zompist bboard

Just out of curiosity, do any of your conlangs use natural scripts, like Greek or Cyrillic that are not Roman?

They're not mine, but Martin Posthumus's languages use Cyrillic or Greek.

On this board there are a few languages written in Cyrillic or in the Greek alphabet.

Do conscripts that are intended to be direct evolutions of natscripts count? I have a conlang that uses a descendent of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

With the exception of the far-future descendant of English, all of my conlangs are written in conscripts. But I usually don't actually work out these conscripts, and just find ways of transcribing them in Latin.

In one case, I tried to work out a conscript for a natlang - namely, a Greek alphabet that was not based on the Phoenician abjad, but instead employed the same principle for Greek. Where Phoenician represents each letter by something that looks like a word that begins with that letter in Phoenician, my Greek conscript does the same with words that begin with these letters in Greek. A few end up looking the same as in actual Greek - for example, N looks like N, from neura. Others look like different letters - /k/ looks like <P>, from kephalon. Yet others are new - /i/ looks like a fish, from ichthos.

I once wanted to make a Samaritan script using Pannonian Romance language, but I lost interest.

mèþru wrote:I once wanted to make a Samaritan script using Pannonian Romance language, but I lost interest.

Was there an alternate historical backstory behind that? Some exiled Samaritans get dumped in Pannonia after the 5th-6th century Samaritan Revolts?

It was an ASB alternate history involving a consect of Judaising Christians founded in the 5th or 6th century establishing an empire in the same century that had the goal of establishing one nation ruling all of Europe. It was so historically inaccurate that using the term ASB seems like an insult to the Alien Space Bats of the successful Operation Sealion. The idea was that they establish the area of Buda in Hungary as the capital of this empire and declare the Vulgar Latin there the official language of the empire, and use the Samaritan script because its the closest script known in the time period to the Phoenician alphabet (which I chose just because that was the oldest alphabet ever.)

mèþru wrote:It was so historically inaccurate that using the term ASB seems like an insult to the Alien Space Bats of the successful Operation Sealion.

You really do not want to know what goes on in the ASB section of alternatehistory.com, then.

Makhachkala Norse is written in Cyrillic:

/p b t d ts tʃ k g q/ <п б т д ц ч к г къ>
/f v s z ʂ ʐ ɕ x ʁ/ <ф в с з ш ж щ х гъ хъ>
/m n ŋ/ <м н ҥ>
/ɬ l r̥ r j/ <лъ л ръ р й>
/æ æː a aː we oaː ɛ eː œ øː o oː je ieː ɥø yøː wo uoː ɪ iː ʏ yː ʊ uː/ <аь аь а а о о е е оь оь о о е е оь оь о о и ий уь уй у ув>
/aiː ei oi uiː æuː ou/ <ай ей ой уй ав ов>
Tone, although grammatically important, is usually unwritten, or marked with a palochka <ӏ> after the vowel.

Фадж ор, фар ешт ай щиймн, вердь намн тит щелът.
/faːdʐ² oaːr¹, faːr¹ ɛʂt⁰ aiː⁰ ɕiːmʲnʲ², vɛrdʲ¹ namn¹ tɪt⁰ ɕieːɬt²/

or: (I'm not sure how extensive vowel reduction is yet)
Фадер ор, фар ешт ай щиймен, верадь нап тит щелахт.
/faːdʲər² oaːr¹, faːr¹ ɛʂt⁰ aiː⁰ ɕiːmʲən², vɛrədʲ¹ namən¹ tɪt⁰ ɕieːləxt²/

I haven't any yet, but the Zamanic languages will surely be written in Cyrillic, a planned "Para-Anatolian" (i.e. more closely related to Anatolian than to non-Anatolian IE) lostlang in Greece with the working title "Neo-Pelasgian" will be written in Greek, and a planned "Colchidic Greek" lostlang in Georgia will have a Greek and a Georgian orthography.

Alas, all of these projects are currently dormant.

I have two Greek-based conlangs which use a form of the Greek Alphabet:
Iveriki - (pretty much standard Greek alphabet, w/ Digamma, Tsampi. Some letters like kappa, epsilon, nu and rho are mirrored. Iota looks more like a 'z'. Sigma is like the yogh-looking lowercase zeta found in some Greek fonts, and pi looks like this letter 'Ⴑ' but rotated 180 degrees. Zeta looks pretty much like an uptack ⊥ .

Gavik - Adapted from the Iveriki alphabet, but has a more serifed, squarish, Cyrillic look. Has some additional chuintante letters.


