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MANTRAKSHAR
Mantrakshar or Sanskritography is a constructed language conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Mantrakshar differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language. Air, mywiki:air
An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idéa idea and γράφω gráphō to write) is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.
Mantrakshar was created by Dr.Anupam Nirvikar in 2017 and It is designed to express deeper levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly with regard to human categorization
The name Mantrakshar is an derived from the mantra (mandarin(chinese) = mantrin(मंत्री sanskrit) and (mnemonic(greek) = mantra(मंत्र sanskrit) , which in the original form roughly means hypothetical representation of a language.
History
Influences
Mantrakshar evolved over years as a linguistic experiment beyond Indo-European languages in response to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Charles J. Fillmore’s case grammar into a complex, intricate array of interwoven grammatical concepts with ideas inspired by countless hours studying texts in theoretical linguistics, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, linguistic relativity, semantics, semiotics, philosophy, fuzzy set theory, and even quantum physics..
Mantrakshar was heavily inspired by cognitive linguists including George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Gilles Fauconnier,Len Talmy and L.L.Zamenhof.Esperanto was created by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. It was intended to be a universal second language for international communication. Zamenhof first described the language in Dr. Esperanto's International Language, which he published in five languages under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto
Semantics
Another vital referent is Leibniz’s project of an ideographic language called universal character, based on the principles of Chinese characters. It would contain small figures representing visible things by their lines, and the invisible, by the visible which accompany them, as well as adding certain additional marks, suitable to make understood the flexions and the particles.. Dr.Anupam states that his own work was an attempt to take up the thread of Leibniz's project..
Based on the Principles of chinese characters
Chinese characters represent words of the language using several strategies. A few characters, including some of the most commonly used, were originally pictograms, which depicted the objects denoted, or ideograms, in which meaning was expressed iconically. The vast majority were written using the rebus principle, in which a character for a similarly sounding word was either simply borrowed or (more commonly) extended with a disambiguating semantic marker to form a phono-semantic compound character.
The traditional six-fold classification (liùshū 六书 / 六書 six writings) was first described by the scholar Xu Shen in the postface of his dictionary Shuowen Jiezi in 100 AD. While this analysis is sometimes problematic and arguably fails to reflect the complete nature of the Chinese writing system, it has been perpetuated by its long history and pervasive use.
Pictograms
象形字 xiàngxíngzì
Pictograms are highly stylized and simplified pictures of material objects. Examples of pictograms include 日 rì for sun, 月 yuè for moon, and 木 mù for tree or wood. Xu Shen placed approximately 4% of characters in this category. Though few in number and expressing literal objects, pictograms and ideograms are nonetheless the basis on which all the more complex characters such as associative compound characters (会意字/會意字) and phono-semantic characters (形声字/形聲字) are formed.
Pictograms are primary characters in the sense that they, along with ideograms (indicative characters i.e. symbols), are the building blocks of associative compound characters (会意字/會意字) and phono-semantic characters (形声字/形聲字).
Over time pictograms were increasingly standardized, simplified, and stylized to make them easier to write. Furthermore, the same Kangxi radical character element can be used to depict different objects. Thus, the image depicted by most pictograms is not often immediately evident. For example, 口 may indicate the mouth, a window as in 高 which depicts a tall building as a symbol of the idea of tall or the lip of a vessel as in 富 a wine jar under a roof as symbol of wealth. That is, pictograms extended from literal objects to take on symbolic or metaphoric meanings; sometimes even displacing the use of the character as a literal term, or creating ambiguity, which was resolved though character determinants, more commonly but less accurately known as radicals i.e. concept keys in the phono-semantic characters.
Simple ideograms
指事字 zhǐshìzì
Also called simple indicatives, this small category contains characters that are direct iconic illustrations. Examples include 上 shàng up and 下 xià down, originally a dot above and below a line. Indicative characters are symbols for abstract concepts which could not be depicted literally but nonetheless can be expressed as a visual symbol e.g. convex 凸, concave 凹, flat-and-level 平.
