Neography and Writing systems

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15741719

> > Here's my idea of what a completely hummed language could look like, refined from my post on c/neography a couple weeks ago (here). > It only uses 4 or so different sounds, /Ɂ/, /h/, /m/, /ɴ/, /m̰/, & /ɴ̰/, all but two of which can have any combination of 5 pitches to make an arbitrary number of tones. > > I won't go into much detail on how exactly the writing system works since it's mostly unchanged from my first post about it. Tones are made by stacking pitches from top to bottom, alternating between the left and right sides. The bottommost pitch is always on the left. Words are read from top to bottom and left to right. A diagonal line can be added above the horizontal bar tones connect to to show that a tone uses /ɴ/ instead of /m/. A bare vertical line lengthens the last pitch of the previous tone and an arch connecting two tones marks something between an affricate and a diphthong, as opposed to having a slight pause (but not a glottal stop) between tones.I don't have a romanization system, i've just been using IPA with Chao numerals and an affricate marker for connected sounds. > > I probably won't ever make a full conlang out of this, but other people are welcome to expand on what i've done here. All the examples i gave in the attached picture are just sounds to show off the writing system and don't mean anything.

I really like this writing system (first posted here) but i didn't feel like making a full language out of just humming. I'm satisfied to know that it's (theoretically) possible so i've adapted my script to include some different sounds. The spoken language has a long way to go before it's usable but this writing system is already pretty much done, unless i decide to change some letters or add more characters to fit between words.

Now vowel characters alternate being on the left and the right, with the bottom one always on the left. The no-vowel character (far right in the vowels) is used when the last sound in a word is a consonent. Consonents can connect to the vowel bar on either side, but must connect to the bar above where all the characters after that sound connect. It reads top to bottom, left to right, so the characters have to be written top to bottom in order, but bits of them can cover the same horizontal space as long as the connection points are in order.

Hyphens are used pretty much the same way as in English; to connect the two halves of a long word or to connect to words that are sort of a single word already. The and symbol (&), comma, and question mark are used pretty much the same as their existing counterparts.

Here are some example sentences to show off what text in this language will eventually look like. They were drawn before i decided to include /ə/ and rhotic vowels (the second vowel bar from the right). I made some errors in the IPA transcription, so if you try to read it yourself and something doesn't line up right, that might be on me.

This script is still unnamed (it's just filed as "lang05" on my computer) so if anyone has name suggestions, i'd love to hear them.

Here's a script i came up with today for an as yet nonexistent conlang that's entirely hummed.

It's built around /m/, which can have any tone made from these 5 pitches, and can be creaky or modal. It also features /Ɂ/ and /h/, both of which can appear anywhere in a word or sentence. Tones are written by stacking the pitches on top of each other, and a block of text is read from top to bottom and left to right. When a tone contains more than 1 pitch, they alternate being written on the left and right sides, starting at the bottom on the left. Parts of the pitches can overlap horizontally but the bottommost parts must always be in order.

Two tone sticks (i don't have a good name for them yet) can be connected horizontally to save vertical space or to write part of a tone as creaky and part of it as modal. I don't have a way to connect more than 2 sticks, but i could probably make one if it ever comes up. The "keep tone" thing is for lengthening the last pitch of the tone before it. It might be unnecessary since you could just add a connected tone stick of the correct pitch. Creaky voice is indicated by a ring over the tone. Words are separated by a diagonal line through the horizontal bar the whole thing is written on and sentences are started and ended using initial and terminal /Ɂ/ and /h/ or using a little curl as seen in the creaky voice picture.

Sorry if i got the IPA tones wrong. I find them a bit limited and confusing, but that's probably just because this is my first time working with any tonal language and i'm not used to them yet. I probably won't make a full language out of this but maybe i'll reuse the writing system somewhere else.

! ! ! This is a game called chants of the sennaar and in order to progress in this game you must start to understand the writing system through context and the puzzles presented. I think this works super well and was much easier than I expected.

! I kinda like the way this looks as it makes the script predictable but I still feel like it could really be improved

!

! These two are pretty bad in my opinion as I can't really tell where the dots are meant to be and it looks very overcomplicated.

! This is the original font and I believe it can be easily written (unfortunately my artistic skill is pretty low).

I'll start with the ones I'm considering: -Clausal distinction by colour of the word -Boustrophedon (alternating direction of writing) -intent indicators

Every once in a while I sometimes think about remaking the English writing system, as is normal I'm sure😅, and I wonder what would be the most useful revision of punctuation or phonetic.

First panel of a few but I'm not sure if ill finish the whole comic. Translated myself so it's probably bad toaq 😅 but the fun is the journey.

I finally got this script to a state that I'm happy with and i think it works alright for the language. The way it works is that since every elemental word can be either CVC or CVV or CV every symbol is one consonant + the flipped form of the coda consonant on the bottom with up to three vowel marks. I hope you guys check out the nao language and keep on being kool as heck!

