I actually finished it! 31 plus new words in my various conlangs. Here’s the list:
Tynthna: dzashka /dzaʃ.ka/ – blue, light blue, sky blue
Tynthna: tsaatromii /tsao.tɾo.miː/ – dress, tunic, clothing, the basic piece of clothing. The traditional clothing which is wrapped around the body and tied with a belt. From tromiiv ‘to wear’ and tsaa ‘thing, item’
This is written for someone with a basic knowledge of Illustrator. You should also be able to adapt it for other software. This post won’t tell you how to design a script (basically, doodle a bunch of things until you get stuff you like. Make sure parts of the glyphs line up consistently). I’m using letter and glyph interchangeably here.
You have my permission to save, archive, alter, and remix this post, so long as you include credit (Silvercat) and the original URL.
To start with, create a new document in Illustrator with a nice large canvas. Turn on the grid. It doesn’t particularly matter what size the grid is, but 8 subdivisions work well for lining things up. I have the grid at 72px, which means each letter will be an inch tall if printed.
Draw your glyphs as lines, keeping a consistent grid system, glyph widths, ascender and descender height, etc. Your grid can be very complex! Multiple ascender and descender heights, sub-grids, etc are not unusual for a writing system. Just make sure you’ve got a system. Use guides and refer to your other letters often.
A wider stroke will make it look more like type – I was using 7 point. You’ll probably have to make adjustments later in any case, so don’t worry overly much about getting it perfect.
Re-use parts of letters where you can, like dots, curves, and angles. It doesn’t matter how many pieces a letter is made up of. I like drawing circles and cutting them to pieces as appropriate to get a good curve, but that probably won’t work for all conscripts.
That last letter probably needs some adjustment.
See how the curve of the first one and the last one line up? And the midline of the two middle ones? It’s the same dot in the first two. The three narrow letters are five boxes wide, while the larger one is eight. Depending on your glyphs that could vary a lot or not at all. Latin letters vary widely, from ‘i’ to ‘m’.
At this point, you could stop – it’ll be an acceptable set of characters, but letter nerds will notice some issues. You can fudge some of these with a round cap on the stroke.
The problem is that the strokes end in whatever direction they’re facing. Whether done as calligraphy or as a font, letters end in a deliberate way. Compare the leg on the first glyph and the curve on the second with similar Latin letters, like below. In both cases, they end horizontally. You’re not limited to horizontal or vertical, but make a decision about it.
How do you fix it? Easy.
Outline the stroke (Object > Path > Outline stroke) then cut away the offending bits with a rectangle and Minus Front in the Pathfinder palette. If you want to be super-accurate (and you should), turn on ‘snap to grid’ (Shift+CTRL+” or View>Snap to Grid) and reposition your shapes to perfectly align to the grid. You’ll likely have to use a combination of selecting shapes with the Selection tool and selecting segments with the Direct Selection Tool. A couple of bumps with the arrow keys and you’ll be spot on.
For angles, like the leg on the first letter, before you outline, you’ll want to reposition it so it stays in your grid (unless you deem that acceptable). And you’ll want to make sure there’s enough extra on any stroke that you can cut it cleanly. This can mean redoing your curves, so think ahead.
Two options for each
How about if you want something fancier? This is where it gets fun.
Go back to your letters that are made of just lines. Open a calligraphic brush library or make a new brush. For something similar to Latin letters, use the settings below.
Apply that to your lines, with a 1pt stroke. You’ll get something like below, with thick verticals and thin horizontals. (You can decide whether you want to apply it to dots or not, or to use a narrower stroker) But now you have a lot of adjusting to do to get it gridded.
You could actually just fix it and then leave it like that. Mess around with different calligraphic brushes to see different effects. You could also do like above to get sans-serif glyphs with variable line weight.
Or you can make a fancy serif version. Note: this is the quick and easy way. You can get fancier with curved serifs. Take a look at different font faces for ideas.
We’re making a slab serif font here.
The first step is to make nice clean angles for the serifs to hang off from. Extend your lines so that the round ends will get cut off, outline the stroke, then go to town with Minus Front. Get everything arranged on the grid nicely. It can be easier to outline each line at a time so you can make adjustments to angles and lengths as the other lines get set into place.
Nice and clean
Now make a little rectangle where you want a serif to be. The exact size is up to you. I did one square wide and half a square tall. You can use those just like that for serifs, but I want to get a little fancier. Select one corner and bump it up a point or two. Now copy, rotate, and reflect your way around the letter. (It’s easiest if you copy the serifs to a space below so you can just grab them without going back to a previous glyph).
