This project was inspired by Urbit sigils. Urbit sigils are composed of 512 symbols that are in one-to-one correspondence with a list of 512 pronunciations. These Urbit symbols are logograms, i.e. written characters that each represent a word. Although Urbit Sigils are quite beautiful, there exists an already "good enough" logographic language with an immense userbase---Classical Chinese - written using Traditional Chinese characters. The use of Classical Chinese throughout the East Asian cultural sphere became prominent during the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD). Classical Chinese was the written standard among the ruling elites across historical east asia, with its akin to that of Latin in medieval Europe.

Consequently, there exists a large amount of Chinese-derived vocabulary across languages in East Asia (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam), similar to Latin-derived vocabulary in Europe and Sanskrit- derived vocabulary in India and parts of Southeast Asia. However, the sheer number of Chinese characters has been a continual impediment to literacy. The advantage of Chinese characters is that they encode meaning, and can be pronounced differently in different Chinese topolects. An analogy is how Latin roots are pronunced differently in Romance languages today.

Hence, a conlang could be made easier to learn by introducing a featural alphabet. Chao (1983) proposes a draft syllabary of 2085 characters, of which 80% have no homophones. These 2085 phonemes (distinct sounds) were chosen to act as a least common multiple of all such pronounciations of the characters in the Chinese varieties across China. For comparision, Mandarin has about 1100 distinct syllables, Cantonese 1300, Hokkien 1800. The information in any given syllable is enough to uniquely determine its sound in a Chinese variety. For example, sam always means 'three'(三), lit always means ‘chestnut’(栗), sim always means ‘heart’(心). It can also be used for Sino-Xenic pronounciations in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Examples are given in Chao (1983) that this low degree of homophony means it is possible to write literary or modern Chinese without distinguishing homophones with different meanings. One possibility is to make use of the Hangul letters that King Sejong of Joseon intended for the transcription of (Classical) Chinese (which was based on Chinese rime books). This would be in very close correspondence with the Middle Chinese transcription used here, with modifications only for distinctions that have vanished across all pronunciations of Chinese characters.

We briefly note here that Middle Chinese is reconstructed using rime books, which collate characters by tone and rhyme, as opposed to their radical, as is the case in most Chinese dictionaries.

1. Atkinson, Gavin (2020), Creating Sigils
2. Chao, Yuan Ren (1983), A Project for General Chinese
3. San, Duanmu and Yan, Dong, Homophone Density and Word Length in Chinese