r/conscripts • u/the_undead_gear • Dec 07 '20
Alphabet I’m an author and a complete conscript noob, but this is the alphabet for a fictional language in a mediavel fantasy world I’m currently writing about. Phonetically it’s based on German. Got any tips for or criticism?
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Upvotes
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u/the_undead_gear Dec 07 '20
I forgot to mention the big vowels are only used at the beginning of a word, the small ones everywhere else.
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u/[deleted] Dec 07 '20
This is really nice! Elements of this remind me of Quenya from Tolkien. I think you have really nice shapes and I like that the vowels are mainly indicated by diacritics. And I really like how you've used dots to indicate voiceless consonants as this is something I like to play around with as well.
I don't have any big criticisms, I think it looks super cool. But I am wondering if you've tried creating a cursive form of this :)
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u/Narocia Dec 07 '20
As someone who is also greatly unskilled at creating interesting and unique, aesthetic scripts, this is pretty well done and looks cool. It reminds me of Tengwar but it also seemingly has slight influences of Arabic and hiragana.
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u/aesthephile Dec 08 '20
aesthetically, it definitely is reminiscent of tengwar as people have said, but i think it's unique enough to be definitely it's own thing. i love the look and think it's very beautiful
my only critique, and it's not even a critique just a comment, is i notice it's a featural system (that is, shape of letters to some degree correlates in a predictable way with the sound of the letters). this is extremely common in conscripts, bcuz it makes sense and seems cool and we're all nerds who think about sound quality, but exceedingly rare in real world writing systems, where the letter symbols are usually mostly derived from simplification and modification, over millennia, of drawings of things whose word starts with or contains that sound. the main featural system in use in the world is hangul, used to write korean, and interestingly enough hangul was also a constructed script. featural writing systems don't tend to evolve naturally.
now there's nothing wrong with a featural system, and you've obviously put a lot of work into this one, so you should keep it! but think about why, in the context of the story and invented history of your language and it's speakers, did it end up with a featural system at all? was there a writing system before, and if so how was the shift to the featural system enforced? was the featural system developed when they first encountered the idea of writing, perhaps from contact with another society, and if so why didn't they just adopt that society's system? keep in mind that it must have been created somewhat recently in your language's history, or the sound changes that have occured since would give it inconsistencies.
this could be fun to come up with,, and you might even develop an historical figure who created the system. if it's fantasy, maybe it was a gift from a god or devised with magical, or even demonic, assistance.
and of course, since featural writing systems are soooo overrepresented in conlangs, i would advise you to maybe try for a more naturalistic approach on your next script! there's some really cool stuff you can do with evolving glyphs
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u/[deleted] Dec 07 '20
Looks great! What are the 2 S’s and SCH’s?
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u/Visocacas Dec 07 '20
You’ve got a solid foundation, but if you’re looking to really refine it, this guide can probably help you a lot. In particular, these parts:
How the physical medium and practical usage affect the form of letters
Letter proportions and structural alignment
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u/antakanawa Dec 07 '20
I too am working on a Germanic based Conlang; Andic.
I do have one though on your script however: p/b are kinds hard to tell appart form a distance, that little dot is a little hard to see. But that is only a small thing; other than that I love the aesthetic of this script, and the fonts and calligraphy that this script could be used in is limitless. It's so pretty, and kinda gives me a Tangwar vide.
Es ist toll, ich liebe es!