Figure 1. A few examples of complex Chinese pictographs.
Draft begun Dec. 4, 2003. Latest update Dec. 6, 2003
| Piktok to English Dictionary | Designing Piktok Glyphs | Self-Describing Glyphs | Piktok Phonetic Glyphs |
Introduction to Piktok
Piktok (Picture-Talk) is a conlang, or constructed language. It is unusual among constructed languages in that there are no "words" in this language. Concepts are represented by pictograms, symbols or glyphs, but no pronunciation or spelling is provided for these glyphs. Instead, the reader can feel free to read Piktok in his own native language, or in any language of his or her choosing. The only difficulty in doing so is that the grammar of Piktok probably differs significantly from the grammar of the reader's own preferred language so that reading Piktok with English words, for example, will sound more like ungrammatical English than a separate language in its own right.
When reading to one's self one can easily adjust to this difference, and when reading aloud or to a group one can just as easily translate Piktok to the spoken language of the audience as one reads. Because there is no defined way to speak each symbol, two speakers of Piktok might not be able to communicate verbally since they may not share the same spoken rendition of Piktok, but these same two people could communicate fluently and easily in writing because written Piktok is identical in form regardless of the native language of the Piktok user.
The Grammar of Piktok
The grammar of Piktok is presented here without any technical terms and without presupposing any knowledge of linguistics on the part of the reader. One reason for this is to make the language accessable to everyone, but the priniciple reason for making this choice is that, as the creator of Piktok and the author of this document, I myself have absolutely no training in linguistics. Consequently, I am utterly unqualified to discuss the fine points of Piktok grammar in any technically rigorous manner. Instead, I rely on straightforward explanations and copious examples to illustrate the principles of grammar which are, in the final analysis, very simple anyway. In other words, since I seem to be able to speek fluent English while remaining ignorant of its grammatical technicalities, so too can anyone learn to read and write Piktok fluently without the need to wade into the deep waters of grammatical theory.
The Piktok Glyphs
In Piktok we will refer to the pictograms or symbols as glyphs. We avoid the use of the word pictogram because many, if not most of the symbols in Piktok are not strictly pictorial in nature. While a few glyphs might resemble the words they stand for, most do not. As a general rule glyphs are designed with clarity and simplicity in mind. Anyone glancing at a page of densely packed Chinese writing will immeditaely notice how complex and cluttered each individual symbol can be. Here are some samples of Chinese pictographic symbols using ten, twenty, and even thirty or more brush strokes per symbol.
Figure 1. A few examples of complex Chinese pictographs.
Contrast these with the simplicity of Piktok symbols. The general rule, although there are a few exceptions, is that a Piktok glyph can be drawn with no more than four pen strokes.
Figure 2. A few examples of Piktok glyphs.
Glyphs can be drawn in a simple utilitarian style or in a more formal or caligraphic style. Bold and italic forms can be drawn as well as decorative "fonts", as long as the critical features of the glyph remain identifiable.
See Designing Glyphs for Piktok for more hints on glyphs.
Proper Names and Foreign Words
Spelling proper names and words that have no Piktok glyphs is done somewhat phonetically. There is no Piktok glyph for "Albert Einstein" and so his name must be spelled out. Such names could be spelled out using the Roman alphabet, however, this provides no help to the Piktok reader unfamiliar with that particular alphabet, and does tend to give the appearance of cultural bias favoring those readers who are familiar with Romanji. Rather than favor the Arabic alphabet over the Korean or Roman over Cyrillic, PikTok has a set of glyphs specifically set aside for phonetic spellings. They have no definition outside of their phonetic assigments and so cannot be confused for other glyphs that have specifc word meanings.
The Piktok Dictionary
Each Piktok glyph has an index number which is used to locate the glyph in the dictionary. The method of determining the index number, called the LOTEP number, is easy to remember and simple to employ making the job of looking up unknown glyphs relatively easy. The canonical dictionary set will be the Piktok/English and English/Piktok set. Other language dictionaries will be derived from this standard set which will be considered to be the most authoritative resource for Piktok glyph meanings. Piktok is "open source" and users of Piktok are welcome to contribute glyphs of their own making to the dictionary so that other Piktokers can use these glyphs as well. There is no ruling body or group of arbiters other than usage. If users contribute more than one glyph for a single word or concept then usage alone shall decide the survival of duplicate glyphs. Newly added glyphs will be highlighted on the New Additions page of the Piktok dictionary and added to the main body of the dictionary text.
