Your first conscript

[Ser]

We've discussed our first conlangs in the past, but what about our first conscripts?

When I was 9 years old, in El Salvador, my parents bought me a keyboard to start taking piano lessons. It came with a manual in various languages, including Japanese and Chinese. I had seen Japanese/Chinese characters before on TV shows dubbed into Spanish, but I could never had a good look at them since they only showed them for some seconds. I found them pretty interesting now that I could look at them, and somehow the idea came to me to make a 1:1 replacement of the Latin alphabet with some of the characters or parts of them.

A = 亻 B = 用 C = 月 D = 牜 E = 兄 F = 木 G = 色 H = 有
J = 自 K = 句 L = 必 M = (1) N = (2) Ñ = (2) O = 又 P = (3) Q = (3)
R = 合 S = (4) T = (5) U = (5) V = 各 W = 整 X = 彳 Y = 果 Z = (6)

(1) Made-up character mixing 句 and る. It looked like a single character with 口 on the left and ろ on the right.

(2) The left half of 以 was N, and the right half was Ñ. Ñ (and only Ñ) had the alternative characters 之 and る too (I thought the latter was cool as it was the first character in the title of Rurouni Kenshin).

(3) The left half of 所 was P, and the right half was Q

(4) S was an alteration of 合 so that the "roof" had three lines, adding a horizontal line in the middle of the two askew lines. It looked like this:


(5) The left half of 地 was T, and the right half was U.

(6) Z was an alteration of 果 without the middle horizontal line, and with the three lines below spreading directly off the square. It looked like this:


Please excuse the crude drawings. I made them with my laptop's nipple mouse.



If you know any Chinese or Japanese, you'll notice there is no relationship whatsoever between the real character pronunciations and my assignments. 色 is se4 or shai3 in Mandarin and iro, shoku or shiki in Japanese--it has nothing to do with /g/ or /x/.

The appearance of 木 'wood' may be surprising, considering these characters come from a keyboard manual. I do suspect it is really 术 'method, technique', as in Mandarin 技术 ji4shu4 'technology'.


At the time, I showed it to some of my classmates, and they thought it was pretty cool. Two of them actually learned it, although we rarely made any exchanges in the code.


User Nesescosac pointed out to me that this is basically the same thing that some tattoo artists do when people ask them to write their name in Chinese.

[masako]

My first script was very much a play on the Pigpen Cipher:



That led to my favorite, Moya, which I still use almost daily.

[Soap]

I cant post pictures of any of this, but:

My first conscript ever was for "Manni", a conlang spoken by people who live in very cold climates on planet Teppala and are close to nature. The phonology was simple, with I think 4 vowels and maybe about 15 conosnants. Even though this was over 20 years ago, and I remember almost nothing, I think that even back then the resemblance between what I worked on then and what I mostly produce now would have been fairly noticeable. More info at http://www.frathwiki.com/Minor_languages_of_Teppala .

Why I cant post a picture is that I made the script for Manni totally unrelated to English or anything else on Earth, and I never bothered to write even a single Manni word in Roman letters. Then one day I realized I had lost the paper that had the key to which symbol spelled each letter, and I had never memorized them, so the entire language was unreadable to me and I had to abandon the script and the language entirely.

Next I worked on a language called Moonshine, which is still going after all these years. The phonology of Moonshine was much more complicated than that of Manni, so my script was also more complicated, and I even made a "bisyllabary" for it. I remember that the symbols for /p/ and /b/ were straight lines, meant to represent lips, and I was probably inspired by Hangul since the symbols were also stacked together like Hangul. (Which means that there were thousands of glyphs but only maybe 40 or so "radicals"). However, I also wrote Moonshine in a modified form of the Greek alphabet, because I my seething hatred of the Greek language had not yet begun.

While those early attempts at a priori conscripts may sound impressive, Im much more proud of the scripts I came up with later on, which were much better suited to their respective languages. I will try to eventually load those up at pabappa.com (which is just a placeholder now and will be for quite a while).

[Pole, the]

I don't know which one was the earliest, but one of my first conscripts was a slight alteration of Latin and looked like this: http://jezykotw.webd.pl/w/images/4/4c/100_3191.jpg (here with IPA values and transliteration: http://jezykotw.webd.pl/w/images/7/77/Anbo.png).

There was another one, based upon Arabic digits turned upside down, which started with the following values: U Ł L G H E I J B (based upon 8 7 7 5 4 3 2 2 1, respectively), but I don't have any photos of it. (I might get some when I visit my family home.)

[Pole, the]

Found it! Here are some excerpts:


The basic version, with some of the sounds represented by the modifier + another letter.


