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Sunday 27 May 2012

Script

I've been working on the script for quite a while and now I have finally organised my scribbles and scanned them in. First a sample, so you can get a feel of it:

The name of the language (‘Mhmmz) in the ‘Mhmmz script
The asian inspiration should be obvious, and I think that goes well with the tonal nature of the language. I have tried to mimic, mix and match (and even shamelessly stolen a bit from) scripts such as tibetan, devanagari, chinese, katakana, hiragana, hangul, tamil, mongolian and possibly many more. It is written vertically - another very asian feature - from top to bottom in rows from right to left.

Now let's break down the word into its individual parts:

Analysis of the word ‘Mhmmz
The yellow things are punctuation: The first two circumflex-like things mean "begin paragraph", and the last vertical line means "end paragraph". I know. It's a very short paragraph.

Each syllable is enclosed in a 7-shaped bracket; the green ones in the image. Or if there is no onset simply a vertical line. This is from devanagari- and tibetan-influence.

The red characters are the vowels m and mm respectively. See how the shape of the long vowel symbol is derrived from the short vowel symbol? All long vowels of the script are, but each of them is derived somewhat randomly. But I guess this makes the script featural. At least a bit like hangul.

The bright blue character is the onset of the second syllable (h), and you may wonder where the onset of the first syllable () is. It is not written directly, but the horizontal line of the syllable-bracket alone stands in for it. And as mentioned no onset is marked otherwise.

The purple curl at the end marks the tone, and so does the absence of a curl in the first syllable. I think you get the point of how this script works. Now jump in to get the full alphabet.