The purpose of this page is to give people the option to think about their pictograph as both an image on its own and as the sum of other images.
Unplugged shared brilliant knowledge that has been instrumental to La's glyph catalog. I highly recommend reading what Unplugged has to say because I use the system s/he explains to identify specific glyphs.
In no particular order, PLK217, Unplugged, Shaku, and Aivilo have all been instrumental in my compiling of images of glyphs. Many of the images they supplied are linked to in the comments of this page, and Aivilo's contributions came in the form of .psd files from here.
SORTING INFO
I begin this by assuming you understand how pictographs work. If not: each pictograph is four glyphs. Each pictograph has a code to it that is four numbers and letters long. More info here.
Each glyph is defined in this thread by its generation with roman numerals, by a number/letter, and by the placement of the number/letter in the sequence of four.
I have given arbitrary names to glyphs in order to sort them in a way that makes sense to me. Alternative name suggestions and categorizations are welcome. I'll add them to the description.
I use sub-categorizations of "greater", "lesser", and "intermediate" to divide groups of glyphs that are similar in all but size. Greater glyphs span across all of most of a pictograph while lesser glyphs do not.
GLYPHS (click to enlarge by generation)
Glyphs are sorted by generation and then alphabetically by the name I've given them, and then by their location in the sequence of the URL. Click the name of the generation to show the glyphs for it. The images are hidden by default to save you load time.
This Generation builds upon its predecessors while introducing many more curves and curls. It does not have any true polygons like the others in its family. Most impressively, many of its glyphs "line up" with other glyphs and allow them to appear merged. This was almost possible in past generations, but almost always obvious in Gen I and extremely rare in Gen II.
Angle, Acute, Greater: Compare and contrast with Generation II. 1E, 2T, 2Y, 2X
Angle, Acute, Lesser: 2Y
Arc, Greater: 2W, 3l
Arc, Lesser: 1I, 3p, 41
Circle, Lesser: Compare and contrast with Generation II. 4z, 40
Circle, Three-Quarter: 1F, 2U, 3i, 3j, 4x, 4y
Curl: 1G, 1J, 2V, 3k
Leaf, lesser: 1L, 2Z, 3m, 3n, 3o, 44, 45
Leaf, intermediate: 3m, 3n
Line, Greater: Compare and contrast with Generations I and II. 4u
Pick: Named for the tool it resembles. 1C, 1M, 2c, 3r
Raindrop, Greater: When the pointed side is down, they could be called icicles. 1H, 1K, 2d, 3s, 47
Raindrop, Lesser: 2R, 2a, 3g, 4w, 43
Semicircle: Distinguished from other arcs in that if you completed the circle it would fit in the pictograph. 1A, 2P, 3e, 4t
Sprout: 4v, 46
Thorn: 1B, 1N, 1O, 2Q, 3f
Turnaround: Compare and contrast with Generation I. 1D, 2S, 2b, 3h, 3q, 42.
This generation contains a mix of straight and curved lines and no true polygons except for some regular rectangles. This section is a work in progress.
Arc, Greater: Compare and contrast Generation I. 3i, 4t
Arc, Lesser: Compare and contrast Generations I and II. 1C, 3j, 4y, 40
Bow: As the weapon. 2c, 3q
Branch: Like the branch of a tree reaching skyward. 3f, 3n
Crook: Bears resemblance to a shepherd's crook. 2X, 3m, 44
Curve, Odd-Toed Ungulate: Named for its horseshoe resemblance. 1D
Curve, unnamed form 1: Not sure what to call this arrangement of the curve. 1F, 3g, 4u, 42
Curve, unnamed form 2: Not sure what to call this arrangement of the curve. 1I, 1O
Curve, unnamed form 3: Not sure what to call this arrangement of the curve. 1L, 2P, 2U, 3p
Fiddlehead, Greater, Angular: Compare and contrast with Generation I's fiddleheads. 1J, 4x
Fiddlehead, Lesser, Angular: Compare and contrast with Generation I's fiddleheads. 1B, 2Y
Fishhook: 4v, 4w
Line, Greater: Compare and Contrast with Generations I, II, and III. 1H, 1N, 3s
Line, Lesser: Compare and contrast with Generations I and II. 2Q, 41
Multiple Angles, Five: 1K, 2Z, 3o, 43
Quadrilateral, Equilateral: Compare and contrast with Generations I and II. 1G, 2V, 3k, 4z
Root: As a root under a plant. 2d, 47
Seed, Almond:: 2R, 2S, 3h, 3r, 46
Seed, Sunflower: 1E, 2T
Stone, Greater: 1A, 2a, 3e
Stone, Lesser: 2b
Wishbone: 1M, 2W, 3l, 45
AFTERWORD
Questions, comments, and suggestions for other names for symbols would be loved. Anything you have to say about pictographs either here or in the other thread where I talk about pictographs I would love to hear.
