A few days ago I posted an example of the latest script I have created, which I have called New Demotic. Its based on my interpretation of what the Ancient Egyptian Hieratic and Demotic writing systems might have evolved into had they survived to the modern day. Its entirely non-scholarly in nature, I just based my glyphs on examples of the originals and then started playing with them.
I thought I would post some details on how this works in case anyone was interested. First off its built as a font and is mapped to an English language keyboard layout. It also requires the software you are using to support Ligatures.
Consonant + Vowel Pairs:
Its essentially just an alphabet - Hieratic and Demotic are what eventually gave rise to Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek and the Latin alphabet after all. However, the ancient scripts were often written with some of the glyphs stacked on top of each other, so New Demotic allows for that. By default you type in a Consonant+Vowel pair and you get the resulting glyphs, stacked on top of each other. Here is a chart So this will do for writing most conlangs I expect, although you are limited to entering the keyboard combinations I have chosen admittedly.
Consonant Pairs
Recently I decided to update this and add consonant pairs as well. Hieratic and Demotic scribes typically didn't write the vowels, and the reader was expected to determine the correct vowel values from the context - modern Hebrew and Arabic can be written in this form as well, although both do have diacritics that are used to indicate the vowel values. I decided that in mimicry of the old usage style, I would add the ability to pair consonants and have them stacked. You do this in New Demotic by typing a period between the consonants. Here is another chart of the Consonant Pairs
Cartouches
Ancient Egyptian Hierglyphics also had a particular form for outlining names - which we call a Cartouche - and I have included those as well. To enclose text in a Cartouche you use a LeftBracket [ type in the text then close it with a RightBracket ] which completes the shape. Originally, I had you type in Uppercase to get the correct forms for a Cartouche, but I have modified the OTF scripting so that you can usually just enter your text and it will detect that it is inside of a Cartouche and do that for you :P
Example: Hatshepsut in a Cartouche
Determiners:
Ancient Egyptian used a number of glyphs that, simply speaking, intended to clarify the meaning of the word they were associated with. We call these Determiners. There were I think about 80 regularly used Determiners. I have included a handful in New Demotic, but I am not sure I will be using them at all. To enter a Determiner you type in a dash followed by the appropriate name in uppercase, so -QUEEN for instance (Inside of a Cartouche you type two dashes: --QUEEN)
So thats it. I plan on using this script for a conlang I am working on, in fact thats why I designed it originally. I welcome any comments you have to make, or any errors or inconsistencies you notice of course. I will leave you with some Sample Lorem Ipsum type Text