My conlang Rozwi uses an unconnected cursive abjad based on a chunk of the Old Persian Cuneiform syllabary.

My conlang Yauchuan uses a kana/alphabet based on the same Old Persian cuneiform as Rozwi. But it also has an increasing number of 'kanji', which are mostly kitbashed Sumerian/Akkadian cuneiform glyphs run through a Chinese calligraphic lens.

Kwijin has a cursive abjad, but it was based on me just scribbling and scribbling one day, and then stepping back and pulling interesting looking symbols out of the mess.

My conlang Hwa-An uses a modified form of the Old Muscan Alphabet, which was an early relex of the English alphabet, but beat up some, made to look a little like
Syriac, with some letters retooled for the Hwa-An phonology.

I also have a monstrosity called Yakseeka/Hri-Hra Alphabet, another pretty much relex of the English Alphabet. Each symbol is its own intricate explosion of ink, the result of repeated bombardments of Arabic calligraphy with Ralph Steadmanesque penmanship. One of the sisterlangs to Rozwi/Kwijin/Yauchuan/Hwa-An uses it, but i'd forgotten which...

I have a currently unnamed and still-in-development conlang that uses Syriac script.

Most of the pseudo-Tungusic and pseudo-Mongolic languages I've played with have had 'official' orthographies using a Cyrillic base; one with a hanzi-based literary form; and I've played around with Manchu, Mongolic, and even Uighur~Sogdian alphabets for them too, though not very seriously.

At various points I've tried using Demotic, Kharosthi, Tibetan dbu-med, and Orkhon 'runic' scripts for various conlangs but either never got far with them, usually because I was more interested in the language than their fictional writing system... which I've always thought was kind of regrettable, but that's just how it turned out.

I once worked on a language for a friend using the Arabic script, for a fictional Semitic people living on an archipelago in the middle of the Red Sea. I somehow managed to cobble together a decent-looking script using a combination of Qur'anic and Ottoman Turkish letter values. I haven't looked at it in a while, though...

Gu-shi-han-gu-an-yur (之人地之子語) uses hanzi (but is kind of a joke), and Malo uses kanji and kana (WIP).

For a neo-Akkadian lang that I was working on, the script is the Arabic alphabet. Since it is spoken in modern-Iraq.

My Yabushionese language is written in kanji, katakana, and archaic hiragana.

In my oldoldold conlanging, over 20 years ago, I used the Greek alphabet instead of the Roman. Probably honestly just because Im half Greek and was somewhat interested in Greek at the time. But I gave it up, not because of any dislike of the alphabet but because the computers of the time just couldnt handle writing in Greek with all the diacritics I needed to add on just to spell my words right ... it was one of those Speedtalk type languages. If I remember right I had 20 vowels and 39 consonants, and just for fun i used diacritics for the diphthongs as well (which is actually attested in Greek, but was not available on computers at the time.)

This language is Moonshine, but I've cut its phonology down somewhat in its modern incarnation. Still, the Greek alphabet wouldn't be well suited to it.

My Conlang, Ternuan (Linjυa Ternυa) mostly uses the Latin alphabet but also uses some Greek and Cyrillic letters.

Carolina Conlanger wrote:My Conlang, Ternuan (Linjυa Ternυa) mostly uses the Latin alphabet but also uses some Greek and Cyrillic letters.

That actually reminds me: I have a language that contrasts /t̪ d̪ s̪ z̪/ vs. /t̺ d̺ s̺ z̺/ and I was already using the under-dot to represent ejective consonants. I couldn't find an diacritic I found aesthetically pleasing, so I ended up representing them as <t d s z τ δ σ ζ>.

Greek <τ> looks too much like <T>. I suggest using carons, accents or <h> digraphs.

mèþru wrote:Greek <τ> looks too much like <T>. I suggest using carons, accents or <h> digraphs.

I initially used carons, but I dislike <ť ď>; I did use <ň> to avoid confusing <ν> /n̺/ with <v> /v/, though. <Th> wouldn't work well because the language has many consonant clusters, including /Th/. In a much earlier form of the language I used cedillas, but I didn't really like the look of those either and I had no good option for /t̺ʼ/. These are just characters I use in my transcriptions, anyway; neither the native script (which is borrowed from another language that ill-suits it) nor the broad transcription I use in my book distinguish between anterior/posterior coronals.

I remembered that I made a Cyrillic transcription for the script used by brazi, varikѐvi, agefaqeg and other languages yet to get phonologies (link). All of them are spoken on my conworld karroť. I also started a Greek one, but lost interest.

I use Hangul for Kala and occasionally, Tibetan.