Conlang Workshop 4: The Ortography of Your Conlang
by Jam Ham
The Ortography of Your Conlang
Understanding orthography, graphemes, and glyphs
Exploring types of writing systems (alphabets, syllabaries, abugidas, etc.)
Designing your conlang’s writing system
Considering factors like directionality, spacing, and punctuation
Task #4: Develop Your Conlang's Orthography!
For this week, we will be working on your conlang's orthography! Please answer the following questions:
Does your conlang use an existing orthography?
If so, what script does it use, and what are its rules?
If it uses its own orthography, what type of writing system does it use?
Is it an alphabet? Abjad? Abugida? Syllabary? Logographic system? A mix of these?
For either your very own writing system or an already-existing writing system, please show us a chart and/or sample words or sentences to show your orthographic rules!
For either creating your own or using an existing set of glyphs, you may also want to consider:
Writing direction - Do you read it left-to-right? Right-to-left? Top-to-bottom? Differently in certain contexts? A mix of directions in the same pieces of text?
Spacing - Are spaces used at all? Do they separate words? Phrases? Clauses?
Punctuation - Is punctuation used? What do they separate, or what else does it indicate?
Representing prosody - How are things like vowel length, gemination, tone, stress, or intonation represented (if you want them to be represented in writing at all)?
In case you missed it, here are some useful links for your conlanging process! (FontStruct was added as per the discussion we had after the workshop)
ConWorkShop - A useful site to store any info about whatever conlang you have!
FontStruct - A free and easy tool for you to create fonts in case you want your orthography seen typed! (You can upload your orthography font to ConWorkShop too!)