For thinner strokes, you want thinner serifs – for the wide strokes I put the serif halfway into the stroke and for the thin, the back of the serif shape touches the opposite side of the stroke. It helps to turn on Smart Guides so you can get the exact middle on the exact line segment you want. You can use a serif font as a guide, but in the end where you put serifs and where you don’t is up to you.
Fancy
Now do all the rest of your letters and try not to curse past-you for deciding the writing system should have so many glyphs. Could be worse – you could be carving the whole thing into stone.
I’ve already said that I was creating Maanxmusht to borrow words into Nyjichun, but I was actually making two conlangs. The other is Tsako, which is vaguely Finnish inspired, at least for the phonology.
Tsako and Maanxmusht are what’s called “naming languages” – conlangs with just enough vocabulary and grammar to create names. Tsako has less than 250 words – some of those created just to show how to use the couple of derivational prefixes that I’ve invented.
Tsako has paucal and plural, phonotactics that strictly limit what can appear where while still being CVC, and vowel harmony. I really like how the plurals turn out.
You can see all of it on my Neocities site. Here are some words I especially like:
nimerøl – to bake, which forms ɯtinimerø, a baker
iirikogyl – to barter
mørmøkottɑæd – ceramic, βottɑæd – clay (β changes to k medially), ætekottɑæd – potter
ʦøpɣø – blanket, paucal – ʦøpɣɑt, plural – ʦøpɔkkɔ, which changes to tsepe in early Nyji
to give – ɑɑreel, charity – ɑɑree
salt – øʣ
to shine – peippel
I could pick a dozen more, but how about I stop there.
In the previous post, I talked about how easy Gen is. In this post, I’ll show what a generator in Gen looks like and what the limitations are. I’m working on a language called Maanxmuʃt, which I had decided I wanted to be Germanic-like so that there would be a bunch of sound changes when words where borrowed, since Nyji words are basically CVC. (I actually stole the phonology and phonotactics from some Germanic language, I don’t remember which) So I wrote up some guidelines for the phonotactics.
Sometimes you just want a big list of words for your language. In my case, I’m creating a language (Maanxmuʃt) to be borrowed from for my main language (Nyji). There are two word generators I use:
I’m doing Lexember again and unlike before I’m actually way ahead! My focus this year was using the various derivation affixes and adding some essential words. This is going to be a long entry, so cut time!
I’ve uploaded the newest version of the Nyjichun wikis! There is now one for the grammar and one for the lexicon (aka, all the words). They are SO a work in progress and are full of notes to myself and half-finished stuff.
In addition to that, I recently made a twine game for a jam on itch.io. I redid my conlang Tynthna. It now has actual IPA sounds and a few more words than it did before. And lots of sound recordings! Which may or may not be accurately said! (when in doubt, the orthography is canon). You can play it in your browser on itch.io.
That makes three conlangs that I’m sort of currently working on: Nyjichun, Tynthna, and Ie. I’ve also done a tiny bit in Ylis (the language of the Thunderian capital) lately, because I needed to be able to say Thunderian for on A Heroic Moment without actually referencing Thundercats. (It’s Lunderka for singular and Lunderkusa for plural – and that’s literally the only words I have for it right now, because the old version was from before I knew what IPA was).
I don’t get to garden today. The Santa Ana winds damaged the fence so one of my roommates and the neighbor are fixing it. So instead, ya’ll get updates! Yay!
One of the fun but sometimes frustrating things about translating is that you keep finding situations where what you did before doesn’t work. This is one of them. In previous sentences zɯ got the accusative case marker, but it could be replaced by the answer. So, new rule was noted: if zɯ can’t be replaced by an object answering the question, it’s unmarked.
I’ve come up with a bunch of words for Nyjichxn because I was on a roll, but I have to do all the fiddly bits before they’re ready to share. It won’t be tomorrow, because I’m going to a thing. Probably won’t be Sunday because I’m going to prune the heck outta the tomatoes and do other gardening crap. But those eight words are coming soon.
Yup, doing Lexember again this year. Yup, I’m behind. The plan is actually to do it for the two languages I’m working on, Ŋyjichɯn and Ie. I’ll have to get caught up on Ie later, but it’s easier because it doesn’t have all the alternation and crap that Ŋyjichɯn does.
Anyway, here’s my first lexeme for the month:
Lexeme: chyjɒovi
Gloss: ice, slush, freeze
Irregularity: Noun – Type 1 (no plural or paucal)
Stress: chyjɒovi
Phonetic (IPA / Ŋyjichɯn transliteration): ˈtʃi.dʒɑɜ.ˌvʏ / chyjɒovi
