As those of you involved with Lavalon may by now know, the main thing I have to contribute to our little renascent would-be nation is the constructed language I've designed.
The website
http://setowu.wikia.com shows what I've done with the language so far. If you haven't looked at the site yet, I encourage you to have a look, as I think there has been a lot of progress made with it. (Also, I fixed a glitch with the Unicode-encoded alphabet I created for the language, which I didn't see using Google Chrome as a browser, but which I discovered made the alphabet look crappy on Internet Explorer...all fixed now - IE now displays the alphabet on the site as it was meant to do.)
I particularly, however, want to draw your attention to the fact that I've finally gotten things arranged on the site to show what the "characters" of Setowu look like. I deliberately organized this language so that it is similar to East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) that are written in characters. I wanted a language that could both be written with an alphabet (less confusing to Westerners) and with characters (less confusing to Easterners).
An example of how the Setowu alphabet can be used to construct characters is at the following link:
http://setowu.wikia.com/wiki/Derek_Jeter_(keropu-fupa_ze). Using the American baseball player Derek Jeter as the subject of my test sentence here, I'm showing at this web page how Setowu can be written by splitting words up into their constituent syllables and arranged into a "character" representation.
Notice how, if you wanted to, you could actually bypass learning the pronunciation of these words and just use the character symbol to represent the English word (or word of some other language). This was also something I intended. A Chinese friend of mine told me once that he could (mostly) read newspapers from Japan due to their use of Chinese characters (kanji) there...but he couldn't read them "in Japanese" because the characters would be pronounced differently in Japan than they are in China. I was intrigued by that, and this is also a language which people could, if they chose, "read" without knowing how to pronounce the words. (Another example of this...also from the world of baseball...the Taiwanese-Japanese baseball star Sadaharu Oh's real name is Wang Zhenzhi...the word "Wang" in Chinese is read "Oh" in Japanese and "Zhenzhi" is read "Sadaharu". It is, in fact, the same name in kanji.)
The link is a short extract from the fuller entry on Derek Jeter shown here, in case you want to compare and contrast:
http://setowu.wikia.com/wiki/Derek_Jeter.
Anyway, let me know what you think about this...could a language like this be useful here?
In the next little while, I'll see what I can do to add some of this language into the forum environment for Lavalon.
