Conlang General Sketch: Magic

As I said in the introductory post for my conlangs, it would be very helpful to have a writing system for magic which is as regular and functional as the writing system for mathematics. It's been tried without much success for centuries. So many diagrams have been created over the years that it seems that it should be workable. You would be able to tell what a magical drawing was about by how it looks. It could make life much easier for game masters who need glyphs and role players who want a touch more realism. The most useful version of magical writing that I know of was come up with by Dr. John Dee, court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, and while he worked on his Angelic Script for a long time, it's not the most coherent thing ever. Of course, he had the handicap of trying to make something that actually works. I just want to make something that is useful to authors and gamers.

This would be one of the most difficult items on my list of languages to create even though, like mathematics, it’s primarily a written language. A friend of mine has a book that promises to allow diagramming the logic of an argument just as a student of English would diagram a sentence. It looks like it could actually allow me to get somewhere on a logical yet magical language in a coherent way, which is a relief. I'd really like to make this work. The biggest issue, however, I suspect will be formulating the subjects to be covered. Just as math, chemistry or physics express things not normally said aloud, magic covers a very unusual set of topics. Even after I get some sort of visual grammar in mind, it will be an interesting process going back and forth between that and the symbolic vocabulary in order to make it all work together.

My Planned Languages

Designing languages is fun, and it's easy to get carried away with it.  I realize that it's unlikely I will get all of my ideas into a functional form, but the plan is to get some real development done on each. Even if they never get done they can be handed off to someone else, and failing that I'll at least amuse and educate myself.

The following list is a very brief description of each. I'll sketch out fuller plans in later posts.

• Dwarven:  Designed for gamers to actually use, this is made to be easy for English-speakers to learn. This is the only one with any real work done on it so far, and in fact I'm likely to publish something on it in the not-too-distant future.
• Parseltongue:  It was partly created for the Chamber of Secrets movie but no information seems to be on it anywhere.  So I'll do it.  It would be spectacular to talk Ms. Rowling into publishing or at least signing off on it. For one thing, it'd ensure development of probably the entire list.
• Draconic:  This is conceived as the head of a language family, and sort of a sister language to Parseltongue.
• Black Speech:  That's what Tolkien called Sauron’s created tongue for his minions, so I'll need a different name, though mine is for the same purpose exactly:  created by a big baddie to unite his disparate underlings.  Unlike Tolkien's, though, it's based not on Elvish but Draconic.
• Orcish:  Again like Tolkien’s, a simplified Black Speech, worn down by dumb underlings (orcs) who have no love or knowledge of language and little brainpower for using it.  Certainly easy to use by gamers, and possibly publishable.
• Arboreal:  I have a great idea for a language which is built of radicals and infixes, like the Semitic languages, and which uses a symbolic writing system that reflects it. The fictional speakers are a race of deeply philosophical tree-dwellers.
• Magic:  It would be very helpful to have a writing system for magic which is as regular and functional as the writing system for mathematics. It's been tried without much success for centuries. However, it seems there is a system which allows one to chart logic like a sentence diagram, and that makes it very promising.

I suspect I've left something off the list. Not that the above isn't more than enough.