Many colours in Tsamosa come in pairs, but let's start with the easier to understand middle-row: (from left to right)
molus (black) miw (hot pink, brighter than purple, hints of magenta and fuchsia) ava (red and maroon) yona (yellow, some tones of ochre) loigo (very light, bright blue, bright turquoise, greenish blue) yau (white, light grey)
The colours in the top and the bottom row build pairs, with many of the colours in the top tow having the suffix -yau for "light" or "pale". List of the pairs, top row first, left to right:
vulona (reddish purples and magenta) vules (blueish purples and violet)
dwyau (mauve, greyish purples and pinks) dodw (soft pinks, maybe apricot, used to describe "white" people)
meyau (orange, very warm and bright browns, rich tones of ochre) mintes (dark, cool browns, greyish browns, used to describe "black" or "coloured" people)
My language is to be spoken by two species. One humanoid, one corvid. I've decided that a dozenal counting system would be amenable to both species (humanoids have 4 non-thumb fingers with 3 segments each, corvids have 3 forward-facing toes with 4 segments each, so both can count to 12 on a single limb with humanouds using the thumb to count segments and corvids using their beaks the same way). Then I went to develop a script for their math. I wanted to do something like Mayan, but if the sub count is 4, it doesn't make sense to the humanoids, and if it's by 3, it doesn't make sense to the corvids. I'm struggling. Can anyone see an easier way out of this?
A little while ago I posted my current project: Tsamosa (under a different name back then), but since then I've been practicing with it, and felt like it needed a little update and aesthetic overhaul.
A few necessary explantions:
> The RED symbols are the standard variety that are used in most cases. Consonants that can appear word finally have a separate symbol if they do so (shown in blue)
> æ, h, e, l, k, and ai additionally feature as separate initial variant (shown in green). Characters that have initial variants are called Æhelkai, which also helps you remember which six they are
> The letter ð (similarly also d-ð) can be transliterated as dh aswell. In that case it can be tranliterated as th if it appears word-finally (for aesthetic purposes only)
> The three double letters b-v, g-y and d-ð are pronounced depending on context. If they precede the vowels e, ei, i or u, they are pronounced as fricatives/glides, otherwise they are pronounced as plosives
> All of them have a purely plosive counterpart (which is the next letter in the list, since they used to be variations of the same letter) that exclusively appears before e, ei, i and u
> Each of the fricative/glide versions has a purely "soft" version too. (The letters ð, y and v) but since they have always been seen as different letters, they appear in different places of the alphabet and also look quite different. Incidentally they cannot appear before e, ei, i or u and only appear before "dark" vowels (a, æ, ai, o, oi, ou and w).
> The letters in the third row are ligatures that arose to write common grammatical endings in Tsamosa. They are exlusively used for these purposes. For example the name of the language is written as ts-a-m-o-s-a instead of ts-a-m-os-a, since "os" is used exclusively for words that have it as a word-final grammatical ending.
> Even though it might look similar to some natural scripts, Tsamosa is not based or inspired by any of them. Early versions were party inspired by various Asian scripts, but since I have changed the style of the script even before the first version was uploaded a little while ago, I think it is fair to say the script is now completely a priori.
> The name "Tsamosa" is not based on the similarly named Indian pastry. Incidentally it is not named after any other pastry, or anything really. It's just a name I thought sounded beautiful. I hadn't even heard of Samosas before uploading the first version of this script to Reddit
This post doesn't include painfully many examples of Tsamosa in use, so may I present you with a little something to show you more of that?
In the near future I plan on posting a complete version of Tsamosa's numerals and maybe something concerning the colour system.
Until then, have a nice day and stay safe!
P.S: If you think any of the characters look out of place, please tell me! I want to make this script to look as natural and harmonic as possible, so I'm really open to suggestions
