Creating a Writing System

How to create a writing system for your conlang.

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Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

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Thank you all so much for watching…Edgar out!

[trekkielife]

The language listed under "elegant" is Vulcan. It says "pon-farr"which means "time of mating"

[PilgrimofMatter]

"Go forth and iterate until you can iterate no more." Until I am ill - iterate?

[danielchang]

"Can you distinguish them from afar?"
*Looks at Mandarin
*YES*

[BagelBrain]

Imagine a symbol that represents every single letter in the language, but it is rotated by a slightly different degrees to represent each letter individually.

[traderjoestotebag]

makes me really appreciate how language evolved over time and some poor soul didn't have to sit down and think of it all

[FlapJackSyrup]

I just said “this is so complicated!” as if this wasn’t creating a language, that in real life took thousands of years to become what they are now

[UninspiredUsername]

Or you could pick a writing system that doesn't fit your language at all. Then you can tack on an extremely complicated extra rules or even extra writing systems to make it sort of fit. Then you can add in bizarre extremely culturally specific rules and idiosyncrasies just to fuck with people trying to learn the language. Once you do that, you basically have Japanese.

[changbeanjam]

no one:


8 years old me with a diary:

[Cris-qnii]

I remember I used to slightly change letters as a kid to make my own secret language, you can't imagine my shock when I handed my mom a text written in that language and she read it so fluently and easily. She said it was cause she was very smart...

[coreblaster]

A written language that uses gifs as characters would be incredibly interesting.

[PaulMauser]

I'm already a pro at this. Everytime I stub my toe I invent a new curse language.

[simplydolci]

THE WHEEL OF TIME TURNS,
AND AGES COME AND PASS.
WHAT WAS, WHAT WILL BE,
AND WHAT IS, MAY YET FALL
UNDER SHADOW.

[carterwood]

The script at 3:43 is the Tamil script, but the language using it in the video is not Tamil; it's English using the Tamil script phonetically, and it says "Ya​ sal nōṭ pās, " or "You shall not pass."

[Taneth]

I gave my writing system three cases instead of just upper and lower. A letter is made second case by a diacritic, and a different diacritic at the beginning of a word makes the whole word third case. Second case is used for nouns, beginning a sentence, or acronyms similar to the way we would in English, but third case is used for proper names of individuals, places and events. Here's the cultural implication, though: in a casual situation one may be forgiven for not bothering to put third case on someone's name; if you want to show them disrespect, write their name in first case in formal writing (but that has the effect of making the writer look uncultured, too); and if you really want to insult them, put every letter of their name in second case. Since third case applies to the whole word, what this says is "I'm going to go to all the trouble of marking every letter of your name incorrectly because you don't deserve a capital."

[aimarov.]

5:06 "Ambiguity is never a good thing"

Armenian and Georgian: *"Allow us to introduce ourselves"*

[Seltyk]

A few friends of mine are having a contest - they each get exactly 365 days to build a language
These rats all went with their own ridiculous ways of writing
Guy A is diacritic-heavy. Not all diacritics are necessary - only a few to distinguish otherwise equal glyphs - but the rest make pronunciation exactly obvious with how much, say, "freedom" he's exercising with stress and slight variation in vowels
Guy B is making use of characters from over 30 different languages, solely to be confusing and - I kid you not - to piss me off. Me specifically...
Guy C is the crazy one here. His words will be written... as electrical diagrams

[maximilienrobespierre]

I like how you used Daedric for an example of evil.

[redseve]

"Are you going to create upper case and lower case, and if so.. Why?" that had me dying

[evannibbe]

You could also go the Artemis Fowl fairy writing system of starting in the center of the page and writing outward in a spiral. They use logographic characters.

[ferrellmanes]

*Shows Tengwar* "Peaceful"
Ah yes. The famous "peacefulness" of the Noldor.