Re: Zaik! (Hi there!) - Description of Lyanjen

>You know Matt, I love seeing different writing systems. I'd really like to
>see yours whenever you get a copy up. And yeah, i got excited over your
>Latin transcription, because i had not seen someone give c the /S/ value
>and edh the /dj/ value before in a conlang ;).
Ok. Note also that in addition to edh = /dj/, I also have n-tilde = /nj/
and l-slash (like in Polish, although in HTML I just use an l with a
strikethrough) = /lj/. Without those characters available, they're just dy,
ny, ly.

Actually, I haven't decided whether to have those be strictly /nj/
and /lj/, or to make ly a palatal lateral (/L/, Italian "famiglia") and ny
a palatal nasal (/J/, Spanish "an~o"). What would be a corresponding
monophthongal phone for /dj/?

Hm, now that I look, I find such a thing as a voiced palatal plosive, a
difficult consonant which I can't find in X-SAMPA (its IPA glyph looks like
a small capital J with a line through it - call it J-).

I'm sitting here saying, ctricpadya, ctricpadya, /StriS'p{J-a/, and it's
not getting any easier. Maybe not.

Well, maybe I could do it so that /dj/,/nj/,/lj/ are the capital dialect,
and some other dialect has /J-/, /J/, /L/.

At any rate, there are five different writing systems.

The most common, called gai'lyausp rebard (standard letterform), is
ordinary longhand handwriting, corresponding to Roman type or Japanese
hiragana. (An example is the title on my front page:
http://www.crosswinds.net/~shrislyaria .)

Then you have gai'lyausp druijes (emphasized letterform), used for emphasis
and foreign words, like italic or underlined type or Japanese katakana.

Next is gai'lyausp obecard (block letterform), which is a simplified
version of rebard used on computer terminals, typewriters (or whatever the
Shrislia equivalent of these might be), and signs - places where visibility
and clearness are key. Equivalent to sans-serif, monospaced, or LCD letters.

Finally, and most interesting, is the formal system, gai'lyausp moctard.
It's the oldest system and is used in very formal contexts, like very fancy
calligraphy is. (Examples include the motto on the shield on the front
page, and the title of the Message from the Queen.)

It's got initial, medial, and terminal letterforms, like Arabic; they're
written in such a way that the letters in a word are joined together by a
bar (nyo-lyenil, "word-link"), so it kind of looks like Hindi letterforms.
In addition, all the words in a sentence or phrase are joined by a bar
placed above the word-link, called the nyoor-lyenil ("sentence-link"). Each
word is attached to the sentence-link by its stressed vowel.

Related to the formal system is the inscription system (gai'lyausp
k'itcajam), which is the same except with simpler shapes that are easier to
chisel into rock. I got this idea from Tolkien.