#fanlang

Ciphers are used to encrypt text in an already existing alphabet, so in Minecraft when you click on the enchantment table the SGA text you see is usually just random English words like "fiddle" or "water" or references like "cthulhu" or "xyzzy".

When I started turning the "enchantment table language" into an actual full fledged conlang I decided to use the SGA in case other Minecraft fans became interested in my work, I wanted the symbols to still be recognizable to them so I didn't want to change things too much, I avoided doing things like adding new letters, diacritic marks or removing letters, I wanted to use all 26 base glyphs to write the words in my language (though I slightly modified the appearance of some of the symbols to make it flow a bit better).

But of course, as a conlanger I didn't like the idea of my language being written with what is essentially a copy of the roman alphabet, I still want to give it its own identity so it feels a bit more original, so I'm going to explain what I did to turn the cipher into something that is hopefully more interesting (I'll let you be the judge of that).

First let's look at the names of each character, similarly to some roman letters the name starts with the letter itself and if it's a consonant a vowel sound gets added (like the letter T just getting "ee" added onto it) but in this case every letter gets the same vowel, so all consonants are just (consonant) + a.

Some of the letters are used to spell identical sounds though (more on that later) so for example the equivalent of roman {j} and the equivalent of roman {x} are both used to spell the palatal glide /j/, so they are both called "ya" /ja/.

To disambiguate, speakers add nouns that start with that letter, similarly to how in Spanish <b> and <v> are both pronounced the same and sometimes they both get called /be/ so some people might say "v de vaca" meaning "v as in "vaca" (cow)" to make it clear they're talking about the letter <v>. This is also basically what Thai does with its letters: ข kho khai (egg "kho") vs ค kho khwai (buffalo "kho").

Then let's look at the order they come in, I ended up changing the alphabetical order because I think that also helps to make it feel a bit more unique, I'll link to a longer explanation later but in short these are actually organized based on where in the mouth the sound is produced, the letters come in the following order:

labials like /p/ /m/ /f/

coronals like /t/ /n/ /ɬ/

sibilant-like sounds like /t͡s/ /s/

dorsals like /j/ /ʀ/ /k/

vowels

But ultimately the biggest difference comes in the way the letters are mapped to sounds.

When choosing the sounds each character was going to represent I didn't want to make it completely arbitrary, like assigning the {a} glyph to something utterly different like /χ/, but I also didn't want to make it completely like Latin or English, so I avoided just mapping all the letters onto their obvious equivalents, this way hopefully it will feel a bit more similar to when people try to map roman letters onto Arabic letters, some have clear equivalents like <م> - <m> but some require special markings and things to more accurately represent their sound, like <ظ> - <ẓ>.

I evolved the conlang from an ancient stage of the language known as Proto-Kxënt'exo, and in Proto-Kxënt'exo each letter was used to spell a different sound, hence why there are some sounds that can be written two different ways: they used to be pronounced differently way back when.

In the roman alphabet there are voicing distinctions in the stops: unvoiced <p> <t> <k> versus voiced <b> <d> <g>, in Proto-Kxënt'exo that distinction was actually between emphatic and plain stops, so the {p} {t} {k} symbols were pronounced /pˤ/ /tˤ/ /kˤ/ and the {b} {d} {g} symbols were pronounced /p/ /t/ /k/, these evolved into ejectives /pʼ/ /tʼ/ /kʼ/ so in the romanization I represent these as p' t' k' vs p t k instead.

I also added the affricate /t͡ʃ/ and it too has an emphatic equivalent /t͡ʃˤ/, to spell them I used the SGA letters for {c} and {q} respectively, this is because the letter <c> is sometimes used to spell that affricate sound (like in Indonesian: kucing /ku.t͡ʃiŋ/) and the letter <q> is used to represent a similar sound in Mandarin Chinese romanization: qin /tɕʰin/, but <q> is also used for uvular sounds, like in Arabic romanization: qaṣr /qasˤr/ so it doesn't feel completely arbitrary to use that letter for the /t͡ʃˤ/ consonant, and then both of these sounds evolved into alveolar affricates /t͡s/ /t͡sʼ/ romanized as ts ts'.

The fricatives used to have a voicing distinction (except for /ɬ/) so you had {f} {s} {x} representing unvoiced /ɸ/ /s/ /ʃ/ vs {v} {z} {j} representing voiced /β/ /z/ /ʒ/, but this is one of the things that got lost in the evolved language, these consonants merged, so now {f} and {v} are both pronounced /f/, {s} and {z} are both pronounced /s/, and {x} and {j} not only merged but ended up becoming the palatal glide /j/.

There's also some sounds that aren't represented with a single letter, for example the vowels /ɵ/ /ʉ/ and /ɯ/ are all represented with digraphs (letter combinations), because these sounds didn't exist in the proto-language, and once they started to exist people just repurposed the letters they already had to represent the new sounds.

Then there's a couple digraphs that sound identical to single letters: {dx} used to represent a /tç/ cluster, but it ended up merging with the alveolar affricate /t͡s/, so now that sound can be spelled two different ways depending on the origin of the word.

There's even more details, and the post is getting a bit long so to see more go to the Kxënt'exo orthography page on my conlang website.

The last thing I want to highlight is the fact that the spelling of words is also tied to grammar.

There's a lot of silent letters at the end of words, for example the word for cat "yak'e" /jaˈkʼe/ is spelled like {jakex} with a silent {x} representing a lost /ç/ consonant, and this is significant because that actually marks the noun as animate, a large portion of animate nouns were suffixed with *-ʃi in Proto-Kxënt'exo.

Another example is infinitive verbs, they used to end in *-βu in Proto-Kxënt'exo, so now they're all spelled with a silent {v} at the end, and that marks the word as an infinitive. This helps to disambiguate between some words, for example the word lhëxu /ɬəˈχu/ can be either an infinitive meaning "to see" or an adjective meaning "that stands out", word order and context are usually enough to disambiguate, but if you look at the words written down it becomes clear which is which because the former is spelled {lyhuv} and the latter is spelled {lyhul}.

This type of phenomenon happens a lot in different types of words, and I think it also helps to further distinguish this script from the roman alphabet, the way it's used makes sense for Kxënt'exo, the spelling of words isn't what you would expect from a simple cipher, there's nuance to it that comes from its phonology and its history.

So that's basically what I wanted to share, I think I succeeded in making the SGA at least a bit more interesting for my conlang, I had never done something like this before because this is my first fanlang, so let me know how you think I did.

Also if you have any questions feel free to ask! or you can also check out the Kxënt'exo section of my website for more information!

If you're familiar with the Japanese language, you might notice that the sentence structure is identical to Japanese syntax (SOV). The basic language used is Old Egyptian, employing a triconsonantal root system similar to Arabic.

Here are some words you might recognize if you know Japanese:

okkaret = kokoro (heart)

enṓganopet = ogane (big bell)

You may notice that the same sound can be represented by completely different glyphs. This is because the Poneglyph uses a system somewhat akin to the Maya script and Rongorongo script, allowing different glyphs for the same sound for aesthetic reasons. Another reason for these complex sound-to-glyph correspondences is to make Poneglyphs difficult to read and decipher by the government.