A while ago (well, last December) I made a Lexember post using one of my less developed languages, Onakerese, natively known as Onākerē [ona:keɾe:], and the language was also written in its native script. After that, @tlacamazatl asked me to make a post about the script - and nearly a year later, here it finally is. 

Let’s first take a look at the language, Onakerese. It’s a language that was originally inspired by Austronesian languages, such as Tahitian, Samoan, Maori, etc. The phonology and phonotactics of Onakerese follow those languages fairly closely, with a small set of sounds: /a e i o u/ and its long counterparts, and /m n ŋ p t k ʔ s x l ɾ/. The syllable structure is strictly (C)V. It’s a very isolating language, with barely any inflectional morphology but its derivational morphology is a bit richer. The basic word order is SOV and it could be classified as a (split-)ergative language. Onakerese relies heavily on the use of particles to convey various grammatical properties of the language (case, tense, mood, and so on). I have recently decided to revisit the language and flesh it out a bit more, so it’s now got a much more detailed grammar than before (the vocabulary count is still fairly low, however). You can read more about that here. 

But enough about the language, time to cover the script - it is actually an abugida, which suits its CV-syllable structure very well. The script was supposed to have been developed from another script of mine, the Laefêvëši script. The visual appearance of the script was heavily inspired by the beautifully intricate Javanese script. The picture below illustrates the connection between the two scripts.

Now, as mentioned, the script is an abugida, which means that each consonantal glyph comes with an inherent vowel quality, which is /a/. The other four vowels, /a e i o u/, are added by changing the base glyph. Bare vowels have their own stand-alone glyphs, of course. Since all the vowels can be either long of short, the length is indicated by placing a stroke above the glyph.

That’s basically it about the script. It’s a fairly straight-forward system with a clear link between the written form and the spoken form. 

However, the script has another feature - reduplication glyphs. Due to the CV-phonotactic nature of the language, reduplication of syllables is a common occurrence. Instead of simply repeating the same glyph, the script comes with modified versions of non-reduplicated glyphs to show reduplicated pronunciation. There are several variants possible, depending on the length of the vowel(s). See the table below.

Below is a full set of all possible combinations (all five vowels):

Well, that’s really it. Below is a a bit longer text in the script. I’m not going to post a translation because it’s just an assortment of random sentences I’ve translated into Onakerese so far. 

It’s the 7th day of Lexember, yay! And it’s time to go with another one of my a priori conlangs. This is a conlang that was inspired by Austronesian languages (but it doesn't have an Austronesian alignment; rather, it's ergative) and it's one of my most analytic/isolating languages. It comes with its own script too, an abugida (points if you figure out what natscript inspired the conscript :P).

Onākerē (Onakerese): pūkarēŋa [puːkaɾeːŋa] (n) music, from pūkari “sound” and the abstract suffix -rēŋa.

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