Script Evolution, Part 0

This is just going to be a short post, about an idea that I had had recently.

As I've probably said before, I've always been interested in different writing systems. So as soon as I saw the "tengwar" script on the cover of the Fellowship of the Ring, I started looking for more information on it.

I discovered that Tolkein, as a perfectionist, wanted his writing systems to seem as real as possible. He had created a "base" script for the tengwar, and slowly evolved it into the modern version, imitating the way that real forms of writing change over time. I thought this sounded like a very interesting idea, and I wanted to try it as an experiment.

So here's a simple idea for a writing system that I came up with recently. The letters are simple geometric shapes, and they're arranged into syllables as in Hangul (the Korean alphabet).

Every couple weeks I will try to write something out over and over in the script. Certain features should hopefully start to change over time. 

So here's the script as it starts out.

I tried to make it straight and angular, as the Latin alphabet originally was (to make it easier to carve into stone, mostly). The vowels O and U were added to the fictional language later, and have more rounded shapes. And the shapes will probably become more rounded through their "evolution", just as A became a and M became m for us.

The alphabet is phonetic, so it doesn't quite match the English alphabet. Most of the letters are pronounced just as you'd expect, except:

• ʔ - the "glottal stop" that occasionally replaces the "t" sound in "button", uncommon. Many "t"s are replaced by this letter in Australian and Cockney dialects.
• Ŋ (next to N and M, if it doesn't show up) - the "ng" sound in the word "singing"
• Þ - the "th" sound in the word "thin", which looked like a "y" in Old English (thus "ye olde...", which is supposed to be "the")
• Ð - the "th" sound in the word "this", slightly different from Þ. Compare ether (using Þ) and either (using Ð)
• X - the "ch" in many German and Scottish words, such as loch. In German, this can be used for both the ich-Laut and the ach-Laut sounds.
• ʃ - not an integral (∫), this is the "sh" sound in "shine"
• ʒ - sometimes spelled "zh", the si sound in "vision" and the s in "measure"
• Y - Used as a vowel here, not a consonant. It doesn't actually appear in English, but has a letter in several other languages: ü in German, u in French, and υ in Classical Greek. Close to the vowel in "seen".

Letters are arranged into syllables, rather than words. Each syllable in English, or most other languages, can be split into three parts: the consonants at the beginning, the vowels in the middle, and the consonants at the end. Thus strength would become str/e/ngth, seed would become s/ee/d, aisle would become /ai/sle, and say would become s/ay/.

In this script, those groups are arranged into blocks. The initial block is in the top left, the vowels in the top right, and the final block along the bottom. (See the diagram).

Wow, I wrote a lot more about that than I had expected. Since a lot of the "evolving" involves simplification, the next iteration should be a lot simpler.

As a final thought, here are the first two lines of a poem by a well-known author. I've used the letter "i" for consonantal y when necessary, and the rest of the vowels are exactly as in the original poem.

See if you can figure out what poem it is. Leave a comment if you can find the title and author. :)