Neography and Writing systems

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

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

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!