While working on an sf story, I, like so many authors before me, became interested in alien languages. I wasn't so keen on odd words or strange pronounciations as I was in how a logical race might, over time, arrange their words into a structure where the first letter/syllable identifies the nature of the word, the second letter/syllable refines that identification, and so on.
It would, in essence, be like a game of 20 questions: determining if something is animal, vegetable, or mineral (by the first letter) tells you what options there are for the second (if animal, is it mammal, mythical, created, etc.).
In theory, a dictionary in this language would merely be pictures of the nouns. Anything more would be either redundant or impossible.
About that same time, I was building an electronic circuit which contained a seven-segment display. I became frustrated that you can't show the entire alphabet on such a display without creating odd substitutions for common letters.
These two lines of thought combined into a language with only 8 letters, and those letters being of such simple shape that they can be displayed on a four-segment display.
The thought of working out an entire English-Kalen translation was too intimidating, so I let the matter rest until I reread an sf classic whose premise was that science is a universal language. That resurrected my interest in my 8 simple letters, but as numbers.
The concept is a simple one: almost everyone accepts the idea that we will find some commonality with aliens, something which will be the Rosetta Stone that opens the door to communications. Many sf readers believe that science is the same throughout the universe, and we'll have no problems understanding another race's math and physical sciences.
So this devolved into a simple presentation: the following pages contain a grade-school-level primer for the fictional Kalen. If this were truly a representation of an alien text, it would obviously be necessary to print it out and consider all variations of what goes with what before any hope of deciphering it could begin. To avoid this, I have used most of the same basic structures as we use so as to not confuse matters beyond the norm. (My personal preference would be to place the first element of text onto the exact middle of the page and spiral out from there, but the Internet is not a good venue for circular pages.)
As you scan the pages, you can judge for yourself how easy, or difficult, it is to understand simple concepts in unfamiliar script.
NOTE: Graphics presentation has been done in a least-effort mode because this is a work in progress. There is no point in making it look pretty until it is finished and there is less likelihood that large portions of it won't be deleted.
Copyright 2005 J.Michael Matuszewicz All rights reserved.
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