A Few Basics of Word Order
But first a few notes on "words": When we speak of words in this document we are refering to Piktok glyphs regardless of what natural language words are used to speak those glyphs. When natural language words are used to represent glyphs we will observe the following conventions:
1. A pair of words joined by a colon such as "even:now" represents a single glyph.
2. A pair of words joined by a plus sign such as "belong+me" represents a single glyph with an attached glyph modifier.
Action Words and Their Arguments
The first thing mentioned in a sentence will the thing most affected by the action that takes place in the sentence. For example, in the sentence "John gave me the book." the action of giving caused the book to change hands, and so the book is the thing most affected by the "give" action.
Next in order of importance is the person (or thing) performing the action. In this case "John" is the agent who did the giving and he will occupy the second position in the sentence.
Third in order of importance is the action that takes place. In this example the action is "giving," or transfering ownership of the primary object.
Finally comes any elaborations that further explain the action that takes place. In this case we might wonder who John gave the book to, and this detail is added after the action itself is mentioned.
Applying these rules to the sentence "John gave me the book" we arrive at the Piktok symbol order:
Book John give me.
Notice that in the original sentence we used the past tense "gave" to indicate that this action took place some time in the past, while the Piktok translation uses the present tense "give". In Piktok the time and manner in which the action took place must be placed immediately after the action itself. In the above example we might say:
Book John give recently me.
where "recently" specifies that the action took place in the past, but not the distant past.
As a general rule actions that are unmodified can be assumed to have taken place in the recent past, or in the period of time established for the context of the sentence. For example, if a fairy tale begins "Long, Long ago and far, far away..." then any unmodified action words in the story will be assumed to have taken place long, long ago and far, far away. Lacking any specified context if I simply said "Book John give me" it would be assumed that this action took place in the unspecificed past.
Actions that are continuing even as they are spoken are modified with words like "even:now". Thus "I am losing my mind" is translated:
Mind belong+me I lose even:now.
The sentence "Mind belong+me I lose." translates back into English as "I lost my mind." implying sometime in the recent past.
Notice in this example the glyph "belong+me" which follows "mind". This is a specifier that further identifies which mind the sentence is refering to, and corresponds to the English "my mind". Specifiers always follow the word that they modify.
In some cases a specifier can be a whole sentence in its own right. For example, the English "John lost the book that Uncle Ned gave me" would translate to Piktok as :
Book belong+me book Uncle Ned give me John make lose.
Notice that "Book Uncle Ned give me" is a complete and proper sentence in Piktok meaning, in English, "Uncle Ned gave me a book." This complete sentence acts as a specifier and occupies the normal position of a specifier with respect to the noun it identifies.
It is the second occurance of the word "book" that identifies the sub-sentence as a specifier. Without it the sentence would read
Book belong+me Uncle Ned give me John make lose.
Which tells us "Book belong+me Uncle Ned give me" and "John make lose." In other words, that Uncle Ned gave me my own book and further that John caused something (probably that book) to become lost, which is slightly different in meaning from the original. The second sub-sentence, "John make lose," lacking explicit mention of the object that was lost, falls back on the object discussed in the previous sub-sentence.
When an object is mentioned more than once it is assumed that we are talking about the same object and that we mention it again only to provide more details about it. If we mean to convey that more than one object is being discussed then the glyph "also" is used to separate the objects being mentioned. For example:
Book belong+me also book Uncle Ned give me John make lose.
which translates to English as "John lost both my book and also the book Uncle Ned gave me."
Notice the occurance of the glyph "make" in the above examples. This glyph is a verb modifier that alters the meaning of the verb in such a way that the subject of the verb is no longer the person or thing who experienced the action, but rather the person or thing which caused the action to take place. In some cases the distinction is very clear and in some cases it is quite subtle. When I say that I have lost my book I usually mean that I am presently unable to find it, and that I do not know the reason or cause for it not being where I expected to find it. This leaves open the possiblity that the book was eaten by the dog or stolen by thieves. If I say, on the other hand, that I have made my book become lost that implies that it was through some action of my own that the book became misplaced. Thus the difference between these two:
Book belong+me I lose.
Book belong+me I make lose.