I'd been thinking that this place needed a proper symbol and I certainly didn't want to steal one from the reddit logo competition (even if they were ballin) so I kidnapped paid my artist friend to make this awesome logo that shows the different ways of writing over the ages. He's called Kriall btw and might be posting more neography related stuff in the future. I hope you guys love this logo as much as I do! Keep on arting you beautiful people I share a hobby with!

• Sherman's Gallifreyan guide and explanations
• Some Gallifreyan tattoo concepts
• Gallifreyan translator
• Circular Gallifreyan guide

art by u/colin_gorman12 Personally I'm a big fan of Sindarin as it is a featural system and has a great overall design that really says something about the culture of the elves. I also think it can be written in boustrophedon which is something i love to see implemented.

As this is my first real neography review I thought it made sense to do it on a conlang I know somewhat well at least in terms of community and phonotactics. Much of what I am writing here is my own opinion (it’s an art form, duh) but I hope that I can argue well enough that you’ll agree with me. I’ll go through the features and critique them as I go; as always, the sources are at the bottom of the page.

Consonant Shapes !

Positives The inclusion of trailing curves combined with flat stops at the sides of characters makes this script have a truly unique style online and makes things easier when less visible and easier for dyslexics as it is reported that unique additions and features to characters in a font make them more recognisable (1). The dip at the bottom is another feature which can be used to differentiate characters and words and preserves the overall style. The minimalist characters make this script easy and fast to write and don’t involve any hugely complex hand movements. The design of r and l being similar is good as it makes them easier to learn and more obvious that they are pronounced similarly.

Negatives As much as I love this script I believe that many of the letters look far too similar, SH is just CH but with a downstroke which itself is a form of or B C which itself is a dotless form of K, D is a flipped form of G, R is an M missing one circle, N is S missing a flick, and R looks like the inparsable consonant cluster BH (obviously this means you won’t thing it’s another word but reading is about fast recognisability not just mistaken readings).

I think the reason why so many shapes appear the same is because the style forces a narrow set of characters: only downstrokes on the right side of the character, circular motion must be at a set height, two strokes maximum (with two exceptions), the only angles are within a circle/flick or are 90 degrees. Having a limiting set of rules for neography is a very good idea as it’s what gives Derani such a specific and consistent style but I believe that in this case it leads to missed opportunities and repetition.

Vowel shapes !

These are very similar to the consonants in terms of styling and negatives however there is a flaw which I would say is major: the vowel glyphs are all the same as the consonants. This is referenced on the website and addressed with a pretty good explanation: “The vowels use the same letters as five of the consonants. As consonants and vowels alternate in words, this creates no ambiguities in sequences of CV(Q) syllables.”.

This is a unique way of representing things that could only be done in a language with as restrictive a syllable structure, something Toaq only partially fulfils as the next sentence explains that it does create enough ambiguity to warrant double vowels being marked and marking the start of a vowel onset syllables. I think the point about unambiguous vowels is moot if a new system is needed to make it unambiguous. Once again this could be due to the problem of limitations to the style of individual letters, 5 vowels only adds 100 x 39/34 so 15% (reference number 2) more characters, or perhaps this choice may be made due to learnability but I would consider adequate vowel marking an absolute necessity when it causes bad reading.

Diphthong Marking !

Generally a good idea to emphasise diphthongs if there is no specific glyph for them, personally I would have a whole glyph dedicated to them but obviously keeping the number of symbols that need to be memorised low was a clear goal here so this was good design.

Special symbols

!

This is a nice looking symbol and makes names obvious.

!

This is good in terms of design as it creates blank space at the normal viewing height for characters while being long and spikey to create contrast. Unfortunately this is a 5 stroke symbol which is a lot for something that will be used fairly often, another shape which requires much less time and takes up slightly less space would be perfec tbut I think this glyph is almost okay.

!

This glyph is good as it creates vertical visual contrast rather than horizontal meaning it shows a break in the sentence but also doesn’t look anything like the subordination mark. I really like the look of this character as it reminds me of the ithkuil 3 script which I am very fond of.

!

I think the design of this was meant to reflect the fact that it’s somewhere in the middle of the interrogative and declarative which is clever however the contrast isn’t really seen from afar and there could be much more visually distinct characters which still form a middle point like this.

!

This is too similar to the declarative end.

Variable marks

!

This is a very creative way of showing the grammar of Toaq and should be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately this often makes an unfilled space above a word, I’m sure there’s a clever way of making tone work with this system but as for now I believe it’s worth it.

Overall I believe this script deserves a lot of love for it’s wonderful style, usability online and integration with Toaq’s grammar. Derani has come a long way and still has a long way to go, so show it some love!

