Block Writing

Writing System

Only the simplest sentence structures are in any way comprehensible to us now. The truly complicated sentences are thus far unknowable.

It is difficult to fit even an average sentence diagram onto a page. As the Book of Thirty Words attests.

— Linguist from the Womyn Tribe

This is because comprehensible meaning can be derived from both the vertical and horizontal direction. Even though different symbols are being drawn, these perpendicular sentence structures can convey similar or radically divergent ideas.

Geographical Distribution

Floodlands

A low-lying region compared to the living area surrounding it. But during the Kean's first migration, it would have been an altitudinous region.

Outside the Floodgates

Eeat's reliefs direct their original home to be either beyond the horizon or under the Pearl Sea itself. The cravings that show this is uncertain.

Phonology

No one can say what the language Keans spoke sounded like.
However, due to the boney structures found in Kean fossils; scholars theorize that it might have had long and short guttural sounds to it. Likewise, current eeatian chooses to make its sounds based on this assumption.

Morphology

It is thought that pre-Eeatian has two voices: the rational and the irrational. Rational is used with regards to the Kean as a species and their deities. Everything else was irrational. This perception is based on the people's oral traditions and rare depictions on Keanian ruins of human being subservient.
Each sentence is written as a line of glyphs, or in other circumstances as a matrix of rows and columns. Blocks are diagrammed as being simple, connected, acyclic or rooted.

Rooted blocks are placed at the top and usually stand alone, but there can be exceptions. By intent, these types of blocks are parentless and are the equivalent of the thesis or main idea of the structure.

Acyclic blocks weave inter-between the block matrix to offer direction for reading. These type of connected blocks are less common, but far from unusual on the walls of Eeat. On their own, they are called loop sentences by scholars and their presence within a matrix is indicative of transactions.

Connected blocks are substantively meaningless utterances, equivalent to "Um" or "Huh", but that can serve as conjunctions to string ideas together.

Simple blocks are the common, but still odd occurrences, that break the uniform collection of blocks to form branches. These seem to relate an abstract or intangible concept to the overall paragraph and can often times throw the entire meaning into question.

Other than the use of blank spaces between words, sentences, and paragraphs, there are no punctuations to divide sub-clauses, quotations or questions marks, so are either signposted by the dependency labelling or by extra marker words.

Syntax

Based on the decedent block writing systems, it can be determined that a sentence can be a single verb; or consist of just the subject and object, without a verb. Words that can be either noun or verb, are disguised by the writing system, which represents their independent functions.
Keanian glyphs are in effect square grid braille cells, either made empty or filled with dots, bars, chevrons, borders, tags or other simple strokes. Much like how any object falls, the blocks in block writing are written from the top-down. That is, a sentence or corpus of texts have a maximum of six rows and four columns.
Blocks' syntax never needs to be limited to simple linear chains. One row, written in its own combination of styles, can constitute a subject, verb or object. Every word/row is syntactically dependent on the ones above it and each word may have any number of children, but can have no more than one parent.
As a consequence, there are four different standard types of syntactic relationships:
Specifier: These serve as quantifiers, determiners, associatives and proper nouns that have unique identifies modeled from the real world, as opposed from the normal abstract signs.
Argument: A word or phase of which are performing the attached verb, or being acted upon. Verbs are normally tied to a subject, direct object or indirect object; but in block writing, all such constructions are made into multiple intransitive verbs that are then chained together.
No overt distinction is made between verbs that are argumentless because the subject is either vague or functioning as standalone modifiers with no need for an argument. When a verb has more than one argument, there is no inherent order. Therefore, where temporal sequence is significant, needs to be specified explicitly.
Descriptor: Verbs, potentially with subverbs, that are subordinate to nouns; are translated as attributive adjectives when these verbs take on a noun as a parent. While a noun can be modified by any number descriptor constructions, it can only take part in one argument construction, so that one stands out as the primary focus of the clause.
However, it cannot take on an explicit argument because the noun to which the descriptor is subordinated is to be effectively its subject. Though, there is a specialized family of nouns that serve to 'nominalise' the attached sub-clauses.
Subverb: A string of verbs that can have many arguments; just as a single parent verb can have multiple modifiers and sub-clauses attached, since the syntax never needs to be limited to simple linear chains. It may not always be apparent whether a child verb is a modifying sub-verb or a full subordinate clause, but in practice any ambiguity could be resolved via further modifiers.

Substance Question

Records in block writing are taken from Eeat, which has been plunder many times over through the eons. Most ancient writings are just imprints of what was once there, but there are still undisturbed places where glyphs were carved from precious metals and rare stones:

Gold

Jade

Turquoise

Silver

Pearl

Amethyst

Initially thought to be purely decorative; a new layer of thought emerged when it was realized that there was a pattern to the drawing of the glyphs and what they were drawn from.

This meant there was another complicating element to decipher in an already impossible language.
And we're not sure if it's the material itself or its colour that carries the meaning.

— Field Researcher in Eeat

Successor Languages

• Sang Picture Writing
• Folded Blocks
• Eeatian
• Branch Writing

Spoken by
Keanians

Counting

It has been shown that this language uses two base systems: Base 2 and Base 256.

Base 2

Numbers can be identified as base 2 by the cross drawn inside the block with various combinations of drawn lines that form the sectioned perimeter, each of which have their own assigned value. This system counts up to 255.

Base 256

Numbers can be identified as base 256 by the cross drawn inside the smaller blocks made by the first cross with various combinations of drawn lines on the perimeters having even more different valued.