Fish orthography

Not long ago I was having a discussion with Mossbeasts (the magnanimous friend who coded this blog for me) and the phrase “fish orthography” came up. An orthography for those who don’t know is a system of symbols or written that represents a spoken language. Fish are those things that live underwater. Both of us being massive linguistic nerds – if you couldn’t tell from the unironic use of “orthography”-, this immediately led to me to wild speculation on what exactly a writing system for fish would look like.

As I thought, a fun fact murmured up from some deep corner of my brain. White-Spotted Pufferfish can draw! These charming fish live across the Indo-Pacific, living in and around coral reefs, eating crustaceans and other fish. Another fun fact: they are the source of the infamous Japanese delicacy fugu. In most regards they are quite typical. But the males of the species have a very interesting courtship display. When they want to attract a mate, they draw highly intricate geometric symbols in the sand. These geometric circles can be up to 2 meters in diameter, and have an attracting effect on female pufferfish, although we’ll probably never know what exactly they find so alluring about geometry. These complex symbols communicate information to other members of the species, all without the need to “speak”.

You can see where I’m going with this. This is a fish pictograph! Somewhat similar to what the very first writing systems evolved from. It isn’t an orthography yet, but it’s a start.

This is the first post in what I hope will be a longtime project of developing a pictography, or possibly even a full logography, based on this first pufferfish symbol. I don’t plan to develop a full conlang; these pufferfish will “speak” English, but I’m sure the deeper in I get the harder it will be to avoid. The next post in the series will be documenting my initial ideas for new symbols and grammar, as interpreted from my “base” symbol already drawn by the pufferfish. In the future this post will also likely act as an index, depending on how far I take the project.