1 https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/dyslexiafont/ all points except 2 and 5 reference this

2 21 consonant marks + 3 tone marks + a diphthong mark + a hiatus mark + the prefix mark + 5 grammar marks +2 variable marks

3 https://toaq.net/refgram/orthography/ Accessed on 26/07/2023

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Hope this is decipherable!

I started this a while ago and only made one panel of manga and two panels worth of translation but it kept me occpied while I was sick and I really think that manga and memes and other media with a high content to word ratio is the best stuff to translate as you can have a much higher volume of stuff.

Keep on arting peeps! !

Hanzi is a system that inspires many of us who write with alphabets, it's a way of writing things that seems too complex and too beautiful to represent word yet it is used by billions of people every day. Square word calligraphy is not Hanzi however it is very much inspired by it's style: xu bing turned the roman alphabet into a more complex way of combining glyphs that looks very visually distinct. Here is the key ! I think the creation of this system goes to show that there is more to a writing system than just conveying information, the glyphs you choose, the style they're in and the way they combine are important factors in making a good script.

Keep on scripting neographers!

For more information https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/73325 and https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/swc.htm

Dotsies is a very divergent idea from what i normally find online as a script. It's very imaginative in terms of glyph shape making and is obviously incredibly dense in terms of size (not that thats generally an aim for neography). The whole concept is quite simple and in my opinion incredibly effective as it captures the alien like properties of standard galactic (the Minecraft enchanting table script) and old school kryptonian. The main thing that differenciates this script from all others is the fact it can generate fully unique shapes purely out of phonetics making this a rare alpha-logography. Before this script I never really cared about word shape, many of my first projects had hard to separate alphabetic characters and no care for the overall space that a word fills however this script has been a real eye opener: make every shape as close to a morpheme as is phonetically possible and have a variety of shapes to make them blend together to form complex objects that are more recognisable.

After analysing dotsies I've taken more care to make abuguidas that combine in morpheme unique ways and which separate out more easily. If you're working on a new script I highly encourage a unique form of combination between characters in a word like the devanagari topline (something I'm working on encorporating into sitakai) or even using vowels as differently shaped connecting lines in a type of abjad (like im doing for old Kryptonian).

I cannot stress enough the sheer uniqueness of this system however I have a number of issues with it i would love to improve upon. Unfortunately these improvements may be too difficult for me to finalize, if any of you are interested in a candidate for the world's densest writing system feel free to comment >:)

This is a post about the Zach Schneider era Kryptonian alphasyllabary and why I've around in terms of my opinion but also why i think this script can be improved. Firstly the characters initially looked far too complex and dyslexic unfriendly to be useful to anyone, the written text often looks too crowded with detail, however this is a necessary part of the Kryptonian style in these movies and the characters themselves aren't entirely impossible to understand. I think the problem with the system at the moment is the overhead details and topline. Here is an explanation of how the script works https://www.google.com/amp/s/dailyplanetdc.com/2020/09/21/understanding-schreyers-kryptonian-language/amp/. There are 6 vowel sounds with an additional slot for single consonants, the rotation determines the vowel for three of the sounds however the remaining four have no differenciation by rotation whatsoever, relying only on the small shapes above the character. In my opinion these topshapes should be removed and replaced with additional rotation and reflection (there are 8 configurations that could be followed which is more than enough). A problem this will cause is that words will be indistinct without a line keeping them separate however i believe the flowing organic shape could be improved by connecting the empty spaces of the glyphs in a way that shows extra information like grammar; after all the glyphs were made to all have at least one empty space.

This script has a lot of potential and shows real work on the part of Dr. Christine Schreyer: the shapes all fit a certain style and Kryptonian also includes a handful of logographic characters making this a dual script, one of my favourite types. I hope this great alien script follows the words of artifexian. Iterate iterate and iterate some more! !

The pic in the caption is by ykulvaarlck (ithkuil 3 rather than 4 but I love 'em both). I'd love to discuss some of the great design in tnil writing system that JQ came out with a while ago.

For one I love the system of representing triconsonantal roots as single glyphs as it's very efficient but difficult (much like the language itself) but also gives an excuse for such complex single shapes. A problem I find with a lot of "alien alphabets" is that single alphabetic characters are far too complex to be usable and look dull as they're forced to repeat.

Overall i also just love the style and uniqueness of this script! I'd like to hear what you guys think, is this type of script your preference?

Find more details on the script http://ithkuil.net/newithkuil_12_script.htm.

Some ithkuil 4 art by hlakskért-warčtra !

Picture in the caption is made by sirkles and explained by this video https://youtu.be/s-Fv_isg0lY.

Shermans is by far the most popular and was the first i really saw but my favourite style by far is the unfinished grey alien script

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Gallifreyan is a sign you can always be more creative with your script's ability to combine glyphs and with writing direction. Left or right? Fuck it, clockwise! Live long and keep making great art my whovians!

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