This is something else! I came across it yesterday on a web-surfing binge. I somehow ended up on a page with links to artificial languages, and the description of this one struck my fancy.

The author is a philosopher in Stavanger, Norway (immortalized by Garrison Keillor for its residents' hearty Stavanger laughter) but the paper is in English. What he does in this gigantic PDF file is construct a new language of ideographs/hieroglyphs/whatever-you-want-to-call-them. It opens up with about 50 pages of involved but readable philosophy, and then takes you through the process of creating the language. I'm not even a quarter of the way through yet, but I'm amazed by the amount of work and cleverness that must have gone into it.

The reason I bring it up here is that, in the right hands, it could be a gold mine of ideas for BYOND games! It's amazing how he combines these elegant little icons to build a huge vocabulary. It's also a good eye-opener to the amazing variety of stuff in the world... kind of like a Richard Scarry word book for grown-ups. Not that grown-ups can't still enjoy a good Richard Scarry book now and then. :)

It's a big file (over 400 pages), so if you skim over it and it interests you, you'll probably want to save it for offline reading.

Enjoy!

Ideography paper