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A new script

From:Tim May <butsuri@...>
Date:Friday, October 11, 2002, 21:13
Well, I've been working on and off on a featural alphabet for about as
long as I've been on Conlang now (several months) and I've now got it
to the stage where I'm fairly happy with most of the basic concepts
and letterforms.  I don't have a scanner or a graphics tablet, so I've
made images with a vector drawing program.  It's really a compromise
between making a script that'll suit my conlang LC-01 well, and making
a universal phonetic script.

So, the consonants are here:
http://mysite.freeserve.com/butsuri/consonants1.png

They're labelled, an as such fairly self explanatory.  Not all of
these are phonemes in LC-01, by the way.  I'm not sure if a dental
lateral approximant is even possible.

The vowels and semivowels are here:
http://mysite.freeserve.com/butsuri/vowels2.png

These aren't labelled, because I'm lazy. Each set of three glyphs
arranged vertically are syllables with the same vowel.  The uppermost
is the vowel by itself, then prefaced by /w/, then prefaced with /j/
(LC-01 only has these before a vowel - I'll probably introduce some
kind of "null vowel" sign to show them independently).
These groups are arranged as following:

/i/          /u/
/e/   /@/    /o/
/a/          /Q/

(so the first three glyphs, reading down on the left-hand side, are
/i/,/wi/,/ji/.  Or [i],[wi],[ji] if you're using them phonetically.)

Finally, there's a transliteration of a short English phrase here:
http://mysite.freeserve.com/butsuri/text1.png

so you can see how the vowels relate to the consonants in continuous
text.

Anyway, as you can see, it's a fairly strongly featural script, with
everything that implies.  I think at least the various featural
signifiers are more distinctive than Tengwar, so it shouldn't cause as
much dyslexia.  The versions here aren't quite perfect, - I think the
fricative horizontal stems are too long, for one thing - but I'm not
unhappy with the general result.  Some of the vowels might change a
bit.  I've got plans for more consonant tails - pharyngeal, uvular
etc. - but as they don't exist in either English or LC-01 I haven't
computerized them so far.  What I really need now is to think of stem
onsets for other manners, like flap, trill and so on.

So, what do people think?

Replies

Tim May <butsuri@...>
Aidan Grey <grey@...>