Re: New Script

Well, not quite. I decided to do a new version of the Saalangal script,
one that was a little "fancier" than the old one. I've made up a story
that will work in my world, because i can like....do that and stuff :).

The story goes:

Around 1240 King Satcang decided that the Saalangal people needed their
own writing system, and not something derived from either the religious
script in use (a variety of Grantha), or the scripts that South Indian
traders had brought with them. King Satcang was well versed in the Indic
system of writing (meaning he had learned the variety of Grantha that was
used in texts), so he understood the basic principles of a script such as
that. After identifying the sounds in saalangal, he devised symbols to
represent the basic syllables (CV), as well as the basic diacritics for
the vowels and diphthongs. His intention was something that could
represent Saalangal unambiguously.

The script looks close to a Southern Indian script, but the letter forms
aren't derived from them. There is argument though, as the glyph for /a/
looks much like the glyph for the same in Kannada and Telugu, but that may
be coincidental. It's also possible that "ta" may be derived, because it
resembles the Indian Pallava prototype, sans top bar. It does however
follow the diacritic pattern of an indic script (such as a doubling of the
diacritic for /e/ to make the diacritic for the diphthong /aj/).

The syllable forms are simple, but still cursive, and the diacritics are
fairly "artistic". The name of the script in Saalangal is "kuraw" which
means "sounds". The script is here:

http://student.csumb.edu/dh/garciabarryjames/world/images/kuraw.jpg

 I think i may keep the other script as the one used for religious
writings (yeah, it's redundant to have two scripts, but hey, it makes life
interesting!)


See you, Space Cowboy...

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