Linguistic Discombobulations : Eldawnian Script and Phonetic Selections

I wrote about two and a half thousand words, then stopped dead because I felt compelled to give the names of people and places in the world a proper meaning. Once again, Tolkien is a wonderful example, with multiple names in various languages and their meaningful cultural backstories. To generate meaningful names, I had to create my language proper. As a result, I went back to do more planning and can't go ahead with the story.

At least I have a decent diversity of languages to draw on, having grown up in an English speaking environment with Chinese desperately skimming above the passing grade expectations each year. I'd started teaching myself Latin from Wheelock's Latin back in January, and I've got a rudimentary sense of how its inflections work. I don't want my language to be an English clone of course, so I've decided on a few key features that are not characteristic of English.

I've been mulling over this for 2 full weeks of my spare time now, and good grief languages are complicated. There was a particularly helpful site that I used as a resource after I had come up with some basic ideas for Eldawnian. Eldawnian is certainly not the language's final name but for lack of a better term, that's what I'm calling this for now. The website was 'The Language Construction Kit'; quite an eye-opener.

The script that I designed for Eldawn has actually been around for awhile, I probably came up with it in 2011. It was designed with the intention of using very fluid cursive. There would be very few breaks where the pen comes off the page, and no inconvenient crossings with 't's or dots with 'i's. One issue is that its letters do admittedly look very similar, like Tolkien's Tengwar, which some people have found hard for practical use. However, I'd like to point out that cursive characters in Latin script can also be quite hard to decipher, but we get by because we recognise the words without having to read all the letters individually.

Well here it is, the script with the current phonetic values that have been assigned to it for Eldawnian :

There are 24 consonant characters, which are angular, and 6 vowel characters, which are curved. This totals 30 characters that I felt would link up with each other easily. Just so you can see how it works, I've written saton, the word for sun, with the letters linked up. I do hope that I'll be able to turn this into a proper font so I can type it out someday.

The phonetics have been given according to the IPA, or the international phonetic alphabet. If you want to read up more on the confusing field of phonetics; and realise that English is terrible with spelling, then do check it out. Alternatively, have a listen to 'The Chaos' by Gerard Nolst Trenité. The letters in parentheses are how I intend to write these words in Latin script. I know it's butchering the IPA, but for most people who aren't familiar with it, at least that will be an approximation of the proper phonetics that's easily accessible.

It's quite clear to see that my consonants are organised by type for the most part. The plosives are all in the first and second row of columns three to five. The fricatives are in row three and four of columns three to five. The affricates are on the bottom left. These three categories are neatly split into voiced and unvoiced pairs, differentiated by the double stroke in the middle of the stem. I have the nasals above the affricates, n and m. I've put in one unvoiced nasal, the pair with m, but I'm at a loss as to what words to form with it. It could simply represent the sound of breathing. In case you're wondering what an unvoiced nasal sounds like, this one is the 'h' in mhmm. Yeap, that's not very noticeable. The 'liquid' sounds, as I call them, are on the double looped consonants to the right of the arrangement.

The sounds ts, dz, y, ɕ and ʐ are not found in typical English as far as I know, which may pose pronunciation problems. But why follow English sounds? I am racially Chinese after all. Those sounds pop up in Mandarin, with the exception of dz, which is simply a voiced counterpart of ts. 

I do realise that all of this is extremely neat and artificial, but to be honest, I don't feel the need to come up with irregularities. The language of Eldawn, like the whole world itself, is in it's infancy. Language rules were not set, and could be set logically once an authority was established. There was no systemic and etymological baggage to compensate for, perhaps people would have thought : 'If we're going to standardise things and have a formal language, lets do it clearly and correctly.' The early irregularities would be weeded out and the regularities enforced. The irregularities could of course persist in colloquialisms, but for formal vernacular, a standard regular system would have been adopted, certain sounds would be selected for the way they fit into the script and distinguished themselves for use.

This script is used by both the major societies of Eldawn, the Filial and the Radiant Wings. I haven't decided who makes it up yet, but I'm leaning towards having the Radiant Wings do so. The Filial might have had a pictogram system at first, which I have yet to come up with. Following this, the phonetic script could be used in the same way as pinyin is used with Chinese now.