#constructed scripts

You've got King Sejong in Korea going "OK. The script we're using now is hella complex and …Chinese. I want something that's easy enough for a farmer to learn. And maybe to pay his taxes with." And he works out hangul, neat and logical and frequent winner of Best Writing System awards if such things exist. (And then the nobles don't like it because how are they supposed to look smart if the peasants can write too?)

You've got Sequoyah, thinking the settlers he's doing business with might have at least one good idea in this whole 'talking leaves' system they're using. So he throws himself into working out a syllabary that works for the Cherokee language even when his friends and family think he's losing the plot or he's possessed or… Anything. But he hangs in there. Teaches his daughter. Proves that this is something worth it, and goes on to see the syllabary he created become official and used throughout the Cherokee Nation.

These are the best known ones. But how many are there out there?

There are systems where a missionary or someone similar's come into a place, and gone 'hm, Latin ain't cutting it for writing this' - the Cree syllabics and their extended Canadian family fall into this box, though there's at least some accounts that dispute the usual story. (Given that a lot of those sort of stories come down to 'so we can make a Bible at these people', it's fair to put a big old asterisk on them, but… they're a thing.) Getting away from that issue, though? There's local creators making a bespoke system for their language when the ones they'd picked up from outside just don't fit the sounds or grammatical patterns. Writing systems that can really belong to a language and its people.

While it's absolutely not my place to say whether something is good or bad - the only people who can do that are the language users and community the script was made for - there can't help but be a few that catch the eye. For example, I'm quite fond of the Ditema tsa Dinoko script - it's a pretty recent creation from South Africa as a script for a wide range of Bantu languages, using compact triangular blocks in a way that reflects traditional patterns from Sesotho tradition. From my outside perspective, it's an elegant script. It's just one example, though - there's many creators in Africa who have done similar things, sitting down and making a script that their language needs and that isn't being shoved on them by… yeah. Vai and N'Ko are the biggest examples but there are so many! Moving on, in Oceania, we find the Avoiuli text from Vanuatu, designed so that any one character can be drawn with one stroke in the sand… and elsewhere, the scripts being created to use with signed languages which haven't used them in the past…

If I were to try and go into all of them, it'd be a whole essay. And I'd probably miss some as I'm an outsider nerd without access to the deep literature on some of this stuff. Instead, I'll link to The World's Writing Systems as an index to browse through - unfortunately, it doesn't allow searching by how the writing system was created. But there are plenty of indigenous scripts listed there too that deserve their own deep dive. (The fact it lists con-scripts specifically made for fiction… eh.) Their icon comes from the Afaka script, for the Ndyuka creole in Suriname. A lot of the letters are quite pictorial in nature - including the 'ka' in WWS's icon. Gotta say, that's a way to make things memorable.

…anyway, that's my ramble for today. Just gonna wrap with this source which I haven't fully investigated yet, and Endangered Alphabets which isn't so much for deliberately constructed scripts but (unsurprisingly) for endangered ones in general, and as such plain deserves a link.

Not bad, but clearly something I'd need to practice more to actually make it look good.

First in Sasuur:

And in my grass script:

Fun for everyone!

I've also started designing different 'styles' or 'fonts' for grass script that I'll eventually post here as well!