#syllabics

song lyric leggings, Inukness (Inuit)

This syllabics chart with sounds comes via Matt Baker), who says, “Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics - the only writing system that uses letter rotation to indicate vowels. Clever and beautiful!” From Gretchen McCulloch’s All Things Lingustuic:

Settle here  in the place where my arm  branches out  from my chest. 

Build a nest  from all the  little parts of me I  no longer  need, and rest. 

I'm a little sceptical about pure syllabic metre in English, but it's an interesting constraint. And I like the stanzaic head-rhyme.

I'm wanting to create a script with just a small handful of 'diacritics' or 'glyph roots'/'radicals'/'sub-characters' to represent Quechua and Aymara (as well as, with significant alteration, other Andean and Circum-Andean languages). The diacritics would be:

A rectangle representing a light pillar

Rounded semicircles representing sun dogs

A smaller circle used for every letter, for aesthetic effect

A larger circle used to represent solar halos

Mountains (maybe just triangles, maybe rounded cones, maybe more jagged)

Rays (probably just triangles, skinnier than the mountains)

Clouds (maybe just semicircles, maybe rounded)

This would actually entail more than 7 script elements, but only a few more; there would be:

The obligatory sun-circle | Running total: 1

The vertical rectangle for the light pillar | 2

8 total different rays, one for each cardinal direction and a longer variant | 10

The solar halo | 11

The six possible positions for mountains | 17

The single possible position for clouds | 18

Both the left and the right sun dog | 20

My ultimate goal would be to have six buttons for the six non-obligatory features, with special interfaces for the rays and the mountains, given their complex positioning.

It would also need to be able to handle layering, since I would want the rays in front of the light pillar when necessary, the solar halo layered over anything anything else except mountains and clouds, the front mountains to be layered over the back mountains, the mountains layered over the cloud (I think I want it to look that way), etc.