Alphabet

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Alphabet of Arnâron – Final Draft

August 21, 2008 in Arnaron, Worldbuilding | 4 comments

After way too many hours spent working on it, I proudly present: the alphabet of Arnâron. I’ll call it a “final draft” because I am sure I’ll still change some things around… But I think it’s roughly in its “final” form.

As a reminder, I covered the phonemes in an earlier post.

Alphabet - Final Draft

Alphabet - Final Draft

A quick sample, “Arnâron”:

Script Sample.

Script Sample.

Unfortunately, the vocabulary of the language doesn’t suffice for a much longer text, yet. I have the basic grammar down, and I can form plurals, but I am missing numbers, future/past tense, imperative, and so on, as well as quite simply a large number of even basic words.

I’ll get there… the main issue right now is that I really want to work on culture and nations, but to do so I need the language!

Designing a language is quite hard, if you’re going at it from a complete lack of any kind of linguistic knowledge. It’s easy to throw something random together, but I find it hard to make it not suck.

In the meantime, it looks like at least two other World Building Month participants – Cirellio and LeLoOr – have discovered the joy of designing languages, and I’ll follow their designs with great interest. Hey, maybe we can make week 3 of WBM “language week”? ;-)

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The Script of Arnâron – Second Sample

August 19, 2008 in Arnaron, Worldbuilding | No comments

Spent more time last night to work on the script. Current samples:

"Arnâron" in native script.

'Arnâron' in native script.

\"I think therefore I am\" in native language and script.

'I think therefore I am' in native language and script.

The first line simply reads “Arnâron”.

The second line reads “tonyo zu des ka zu” which means “I think therefore I am”.

You may notice that I flipped the “A”-triangles (/a/ and /A/ in X-Sampa) over to make for less eerie similarities. The “u” and “û” (“u” and “y” in X-Sampa) are now the two variations of the circle, while the “o” looks like a “u” – and is one of the glyphs I am really unhappy with. Same for the “ny” consonant (/J/ in X-Sampa).

I resisted the temptation to make the script right-to-left oriented, deciding I didn’t need the added headache.

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The Script of Arnâron – First Sample

August 18, 2008 in Arnaron, Worldbuilding | 2 comments

What’s even tougher than designing a language?

Designing the script for it.

I spent a goodly amount of time brainstorming on my alphabet today. In the end, I came up with 21 glyphs that will be the characters of the script… Except that I think they don’t really match each other stylistically. So there’s still a lot of work ahead of me. Still, I wanted to post a short sample just so that I have something to show for the many hours spent.

Script - First Sample

Script - First Sample

It reads “Arnâron”, of course.

Does it make sense that the “A” and “O” kind of look very similar to what’s in the latin alphabet? Well – the triangle and circle are just too simple to exclude them. And I figured since I’ll include them, it does make sense to use them in this way instead of confusing people by making the o-glyph stand for, say, “e”.

That said, it is very much a work in progress, and I am sure I’ll change a lot of characters around.

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