

Here's some more info from the page where I first found a reference to this:

I thought of this idea while studying Chinese characters -- many are easy to understand like person人, female 女, moon 月, middle 中, sun 日, etc. Simple symbols represent concepts and in combination (like sun+moon 明="brilliant") represent more detailed ideas. In Chinese there arise various distortions, due largely to phonetic uses for characters, like the female+horse 媽="mother" because of the "ma1" (mother) sound of ma3 (horse). There are various other reasons fow why Chinese (as it is) is unsuitable for a universal pictographic language.

Neat!

There's some good comments and criticism of the project here.

Comments

[KuniShiro]

Hi, thank you for the mention, and the link to the c2.com page, which I hadnt seen. I spent some time today dealing with the critics, which is healthy. ;)

~~~
Keep the (^),
KuniShiro