Compound ideographs 会意字 / 會意字 huìyìzì Also translated as logical aggregates or associative idea characters, these characters have been interpreted as combining two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest a third meaning. The canonical example is 明 bright. 明 is the association of the two brightest objects in the sky the sun 日 and moon 月, brought together to express the idea of bright. It is canonical because the term 明白 in Chinese (lit. bright white) means to understand, understand. Adding the abbreviated radical for grass, cao 艹 above the character, ming, changes it to meng 萌, which means to sprout or bud, alluding to the heliotropic behavior of plant life. Other commonly cited examples include 休 rest (composed of the pictograms 人 person and 木 tree) and 好 good (composed of 女 woman and 子 child).
Xu Shen placed approximately 13% of characters in this category, but many of his examples are now believed to be phono-semantic compounds whose origin has been obscured by subsequent changes in their form.[25] Peter Boodberg and William Boltz go so far as to deny that any of the compound characters devised in ancient times were of this type, maintaining that now-lost secondary readings are responsible for the apparent absence of phonetic indicators,[26] but their arguments have been rejected by other scholars.[27]
In contrast, associative compound characters are common among characters coined in Japan. Also, a few characters coined in China in modern times, such as 鉑 platinum, white metal (see chemical elements in East Asian languages) belong to this category.
Rebus 假借字 jiǎjièzì Also called borrowings or phonetic loan characters, the rebus category covers cases where an existing character is used to represent an unrelated word with similar or identical pronunciation; sometimes the old meaning is then lost completely, as with characters such as 自 zì, which has lost its original meaning of nose completely and exclusively means oneself, or 萬 wàn, which originally meant scorpion but is now used only in the sense of ten thousand.
Rebus was pivotal in the history of writing in China insofar as it represented the stage at which logographic writing could become purely phonetic (phonographic). Chinese characters used purely for their sound values are attested in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period manuscripts, in which zhi 氏 was used to write shi 是 and vice versa, just lines apart; the same happened with shao 勺 for Zhao 趙, with the characters in question being homophonous or nearly homophonous at the time.[28]
Phonetical usage for foreign words Chinese characters are used rebus-like and exclusively for their phonetic value when transcribing words of foreign origin, such as ancient Buddhist terms or modern foreign names. For example, the word for the country Romania is 罗马尼亚/羅馬尼亞 (Luó Mǎ Ní Yà), in which the Chinese characters are only used for their sounds and do not provide any meaning.[29] This usage is similar to that of the Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, although the Kanas use a special set of simplified forms of Chinese characters, in order to advertise their value as purely phonetic symbols. The same rebus principle for names in particular has also been used in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya hieroglyphs.[30] In the Chinese usage, in a few instances, the characters used for pronunciation might be carefully chosen in order to connote a specific meaning, as regularly happens for brand names: Coca-Cola is translated phonetically as 可口可乐/可口可樂 (Kěkǒu Kělè), but the characters were carefully selected so as to have the additional meaning of Delicious and Enjoyable.[29][30]
Phono-semantic compounds 形声字 / 形聲字 Mandarin: xíngshēngzì
Structures of compounds, with red marked positions of radicals Semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds are by far the most numerous characters. These characters are composed of at least two parts. The semantic component suggests the general meaning of the compound character. The phonetic component suggests the pronunciation of the compound character. In most cases the semantic indicator is also the 部首 radical under which the character is listed in dictionaries. Because Chinese is replete in homophones phonetic elements may also carry semantic content. In some rare examples phono-semantic characters may also convey pictorial content. Each Chinese character is an attempt to combine sound, image, and idea in a mutually reinforcing fashion.
Examples of phono-semantic characters include 河 hé river, 湖 hú lake, 流 liú stream, 沖 chōng surge, 滑 huá slippery. All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes (氵), which is a reduced form of the character 水 shuǐ meaning water, indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water. The right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator- for instance: 胡 hú has a very similar pronunciation to 湖 and 可 kě has a similar (though somewhat different) pronunciation to 河. For example, in the case of 沖 chōng (Old Chinese *ɡ-ljuŋ[31]) surge, the phonetic indicator is 中 zhōng (Old Chinese *k-ljuŋ), which by itself means middle. In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic indicator; the effect of historical sound change means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today.
