https://i.imgur.com/ZruP7jf.png

(It says: "Endfall's (newline) Writing System Guide (newline) v0.5")

This guide aims to teach you how to create writing systems for the worlds your characters live in. I'm not talking about a "system for your writing", but the way your characters write their language.

There are two general approaches: fast, or realistic. It's very unlikely that a casual reader will be able to tell the two apart, but picking a "fast" approach will hurt you in the future if you actually want to go into detail with the world's languages.

That said, we'll go over the "fast" method first.

The fast method works like this. Get some notebook paper. On the first line, write the uppercase alphabet. On the third line, write the lowercase. On the fifth line, write common punctuation: ,.!?:;"

Beneath every character, write a new random shape. Make sure the shape you chose is simple and actually writable. A good way to make sure that everything works is to build the shape out of a series of simple shapes - for example, in english, the letter "B" is made of the shapes | and 3 put together, while G is made of (, |, and -. As long as you can decompose your character into no more than about 4 simple shapes, your writing system is suitable to be an alphabet. DON'T make anything too complex - people in your world have been using the writing system for a long, long time, and while complex stuff might be seen formally, or artistically, in common use, simpler forms will be used. THIS IS TRUE EVEN WITH CHINESE CHARACTERS.

https://i.imgur.com/58PUXii.png

That's about it for the fast method. It's really that simple. If you want additional versimilitude, you can add characters by picking a sound in english that two letters are used for, and making a new letter for it. For example, you could make a letter for the sound "ch" (as in chair), and then whenever a word with "ch" comes up, instead of using the letters c and h in your new writing system, you use the letter for the sound "ch" instead. Be careful though! Because english is an inconsistent car wreck of a language, we encode a lot of sounds to letter combos that also encode other sounds. make sure to only use a sound-letter for the sound it represents. Make sure your writing system is more consistent than English, because almost every language on earth is.

OK. Now, the accurate way. First, you need to know the sounds that exist in your language. You can separate these into two broad categories. Vowels and consonants. The basic linguistic rule is that a vowel is a sound you can make with just your vocal chords. Try it - keeping your lips, tongue, and teeth completely still, try saying some vowels and consonants. Also, be clear that some things you might have learned were "consonants" in primary school, are not consonants under this defiition. This is, again, because english orthography (orthography is a term that means "the way letters represent sounds") is inconsistent garbage.

But wait, if english is inconsistent garbage, how can you even write down the sounds of your language?

I reccomend writing the letters for your sound along with a word that contains those letters representing the sound you mean. For example, if you want the sound of "ch" at the end "loch" to be in your language, write "loch" beside it so if you come back some time later, you remember that you meant the "ch" of "loch" and not the "ch" of "chew", which sound very different.

One thing that you must remember to do above all else is, if you've already written and published your story? Make sure the the sounds of your characters names and place names are part of the language's sounds. If you have a character named Rasmussen, and your language lacks sounds for r, a, s, m, u, e, and n, then you have a problem. Because while there are always ways to translate things that a language doesn't have sounds for , once you do that, none of your characters would be calling Rasmussen Rasmussen anymore.

Here's what I mean. There's this german word, "arbeit", pronounced (roughly) "are bite", which means "job", or "work". Somehow, this word ended up borrowed by the japanese. In japanese, "arbeit" means "part time job" and only "part time job". You can't use "arbeit" in japanese for full time work. More importantly, though, japanese lacks the sounds for the "are" part, and the "t" at the end. So in japanese, "arbeit" is written as [the japanese letters for arbeit used to be here, but the forums don't let you post them], which we can write in english as "arubaito". "Arubaito" is pronounced as "ah roo by ee toe", with the "by ee" part almost slurred together. So when japanese people say "arbeit", that don't say it like germans do, and if your language doesn't have sounds for the names your characters have, your characters wont be saying their names like the english letters suggest.

Okay, I'm going to assume that you have your language's sounds together right now. You have five choices for how to build your writing system unless you want to transcedn the scope of this guide and try something unprecedented.

These choices are:


  1. Alphabet - like english, but probably less awful

  2. Synthetic Alphabet - like korean

  3. Syllabary - like japanese

  4. Abjad - like arabic

  5. Ideographic - like chinese


If you chose five, exit the guide now, go to wikipedia, and start reading about chinese writing. Especially focus on "radicals", which are to chinese characters what letters are to english. Roughly. Very, very roughly.

I'd also reccomend looking at ancient egyptian and mayan to see what the possibilities for character design in an ideographic system can be.

Also be aware that ideographic writing systems are complex enough that they require almost if not just as much effort as designing a spoken language. That's why I'm not giving advice on them - they're almost not even the same type of thing as the other four systems.

Assuming you chose something other than five, you probably have another choice to make:


  1. Your writing system came about "naturally" (nobody consciously designed it, in-world)

  2. Someone made your system


If you chose option 2, then someone designed your system in-world. Synthetic alphabets have never come to exist naturally on earth. The way they work is just... not something that happens without intent. We'll get to why, when we get to them.

So anyway, those are your choices, but what do they mean?

If you can even read this guide, I'm assuming that you know what an alphabet is.

Synthetic alphabets do something smarter than regular alphabets. In a synthetic alphabet, each letter has one sound, but no letter is used alone. Instead, you put these letters together into compound shapes that form complete syllables, and the shape of a syllable-character tells you how that character is pronounced. This is not like alphabets, because there's none of that bizarre nonsense where putting together two letters makes a new sound. No, if a sound exists, it gets it's own letter; period.

