Flatfingers wrote:<whistle> That is certainly detailed.
At first it reminded me of Tamil, but after looking at the abugida chart on Wikipedia I see that it seems closer in spirit to
Telugu. Were you inspired by the looks of any existing abugidas or alphabets?
(Actually, when I originally looked closely at your example, my first thought was, "Hmmm... these look sort of like English letters read in a mirror." I tried flipping them horizontally, and sure enough, some of the individual letters start to look familiar: I can see an "s" and an "a," and possibly "c" and "r" and "n" as well... but I think those are just coincidences. And yet somehow the horizontally flipped text seems to me to create words that almost feel like I should be able to translate them, where the original feels more alien. Funny.
)
As a matter of fact, I was! One of my earliest goals as I was developing it was to elicit a resemblance to the Brahmic scripts (like Telugu, Gujarati, etc.), but I avoided actually looking at any of them during the initial drafting period to avoid explicitly borrowing any letterforms. I *did* end up stealing a few letters from Thai, though. Throughout the bulk of development, I drew most of my inspiration from Ayeri, a conscript by Carsten Becker:
And those almost-English letters? You got me.
Designing >20 basic letterforms from scratch was too much. Some of the letters are completely original, and others bear resemblance by chance, but all told, I ultimately took/slightly modified:
5, 4, 3, 2, c, n, R, s, z, and G.
Flatfingers wrote:
Is there also an invented language behind the characters, or are they a direct cipher for an existing human language? I think I'm safe in guessing that this one is a cipher from English, yes?
Also, not to pry into "because reasons," but are there at least rules behind the reasons for the different non-interchangeable placements of vowels and stresses and non-consonants so that I don't have to try to sleep knowing that someone has invented a semi-randomized writing system?
No conlanging here! I simply don't have the time. So, yes, it is a phonetic transcription of English. It's actually optimized for my specific American accent, partly because I'm not terribly familiar with other accents. For instance, like me, my script exhibits the cot-caught merger.
There are definitely rules to the madness -- nothing is random.
The null consonants are probably the simplest example. One is used only at the beginning of words (and can carry both mods and diacritics) while the other is used in all other cases (and can only carry diacritics.)
It's hard to concisely explain the situation with the vowels, but it could be said that mods are standard and diacritics and standalone letters are (usually) auxiliary. Usually if a diacritic is used it is over the medial null consonant (^) or is rewriting the vowel already marked via a mod (i.e. doubling) to indicate stress. There are other uses, though.
Part of the reason why it is so complex is because I just kind of threw new features into the mix every few weeks/months instead of designing it from the beginning with all of those features in mind -- i.e. the rules and complexities grew organically as a by-product of finagling. So you can sleep easy. Or not, seeing as the semi-randomized writing system you mentioned already exists. It's called English orthography.
And don't think you're prying -- I just said "reasons" because I thought it sounded funnier