I love sorting and organizing things, and seeing all this art taken apart so I could sort it and appreciate the parts is almost a religious sort of experience/pleasure for me. It's what I imagine pigs feel like when they roll in mud.
Huh. This thread, besides being really interesting from a purely theoretical standpoint, actually did provide some really interesting knowledge about Seed's pictogram, which I'd known the original "coded" elements for from ages ago, but...Well, if you look at the code, you see 4 pieces. If you look at the pictogram, you see 3 glyphs clearly, and the 3rd, in terms of the code, is sort of hidden. After looking through the catalog, I've found it! It's the little downturned u.
Yes, I've noticed that about Seed's picto before actually! Some glyphs blend into each other very sneakily and are harder to pull apart.
I imagine that those invisible glyphs that blend in and hide among others are like silent letters in English (and other languages that aren't written like they sound that have silent characters). Like the word knight for instance. There's a lot of information there that matters, it just isn't said out loud.
Actually, what happened with "knight" is that the spelling didn't change when the pronunciation did. Back before the great vowel shift, "knight" would be pronounced...Well, actually, kind of like you're choking to be honest. Like, it's pronounced so you could hear every single last letter. But that is a lot of work to say, and gradually, it just sort of dropped away from people's speech. But they were just getting into formal spelling, and didn't bother changing it, so you have the word equivalent of a snake's hip-bones.
With Seed's, I've quietly noted in my headcanons that the blended, hidden glyph is also the only one (besides the one that's represented by a number) that's not represented by a capital. I have yet to fully decide what this means in my imaginary world where it means something.
This is amazing. *hugs* I love organizing too, and I had ideas of making like a chart of all the pictos I own and sort them by generation. Not that, that really matters but hey its an idea. B)
Oh trust me I know about knight and the old pronunciation. English language history and linguistics are stuff I've studied in school and I love them dearly. Some of my favorite subjects.
That's why I picked it as the example--its silent letters (like hidden glyphs) are still extremely to the word. To just say it as we say it now you get the meaning of the word, but only when you can see it and take it apart and understand the pieces do you understand the history of it and all that entails.
I picked it for the metaphor since blended glyphs are like that too, they can look like another glyph but you don't really know what's there until you look closely. I might actually add this stuff to the other pictogram page. Hmm.
@Night
I'm glad you like it! I'm not sure how I'd begin to sort complete pictographs but I suppose it would be a bit like sorting a dictionary.
Well I was thinking of gathering all my pictos and changing them to have a transparent background. Then just making rows of pictos horizontally in a box-like fashion possibly with a border and identification name on top or below the box.
It might be a fun thing to add; certainly, I'm tempted to write about it from Seed's perspective a bit. I'll make sure you see it if I do! I will say that I did have a reason for pointing it out, but I can't seem to explain it without going on a paragraphs-long ramble, one which I'm not sure serves a point.
@Night You could sort them any number of ways really. I don't know how I'd do it in the end, I've only ever needed/wanted my one.
@Rikka You're always welcome here. :3 If you ever have ideas for things I should add or things you would like to know feel free to make suggestions or ask questions!
@Seed That would be cool! Out of character I think of them as a metaphor for language but in-character with La I think about them with more of a religious view. I'm not a religious person myself but La certainly is and she dwells on The Twin Gods and Pictos and philosophies related to names more than I do. She would love to read anything Seed has to say about it and hopefully talk with him at length about language/names/pictos/life/whatever with him. He wrote that story for her and she's totally hooked his work now.