Syllabaries are the least efficient system of writing, in most cases. The reason for this is that, like synthetic alphabets, every syllable gets a character. Unlike synthetic alphabets, each syllable gets a unique character. So, for example, if your language has the syllables "ka", "ko", "ta", "to", "ma" and "mo" in it, in a synthetic alphabet, you would need letters for "a", "o", k", "t", and "m" - five in total. A syllabary would need six. And this gets worse the more syllables a language has - for example, if japanese were written with a synthetic alphabet, you would need fifteen letters for the basic syllables; but as it stands, the basic syllables use forty six characters.

Syllabaries are great for one thing though - developing a complex visual aesthetic. They are, in fact, the best possible thing for this outside of ideographic systems.

And then you have abjads. Abjads are alphabets without vowels. If you want to show a vowel (something that you cant, technically, do in a "pure" abjad), instead of havng a letter for it, you modify a consonant. In arabic and hebrew, that's done by adding dots, but really, you can specify whatever standard you want.

So that's the writing systems distinguished. Now, what's the difference between natural and artificial?

If you're creating an artificial system it should be structured. Someone in your world spent time making the system, and unless they had a powerful ulterior motive to slap it together as fast as possible (see: missionaries like Saint Cyril, who sometimes invented writing systems in a way similar to the "fast" method so they could write a translation of the bible ASAP), they probably devoted some attention and care to making the entire thing have a coherent structure.

Natrural systems lack such.

Now, what might I mean by that...? I mean that there will be rules for how characters are designed. You won't be just choosing arbitrary shapes. The arrangement of parts of letters in space will carry meaning. The language might employ "tricks" that make learning it super easy. For example, in a "natural" system, like english, the letter's "N" and "n" really don't look alike. In an artificial system, if the concept of lower and upper case exist at all (and it probably wont; because the idea of an entire second alphabet to memorise just so people can identity Pronouns Of Importance is silly when you could just add a punctuation mark that shows that the word it's attached to is a pronoun), then it will probably be through a simple rule like "letters have lines over them if they're uppercase" (see what I mean about that punctuation). So in an artificial system, you wouldn't see "N" and "n", you would see "n" and "n¯".

In an artificial system, there should be at least some trace of that sort of thing. The sky is really the limit, though. When I make an artificial system, I tend to draw a box and then draw other boxes inside it; and if something is in a certain box, then it means something about the character in question. For example, I might put a box on the bottom left which means "this letter is a vowel that comes from two simpler vowels (like the vowel sound "yah" comes from saying "ee" and "ah" together, very fast.). Then someone trying to learn the system would know that any letter that had a tail on the left, like, "p" or example was a double-vowel compound, which would probably help jog their memory.

Although you can also use structure to make writing systems more difficult, too, if you think about it long enough.

There's two things that you need to consider from a design standpoint no matter how  your writing system came to be, in-universe. And that's the reading directions - and yes, I do mean directions. The firs direction is the linear direction. The second if the multilinear one. To show what these names mean, let's look at english. In english, we have a linear direction of left to right, because you start reading every line from the left to the right, and a multilinear direction of top to bottom, because after finishing a line, you move down.

By comparison, arabic and hebrew are read right-to-left linearly, and top-to-bottom multilinearly. Traditionally, (and still seen in various contexts today), japanese was written top-to-bottom linearly, and right-to-left multilinearly. But you don't have to limit yourself like this! In ancient times, it was pretty popular to write in something called boustrophedon, where you wrote left to right on the first line, then right to left with backwards letters on the next, then left to right  is non-backwards letters on the next line, and so forth.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...phedon.png

Actually, I'm sort of sad that boustrophedon died. If you think about it, once you learn it, it's faster to read and write - no need to move your hand or your eyes back to the left/right of the page.

For an example of a really exotic writing order, the irish author Eoin Colfer designed a writing system where the characters spiral into the centre of the page.

The important thing is really finding a rule, and then sticking to it.

Second and last thing you have to think about: Punctuation. I don't speak any spanish myself, but I've seen it enough to know that if someone is asking a question, then it's not like we so it in english.

English Punct: "What is food?"
Spanish Punct: "¿What is food?"

On the face of it, that seems less efficient. But, spanish writing, because of how it punctuates questions, can be more subtle than english in at least one way. In english writing, to ask a question, the entire sentence must be a question. In spanish writing, you can just put the ¿ where the question starts. As far as I know, the ? still has to be at sentence end... but in your language, it doesn't have to be. In your language, you might decide that the grammar lets people as questions in mid-sentence without the overall sentence being a question (english technically sort-of implements this like it technically sort-of implements many features of many languages: "And he said - I wonder if he really meant it? - that he didn't love her anymore."). Then design your punctuation with that in mind. Also, think about things english doesn't have punctuation for, like sarcasm, and include it if you think it's culturally important enough.

One thing of special note is the space. Spaces    between     words    are    punctuation. Some languages do not have them; for example japanese and chinese.

https://i.imgur.com/hgSgWbR.png

I know, I know, those languages have ideographic/logographic characters that make spaces unnecessary, rigggght? Yes, but also very much no. Spaces are a fairly new invention, and you don't see them much before medieval times. Writing predates such times by many thousands of years. Beacause of that, we know that spaces are not obvious. Consider not having them.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...ca_141.jpg

Okay, that's all the structural stuff. As far as aesthetic stuff goes, I reccomend going to this site if you need inspiration. You can see just about every writing system in the world there. If you want more detail, wikipedia is your best friend.

Well, that's all for v0.5 of this guide. v0.6 will include a spell-check and images to help illustrate what I'm talking about. v0.7 might include some more depth, and a partial translation into esperanto.