Or at least, I finally sat down and instead of thinking about it just made a script for Baranxe'i and turned it into a font. It's the first time I've actually finished such a project and while there's certainly optimisation to be done wrt ... [font terminology] stuff... I figure it's at least semi-presentable.
--
The Baranxe'i Script - Bagīraŋu Baranxe’itu
The Baranxe'i script is an alphabet with certain alphasyllabic features; vowels are usually denoted by diacritic signs and consonant characters have allographs depending on whether or not they are succeeded by a vowel. However, the concept of an inherent vowel is absent.
--
Vowel Signs - Ŋaðuraukubaŋa
Vowel signs have three shapes:
- an independent one used when a vowel starts a word or is preceded by another vowel which it doesn't form a diphthong with
- a dependent diacritic put under a consonant sign
- a diphthong-carrying form
The dependent examples use <k> as the carrier.
In native Baranxe'i, only a, e, ē can form true diphthongs (ai, au, ei, ēi), but the other forms are included for completion's sake.
As well, only <o, u> occur in Standard Baranxe'i orthography, but <ō ū> are used for historical transcription, foreign names, etc, as well as in non-standard writing for aesthetic reasons, in free variation with their short counterparts.
Diphthongs are always written by using a diphthong carrier + diacritic, even within a word. If the first vowel is written as a diacritic and the second as an independent character, it is read as a hiatus (transcribed as <'>):
kai vs ka'i
While not a primary phonetic feature, a few minimal pairs exist, suchs as
ai (interjection) vs a'i (negative preposition)
or
Baranxe'i (language name) vs Baranxei (archaic genitive of Baranxi)
--
Consonant Signs - Maupritaukubaŋa
Most of the consonant signs - those part of the central consonant series, plus h - appear in two variants, one carrying a vowel and one standing alone:
The vowel carrying examples use <i> as the diacritic.
<j> also occurs in two variants, however, these are in free variation and neither can carry a vowel; instead, it is always followed by a full vowel sign:
Finally, the signs denoting the two liquids, <r> and <l>, have three variants: one that appears only in initial position when succeeded by a diphthong, a regular vowel carrying variant and a non-vowel carrying variant.
The latter is written as a diacritic on the consonant preceding the preceding vowel
--
Other signs
One final diacritic is used to denote nasalisation; it takes the form of an <m> turned up placed above the character.
Taken together, this can lead to up to three diacritics on one glyph:
pi< ̃>r - pass.ACC
-
Furthermore, a number of ligatures for commonly used combinations exist; the most important one* is a variant of <tu>
Baranxitu, regular on the left, variant on the right
=tu is the form of the genitive clitic; while this variant can in theory replacy any instance of <tu>, it is very commonly found to write the genitive =tu.
*The only one I've come up with so far.
--
That's it so far; it obviously needs stuff like numbers, punctuation, more ligatures, maybe longer text samples.
At least the former two are already in the works!
the best you can expect is probably at some point a Cuneiform-style version of the parent script.