The extended version, with the modifier pairs replaced with custom letters.

[Soap]

I like your style. Several of the letters there are identical to glyphs in my only current conscript, the Gold syllabary (it covers the entire planet, but is named after the language it originated in.) Will post on pabappa.com , as I said earlier.

In particular the "U", "G", "R", "W", and "M" glyphs are all the same as glyphs in Gold or would be recognized as orthographical variants of them. I like how you vary between angular and curved shapes for the same glyph, as most people would tend to do in a well-used natural language script.

My favorite shape is the "W", which I think of as a bear claw.

[Uruwi]

Linked for size.

Hello, this is one of my first conscripts.

Pairs of letters are fused into one glyph.

I made it at the end of fifth grade.

By the way, this script inspired that of Lek-Tsaro.

[Torco]

a simple substitution cypher. all squares and points and diagonals. i even started coming up with shorthands that amounted to syllabics and even a few logograms for common spanish words such as para, por, sin, sobre, tras.

it is, however, forever lost to time.

[Ryan of Tinellb]

I made my first conscript in pixel art in Applesoft BASIC, on my old //e. It seems fitting that I now use my knowledge of HTML/JavaScript to bring it to the 21st century.
Here it is.
I had been learning the (mostly syllabic) Japanese at the time, so I made this an abugida, with 'a' as the implicit vowel. The characters are 3x5 pixels. Later, I came up with mnemonics for each.

This lead directly into my first relex: Holaya. Take an English word, place an 'a' between any two consonants (except 'ch', 'th' and 'sh'), and pronounce the vowels like Japanese.
Salowa asa fucaka, buta I sapoke like thisa fora foura yearasa.

[Pole, the]

In particular the "U", "G", "R", "W", and "M" glyphs are all the same as glyphs in Gold or would be recognized as orthographical variants of them. I like how you vary between angular and curved shapes for the same glyph, as most people would tend to do in a well-used natural language script.

My favorite shape is the "W", which I think of as a bear claw.

[…] Later, I came up with mnemonics for each.

My conscript also had meanings for each character, along with con-words (there was no real conlang behind it, however). I remember that the character for N was “river”, for example.

I had been learning the (mostly syllabic) Japanese at the time, so I made this an abugida, with 'a' as the implicit vowel.

How are the non-implicit vowels written?

Salowa asa fucaka, buta I sapoke like thisa fora foura yearasa.

As far as I know, languages with more restrictive syllables tend to also have shorter morae, so for a native of this hypothetical language it would even out.

[hoeroathlo]

my first conscript was made in grade 5 or 6, and these examples are what I could remember from middle school.
https://imgur.com/gallery/HmZ04

[yangfiretiger121]

My first conscript (linked cause the image chopped stuff) was for a proposed conlang I'd named Abyssal. However, I stopped short of making it an actual conlang because it would've been impossible to use on a computer without commissioning a font from someone. Granted, I still love the idea of a language in which every vowel is a variant of the same character.

[Neek]

I started when I was 11, it was an English cypher where each English letter equaled a syllable and each word was a portmanteau developed from an abbreviation of the English word. In highschool, I had a Latin-valued script based on Phoenician/Iberian scripts, but this was when I was retooling my own handwriting with repetition.

I don't have any examples of the past. Instead, I have scanned samples of my old scripts from back in 2004. Azvaro, which was influenced by Demotic and Avestan.

[StrangerCoug]

Hoo boy. I don't remember my first conscript anymore, but I remember my introduction to conlanging being an appendix to The Lord of the Rings that I liked reading more than the actual story. (Forgive me for not remembering the exact one, but it's the one with the chart of the Tengwar script.)

There were a couple from about middle school that I remember, though:

1. A cursive-looking one that I only ever remember being used as a cipher of English. It could be read from left to right or right to left, and there was a special character at the beginning of the text that told you which way. (Interestingly enough, I think I made it look loosely like an arrow pointing in the direction in question—think the left-pointing sword of the Saudi Arabian flag.)
2. Another one where each character was essentially based on dots in a 3×4 grid, with all the dots being connected a certain way differentiating each character. (You couldn't leave a dot unconnected and get a valid character.)

[alynnidalar]

Funnily enough for someone who got into conlanging from Lord of the Rings, I didn't try to create a conscript until I'd already been messing about with conlangs for a few years. I don't know if I ever actually had a full alphabet (it's always been an alphabet for Tirina), but I at least had enough to write the name of a major character from the world. (her name is still the only thing I can casually scribble down in the modern Tirina script!) As I recall, most of the characters were just variations on the Latin alphabet because I had no imagination back then. The reader may deduce for themselves whether or not that's changed any.