#gwilith

I’ve come to a point in my work on Elessic where I have a very important decision to make with the Gwilith orthography system.

Gwilith differentiates voicing pairs (g/k, d/t, b/p, ktp) by taking a base glyph and adding a mark to change the voicing. When I was deciding which would be considered the “base” and which would be the “modified” glyphs, I looked at all the sounds in the language and determined that there are more voiced than voiceless, and therefore Voiced should be the default, and the mark should indicate voiceless sounds.

This was because I initially intended for ALL glyphs to be marked as Voiced or Voiceless, not just pairs.

Later, I dropped the mandatory marking, and began actually making the language. As I did, I found I gravitated towards voiceless sounds. Sounds like /s/ and /t/ come up a lot (/s/ is probably the most common consonant in the language), and as I progress, it’s become increasingly annoying to write common suffixes like [si], [st], and [t].

I’m considering inverting Voicing Pairs, so that Voiceless sounds are unmarked and Voiced sounds are marked (like how Japanese works).

Like, in English, we make /j/ sounds after our vowels (the Spanish de is pronounced like “day”), but I want to be able easily turn e into ey for various reasons.

All the consonants (except “j,” since Elessic doesn’t have that sound) are there, but I’d have to decide whether or not to write phonetically, and the vowels could cause problems.

There’s an Arabic calligraphy style that places word-initial graphemes higher than the rest of the word. Some languages have special forms for word-final graphemes. Both of those sound neato, but doing that in font-form would be a butt-hole (I could use capitals to distinguish, but I already use those for syllabics).