Script

The Characters

In the images below, the non-IPA notation of the sound (ie the notation used throughout most of this site) is above the character and the IPA notation is below. There are fifteen consonant characters (sixteen including the glottal stop, which is grouped with the vowels) and seven vowel characters.

In the written word, no distinction is made between the symbols for [r] and [ř]; the reader must simply know when to pronounce either ([ř] is pronounced when coming after a vowel).

Vowels

Consonants

Writing

Text is written and read left to right, top to bottom. There are four lines where characters can be written in each row of characters. Consonants are written in the middle two lines, and vowels (and diphthongs) can be written in any of the four. Diphthongs are notated by writing the two vowel symbols in order in the location they occur. Below is a chart showing the placement of vowels in relation to consonants to form syllables:

Standalone vowel
- standalone vowels default to line 1
Standalone consonant
- tall consonants are two lines tall and occupy both lines 1 and 2. Up and down consonants are one line tall; up consonants occupy line 1 only, down consonants occupy line 2 only
Vowel coming before an up or tall consonant
- vowels coming before a consonant that occupies line 1 are placed on line 4
Vowel coming before a down consonant
- vowels coming before a consonant that occupies line 2 and line 2 only are placed on line 1
Vowel coming after an up consonant
- vowels coming after a consonant occupying line 1 and line 1 only are placed on line 2
Vowel coming after a down or tall consonant
- vowels coming after a consonant occupying line 2 are placed on line 3

Lines

Columns

1 2 3 4 5 6

Creating the Characters

In order to create a "flowier" script, I started with a general concept for each of the characters.

For the consonants, I created symbols indicating where in the mouth a sound was produced, whether it was voiced, and what type of consonant it was (fricative, stop, etc.) I then combined those to form a "prototype" character and wrote out each one a bunch of times to see where the character wanted to go if I was writing it fast to simulate the evolution of the system.

For the vowels, I formed a chart of where each sound occurs in the mouth, and created single-stroke symbols based off of that. I did not evolve these characters because each one already required only one stroke anyways.

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