#alphasyllabary

Whoa, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here! But what with the huge Lexiconga update, I figured now would be a good time to revisit Gobahai, update the dictionary to take advantage of the new features, and finally think about the alphasyllabary again!

This time, I’m going for a much simpler approach: using the characters that 'Oayhàoù used for its characters as a starting point, I came up with pieces representing the different phonetic sounds that could be organized together in predictable ways to construct syllables. This is inspired by a horrifyingly incomplete understanding of the writing system that Korean uses, but hey, it works for this case!

Depending on the direction that any “tails” or other features of the first phoneme’s character might be pointing, the organization has 4 different orientations, pictured with the 4 boxes. Using this, you always know what the first sound is and what the following sounds are just by looking! This way, I don’t have to build out each and every different symbol in the alphasyllabary; I just build them instead!

Worked on Gobahai’s B alphasyllabary a little bit today. I also removed all syllables that end in B, per my most recent phonotactic rule, which cuts down on the number of syllables I need to do, thank goodness. It just takes forever to get it all done. :S

I still have 3 more sets of B alphasyllables left (/o/, /ʌ/, and /u/)  before I can move on to the next letter, but I think they’re looking pretty nice so far! :) Some of the sub-strokes do bother me, though (specifically the T-shaped ones and the dot), so I might go through and change those to something that produces nicer-looking characters. The problem strokes are inherited from 'Oayhàoù’s writing system, so I’m a little hesitant to remove them, but at the same time, screw 'Oayhàoù, really. Gobahai exists because the speakers moved on from 'Oayhàoù.