In the first case I am simply stating that somehow my book has gone missing and that I am not necessarily responsible for that having happened. In the second case I am actively taking the blame for having transported my book some place now unknown, unremembered, or unreachable by myself. Such action modifiers always precede the verbs they modify.
And Now Some Real Glyphs
Let's start with this sample sentence inspired by those in the previous section:
Book belong+me John make lose.(John lost my book.)
Here are the glyphs we need to know in order to write this sentence, along with a few extras just for fun.
|
I, ME |
|
|
BELONG+ME |
|
BOOK |
|
|
LOSE (fall into |
 |
MAKE & verb modifier |
 |
Phonetic "J" as in Judge. |
|
 |
Phonetic "N" as in NouN. |
 |
Phonetic "O" as in OAk. |
|
 |
Phonetic "ah" as in fAther, On. |
 |
Phonetic proper name JON, JOHN |
|
 |
MAN |  |
WOMAN | |
|
Punctuation |
|
|
FIRE |
Table 1. A few beginning glyphs.
Notice the phonetic glyphs are joined together with a horizontal bar at the top. This sets them apart from non-phonetic glyphs and makes it clear where the divisions fall when multiple names are written together as in "John Jacob Jingleheimer." Each of those three names would have its own individual bar. See Piktok Phonetic Glyphs for more details.
Now we can put the glyphs together and write our first sentence entirely in Piktok:
Book belong+me John make lose (full stop)
English: John lost my book.
Dictionaries and "Alphabetic Order"
Once we've collected more that a dozen glyphs or so we will be sorely in need of a dictionary that we can use to look up unfamiliar glyphs. But before we can build a dictionary we need to know how we are going to arrange the glyphs into some meaningful sequence so that we will be able to locate a glyph we've never seen before. But since a glyph is not spelled there is no such thing as alphabetical order.
Suppose that we have just come across these two glyphs in something we are
reading: 
How do we look them
up in the Piktok dictionary?
LOTEP Numbers and How To Find Them
The solution is to count how many time certain features appear in the glyph and to jot down those numbers in a certain order. Take a look at the first of those two glyphs.
Figure 4. Terminations and
Even crossings.
Notice that this particular glyph has 6 endpoints where a line terminates, circled in red. Notice also that this glyph has two places where an even number of lines come into a "crossroads", circled in blue. These two numbers can be used to help identify this glyph. Now let's look at the second glyph.
Figure 5. Terminations, Even crossings,
Odd crossings and Loops.
This glyph is a bit more interesting. Not only does it have endpoints and even-numbered crossroads like the glyph in figure 4, it also has enclosed spaces (loops), marked in yellow, and crossroads marked in green where an odd number of lines meet. Notice how the green crossing have only three lines coming into the intersection while the blue ones have four. That gives us some more numbers to play with. But what do we do with those numbers?
LOTEP: Loops, Odds, Terminals, Evens, Pieces
The answer is that we write those numbers down in a particular order, and use that number as an index into the dictionary. The order is chosen so that the initial letters spell out the word "LOTEP", which is the name we will give to the code number for each glyph.
Looking back at the glyph in figure 4 we see that it has zero loops or enclosed spaces, so the first digit of the index number will be zero. The glyph of figure 4 also has no odd intersections so the second digit will also be zero. There are 6 terminal endpoints and 2 even intersections, so these two will be the next two digits. Finally, the glyph is made of one connected piece, unlike the "MAKE" verb modifier in table 1 which has two disconnected pieces. Therefore the LOTEP number for the glyph in figure 4 will be 00621.
= 00621
The second glyph has 2 enclosed spaces or loops, so its first digit will be 2. It also has 2 odd intersections, 6 terminal endpoints, 3 even intersections and only 1 piece. Stringing these digits together we end up with:
= 22631
Now let's take a look at two glyphs we learned in table1.
=
21321
= 21321
Notice that both of these glyphs have identical lotep numbers. What this means is that lotep index numbers will not uniquely identify every single possible glyph. Instead, the index number will put us on the right page of the dictionary, but we will still have to scan down the page checking perhaps a dozen glyphs to find the one we are looking for. But even so, having to scan through a dozen glyphs is far better than having to scan through a dictionary of 6,000 glyphs that's not arranged in any particular order. So even though the lotep system is not perfect, it will save us a great deal of time when we need to look up glyphs we've never seen before.