I love this! Must've been a lot of work too, really appreciate you doing it! I got two odd pictograms and it's kind of funny to see how they happend. They're both from an entire string of four, like the semicircle in gen3 and quadrilateral in 4. I can really imagine some pictograms with this that would be cool to see.
It's been a very fun project, I like to sort things and give them names. I started this like three years ago but the bulk of the work has been recent.
I'm glad you were able to figure out the odd parts of your pictos, that's one of my favorite parts of putting this together, sort of to give people the option of looking at the picto as both a whole and as a sum of its parts. And then there's always the idea of name building and contemplating all of the possible names. I think that the impossible names are more interesting though, and I wonder if M&A plan ahead about which glyphs can appear together and which can't, or if they just shuffle them up and put them in randomly.
And I just like seeing the art of the pictos change over time, from Gen I with its abundance of right and 45 degree angles to Gen IV with its more organic curves. I think of it as being like the change from old runes to modern handwriting because I like to compare the glyphs to languages.
I think to Seed it's both language and philosophy; on the one hand, when Seed writes, it's definitely in forest glyphs and not in Roman characters -- actually, having this catalog might help me draw what he ooks like at work, since while I assume the whole lexicon isn't limited quite as strictly as names, it'd definitely contain these shapes.
On the other hand, language is a philosophical thing: if you look at the English language, you can understand the history of its people -- you can see the waves of invaders and conquerors, coming in and mingling into the population and the language, then the stabilizing of their own identity in terms of the accent and pronunciation that's distinct from how things like vowels would have been handled by said invaders of the past. You can see the sea-faring colonists building empires of trading concepts; the result is hodgepodge, which suits the speakers of English well. And that could just be called history, but I'd say any sufficiently felt history is philosophy, because there's a character and a perspective to it. I'm not sure about religious, but in a world where the first word that exists in any person's awareness, the first writing any person sees is, you know... a giant glowing glyph granted by the gods hanging above their head, and that is their name in an indisputable way... I think language would then, naturally, have a sort of religious component. I think the two ideas, in this context, compliment each other, even before you add in that it's the task of the poet to, as Blake might put it, "see a world in a grain of sand."
I think it would be interesting to come up with a writing system that uses these glyphs, but on the other hand I am scared to because when new generations come along I want their glyphs to be treated with the same importance as the older ones. There's a really sad hierarchy that some people hold to on the site with picto generations acting like some can be better than others. I think that's absurd--no name can be better than any other name.
If I was going to make them a written language, I'd want the writer to have a lot of artistic license in how they are written. I dunno if you've looked into Mayan Heiroglyphs but they of fascinating--it's a very complex writing system that was very hard to decode in part because of the amount of creativity scribes had when deciding what each glyph should look like.
And I agree with all the things you said, especially about English. I love it because it's a language that continually had the snot kicked out of it and now it's the third most popular language in the world so I almost like to think of it as an underdog story in some ways, but that's oversimplifying things way too much and kind of ignoring that English speakers went from being the ones being invaded to being the ones doing the invading. It's also my mother tongue and of course I am very biased because of that.
You know a lot about language stuff so you might know the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (actually I t hink they call it something different now) and if you don't no biggie since I was gonna type it out in case anyone else wanted to read our conversation. It's the idea that the language you speak/think with can affect the way that you think and act. Like in English, we talk and think about time the way we talk and think about money (eg spend time, waste time, etc.) and talk about debate the way we talk about fighting (eg shoot down an argument, counter something, etc.).
I imagine that deer language lacks an emphasis on time with slightly more vague tenses than English, has little emphasis on combat and strife, and has a very heavy religious component influenced by their gods literally being the ones to have given them their language.
I've also joked before that my deer La has a "deer accent" when she tries to speak other languages but I've been intentionally vague about what that would be.
Huh. This thread, besides
Yes, I've noticed that about
I imagine that those invisible glyphs that blend in and hide among others are like silent letters in English (and other languages that aren't written like they sound that have silent characters). Like the word knight for instance. There's a lot of information there that matters, it just isn't said out loud.
Actually, what happened with
With Seed's, I've quietly noted in my headcanons that the blended, hidden glyph is also the only one (besides the one that's represented by a number) that's not represented by a capital. I have yet to fully decide what this means in my imaginary world where it means something.
