Writing Systems

Latin

This Latin alphabet consists of 55 letters with some digraphs, two of which are considered one letter: ch and rž. This alphabet combines the orthographies of Polish, Slovak, and Czech with some influence from Podlachian. The nasal vowels that are left from Old Church Slavonic that are also present in Polish are present in the orthography of Lyszenian. The letter x́ is borrowed from the extinct language Polabian. Ĺ represents C-l-C or l-C (like in vlnach, the ‘l’ may be written as ĺ, vĺnách wave. ‘l’ may be in the first position as in Ĺhála: she lied). Ř is used at the end of a word to replace the digraph rž, borrowed from the Polish rz, which corresponds with western and southern Slavic/rj/ (рj), usually ri, or rje/rie in these Slavic languages.

Cyrillic

The Cyrillic script that has been adapted for Lyszenian consists of 60 letters, which combines Belorussian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukranian orthographies with some unique characters and digraphs. This alphabet is rarely used with native speakers but with L2 learners from countries that use the Cyrillic script as their primary script and in some Orthodox churches. This version of the Cyrillic script uses some letters that aren't present in any modern Cyrillic alphabet. These letters are the yuses (Ѧѧ, Ѫѫ, Ѩѩ, Ѭѭ), which represent the Slavic nasal vowels ę, ą, ję, and ją, respectively. The last two are iotated or palatalized vowels. The use of the Jus’s (see above) as a Cyrillic transliteration for the nasal vowels borrowed from Polish, and O.C.S. and O.E.S. the only exception is the nasal u (ų), which uses the old letter for Jery, also called Jery with back jer (ꙑ).

Phonotactics:

• ê replaces ie when it comes before bilabial plosives (p, b), fricatives (s, z, v, etc.), and nasal consonants (n, m); this essentially makes the consonant before it stay hard instead of palatalizing it. In some cases, it does not replace ie as in the prefix and word nie, meaning no or not.

• Ě corresponds to many sounds in Slavic languages, such as je, ja, ji, a, jo, and ije, but Lyszenian mostly uses ě, but its pronunciation may be reflected in the orthography Lěs may be written as Lias.

• "O" may be pronounced as  "a" after r and l and may be reflected in orthography, such as Zloty, which may be written as Zlaty.

• Ų is written when ę and ą correspond to u, as in D̦vųk, which may be written as D̦vęk.

• Ă is an optional letter that shows where East Slavic languages insert an extra vowel, such as человек in Russian, which in Lyszenian is Čălovêk, which may be written as Človêk.

• Digraphs that consist of the letter j and another vowel are written as an I preceding the vowel instead of a j, which may convert a consonant into a palatalized consonant, notably s and z, which may be hardened when the i is reverted to a j as in Zjednočenny (united)

Punctuation

Always capitalized are:

• The first letter of a sentence;

• Proper nouns: names of persons, countries, cities, towns, villages, oceans, seas, rivers, mountains, celestial bodies, etc.: Anglija, Tichy okeán

• Possessive adjectives derived from proper names: Petrovo dialo „Peter’s work”;

• The first letter of the name of an organisation: Organizácja zjediniených národov, Komunističná partija Sovětskóho Sojuza

• The first letter of a title: Vojna i miar „War and Peace”;

• Names of holidays: Kolieda "Christmas”

• Names of divine creatures, personifications, etc.: Diad Mráz „Father Christmas”

• Abbreviations in which every letter represents a separate word: SŠA „USA”.

Not capitalized are:

• Adjectives derived from geographical names, f.ex. rússky, londonsky

• Names of languages and language families, for example. anhlijčsky, miedisloviánsky, esperanto

• Punctuation marks are used the same way as in English