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Aeetlrcreejl · Joined: 08 Jun 2007 Posts: 839 Location: Over yonder

It's like that people speaking the same language will develop different scripts if they're far away and haven't had contact since...?
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eldin raigmore · Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 7:51 pm Post subject:

If a pre-literate speech-community splits in two, and the two pieces have little enough contact with each other that their scripts are independent, and this lack of contact lasts long enough for them to develop scripts, like as not their spoken languages will have evolved along separate paths to the point that they're no longer the same language; perhaps as different as Spanish from Italian, or perhaps as much as either of those from French.

But different scripts for the same spoken language arise for other reasons as well.

If some of them were conquered by Muslims and some weren't, maybe the Muslims among them use an Arabic script and the ones who were never ruled by Muslims use something else. That's happened several times IRL.

If some are Orthodox Christians and some are Roman Catholic Christians, maybe the Orthodox ones use a Cyrillic script and the R.C. ones use a Latin script. That's happened several times IRL.

Japanese has a logography borrowed from Chinese, and a native syllabary; both are in use, sometimes in the same document.

Radical-and-determiner, semantic-and-phonetic scripts like the one Chinese uses or like some of the cuneiform ones, are best suited to languages that are isolating and analytic, where every word is just one morpheme and every morpheme is an entire word; and in addition every morpheme is exactly one syllable.

Japanese is not isolating nor analytic; in some documents the roots are written in the logography while the affixes are written in the syllabary.

(Syllabaries are best suited to languages with a simple syllable structure; say, (C)(C)V(C) where the consonants that can be the second one in an onset-cluster are severely restricted.)

Korean also has or had both a logography borrowed from Chinese and a syllabary. TTBOMK Korean never used both scripts in spelling the same occurence of the same word, the way Japanese has; but I would not be surprised if some sentences in some Korean documents have some words in logograms and some words in Hangul.

There used to be languages in the Middle East that borrowed the cuneiform logography; some of them were also not ideally suited to a logography, and developed compromises with it, like many East Asian languages have with Chinese.

Does German's Fraktur count?

Finally, I don't know whether this counts, but many European languages have letters with built-in diacritics; but since the massive American influence following World War II, their typewriters have tended to have only the symbols available on American typewriters. As a result, various digraphs have come into currency to replace some of the diacriticed letters.

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So there are at least two reasons that have occurred many times IRL, for a culture to use two different scripts for its language:
(1) Borrowing the script of a nearby "prestige" culture (whether or not that other culture ever conquered the borrowing culture);
(2) Differences in religion.
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yssida · Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 253 Location: sa jaan lang

Under what kinds of circumstances? I think eldin already enumerated most of the possible scenarios.

I believe it would be plausible, provided the society is pre-literate.

In a related story, almost all native scripts in the Philippines were derived from one source. In fact, if you looked at the characters, most would be similar and you could comfortably switch from one to another, differences are mostly cosmetic. Communities developed their own version of the script, due to divergence.

Thus we have a Tagalog script, a Bisaya script, an Ilocano script....further you get Mangyan script (Buhid and Hanunoo), Tagbanwa...etc...and this divergence probably happened in less than 300 years after the introduction of the 'trunk' script.

The differences between these derivatives are not great at all. They all share one common flaw: being barely adequate to represent the complex syllable structure, lack of sufficient vowels to represent. Some of course have innovated.

Furthermore, I'll add that this divergence was far from complete also. So set a good 1,000 years for your scripts to develop (if literate already). You'd run into the problem of the two languages diverging as well. So I suggest take the invasion/outside influence route.
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miaphenthus · Joined: 04 May 2008 Posts: 28