This is amazing. *hugs* I
@Seed Oh trust me I know
Oh trust me I know about knight and the old pronunciation.
That's why I picked it as the example--its silent letters (like hidden glyphs) are still extremely to the word. To just say it as we say it now you get the meaning of the word, but only when you can see it and take it apart and understand the pieces do you understand the history of it and all that entails.
I picked it for the metaphor since blended glyphs are like that too, they can look like another glyph but you don't really know what's there until you look closely. I might actually add this stuff to the other pictogram page. Hmm.
@Night
I'm glad you like it! I'm not sure how I'd begin to sort complete pictographs but I suppose it would be a bit like sorting a dictionary.
Well I was thinking of
This is really cool. Gonna
It might be a fun thing to
@Night You could sort them
@Rikka You're always welcome here. :3 If you ever have ideas for things I should add or things you would like to know feel free to make suggestions or ask questions!
@Seed That would be cool! Out of character I think of them as a metaphor for language but in-character with La I think about them with more of a religious view. I'm not a religious person myself but La certainly is and she dwells on The Twin Gods and Pictos and philosophies related to names more than I do. She would love to read anything Seed has to say about it and hopefully talk with him at length about language/names/pictos/life/whatever with him. He wrote that story for her and she's totally hooked his work now.
I love this! Must've been a
It's been a very fun project,
I'm glad you were able to figure out the odd parts of your pictos, that's one of my favorite parts of putting this together, sort of to give people the option of looking at the picto as both a whole and as a sum of its parts. And then there's always the idea of name building and contemplating all of the possible names. I think that the impossible names are more interesting though, and I wonder if M&A plan ahead about which glyphs can appear together and which can't, or if they just shuffle them up and put them in randomly.
And I just like seeing the art of the pictos change over time, from Gen I with its abundance of right and 45 degree angles to Gen IV with its more organic curves. I think of it as being like the change from old runes to modern handwriting because I like to compare the glyphs to languages.
I think to Seed it's both
On the other hand, language is a philosophical thing: if you look at the English language, you can understand the history of its people -- you can see the waves of invaders and conquerors, coming in and mingling into the population and the language, then the stabilizing of their own identity in terms of the accent and pronunciation that's distinct from how things like vowels would have been handled by said invaders of the past. You can see the sea-faring colonists building empires of trading concepts; the result is hodgepodge, which suits the speakers of English well. And that could just be called history, but I'd say any sufficiently felt history is philosophy, because there's a character and a perspective to it. I'm not sure about religious, but in a world where the first word that exists in any person's awareness, the first writing any person sees is, you know... a giant glowing glyph granted by the gods hanging above their head, and that is their name in an indisputable way... I think language would then, naturally, have a sort of religious component. I think the two ideas, in this context, compliment each other, even before you add in that it's the task of the poet to, as Blake might put it, "see a world in a grain of sand."
I think it would be
If I was going to make them a written language, I'd want the writer to have a lot of artistic license in how they are written. I dunno if you've looked into Mayan Heiroglyphs but they of fascinating--it's a very complex writing system that was very hard to decode in part because of the amount of creativity scribes had when deciding what each glyph should look like.
And I agree with all the things you said, especially about English. I love it because it's a language that continually had the snot kicked out of it and now it's the third most popular language in the world so I almost like to think of it as an underdog story in some ways, but that's oversimplifying things way too much and kind of ignoring that English speakers went from being the ones being invaded to being the ones doing the invading. It's also my mother tongue and of course I am very biased because of that.
You know a lot about language stuff so you might know the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (actually I t hink they call it something different now) and if you don't no biggie since I was gonna type it out in case anyone else wanted to read our conversation. It's the idea that the language you speak/think with can affect the way that you think and act. Like in English, we talk and think about time the way we talk and think about money (eg spend time, waste time, etc.) and talk about debate the way we talk about fighting (eg shoot down an argument, counter something, etc.).
I imagine that deer language lacks an emphasis on time with slightly more vague tenses than English, has little emphasis on combat and strife, and has a very heavy religious component influenced by their gods literally being the ones to have given them their language.
I've also joked before that my deer La has a "deer accent" when she tries to speak other languages but I've been intentionally vague about what that would be.