In general, phonetic components do not determine the exact pronunciation of a character, but only give a clue as to its pronunciation. While some characters take the exact pronunciation of their phonetic component, others take only the initial or final sounds.[33] In fact, some characters' pronunciations may not correspond to the pronunciations of their phonetic parts at all, which is sometimes the case with characters after having undergone simplification. The 8 characters in the following table all take 也 for their phonetic part, however, as it is readily apparent, none of them take the pronunciation of 也, which is yě (Old Chinese *lajʔ). As the table below shows, the sound changes that have taken place since the Shang/Zhou period when most of these characters were created can be dramatic, to the point of not providing any useful hint of the modern pronunciation.
GRAMMAR
The grammar of Blissymbols is based on a certain interpretation of nature, dividing it into matter (material things), energy (actions), and human values (mental evaluations). In an ordinary language, these would give place respectively to nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In Blissymbols, they are marked respectively by a small square symbol, a small cone symbol, and a small V or inverted cone. These symbols may be placed above any other symbol, turning it respectively into a thing, an action, and an evaluation
The main manifestations of our world can be classified into matter, energy, and…mind force. Matter is symbolised by a square to indicate that the structure of matter is not chaotic…The symbol for energy indicates…the primeval [first age] action of our planet, the throwing-up of volcano cones…The symbol for human evaluation…suggests a cone standing on its point, a position which in physics is termed labile [likely to fall, unstable]….All words relating to things and actions refer to something real, which exists outside of our brain. But human evaluations…depend upon the mind of each individual.
HORIZONTAL WRITING
first | second | third | fourth | fifth |
---|---|---|---|---|
क | ख | ग | घ | ण |
च | छ | ज | झ | ञ |
ट | ठ | ड | ढ | ड़ |
त | थ | द | ध | न |
प | फ | ब | भ | म |
VERTICAL WRITING OR PSEUDO DEVANAGARI
first | second | third | fourth | fifth |
---|---|---|---|---|
क Kafa/kappa | च chet | ट tav/tau | त tsadi | प pi/ |
ख khaf | छ chet | ठ that/theta | थ thet | फ fi |
ग gimel/gamma | ज jim/zeta | ड dal/delta | द dalet | ब bim /beta |
घ ghimel | झ jhet | ढ dhal | ध dhalet | भ bhim |
ण nan | ञ | ड़ | न nun/nu | म mim/mu |
—-
first | second | third | fourth |
---|---|---|---|
अ alif/alpha/ | आ | ए | ओ Omega |
इ elif | ई | य yin/ | |
उ unun | ऊ | व vav/ | |
ऋ | र resh/rho | ||
लृ | ल lameth/lamdba | ||
अः | ह | ||
स shin/sigma | श | ष |
The words for PseudoDevanagri are derived from the Hebrew alphabets and Greek alphabets and English alphabets also have their code sounds.(Former is the Hebrew Code word while latter is the Greek [Hebrew/Greek]
LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR OF MANTRAKSHAR
The Grammar of Mantrakshar varies with language ,While English has a different syntax and Hindi or other Indo-European languages have syntax of another type.
The grammar of Blissymbols is based on a certain interpretation of nature, dividing it into matter (material things), energy (actions), and human values (mental evaluations). In an ordinary language, these would give place respectively to nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The main manifestations of our world can be classified into matter, energy, and mind force. As opposed to Blissymbols , Mantrakshar has a unique way of representing the verbs,prepositions,adjectives,adverbs and nouns.Instead of representing the main manifestations that is matter, energy and mind force with a square, cone and inverted cone in mantrakshar we use Radicals which are added to it as a suffix, prefix or combined as a conjunct character.
CATEGORIZATION OF CHARACTERS :
- PICTOGRAMS AND RADICALS
- PICTOGRAPHIC ACTIONS
- SIMPLE IDEOGRAMS
- SIMPLE VERBS OR ABSTRACT PROCESS
- COMPOUND IDEOGRAMS
- IDEOPHONETIC
PARTS OF SPEECH
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- HINDI PRONOUNS
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- SANSKRIT PREPOSITIONS
- INTERJECTION
- CONJUNCTION
Discussion