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StrandedAlien — Uwan script concept example
Published: 2011-04-03 06:22:55 +0000 UTC; Views: 632; Favourites: 8; Downloads: 5
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Description
Idea for a new writing system, actually two writing systems, for my alien species, the uwan. The older script is half logographic, half syllabary. Here, for example, the logogram is the symbol for "leader". "iyashai", and the symbols next to it are syllables that spell it out, plus a "female" determinative, denoting that the person with this name is a female.The second half of the picture is taken up by the same name written using my idea for the modern script. The signs are arranged in a block pattern like the archaic script, but the logograms have been removed, and the syllabary has been changed into an alphabetic script. Some of the determinatives have been kept, used as equivalents to "Mr., Mrs., Dr." and so forth. In the modern form, however, the determinative is extremely simplified and placed on top of the name, which is written as symmetrically as possible. Letters can be flipped, shrunken, or combined with others into ligatures when necessary.
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Comments: 11
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Did you take the symbol for "sh" from the Cyrillic alphabet?
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Nope, actually, but I see it now that you bring it up. Looking back, I think my mind subconsciously stole the letter "Shin" from Hebrew (and other Semitic scripts like Arabic, Phoenician,etc.) which kind of looks similar. I think the Cyrillic letter Sh was borrowed from Coptic, though, which had it's "Sh" based on a symbol from Egyptian Demotic, a simplified hieroglyph of a pool with lotus flowers and buds in it.
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That's neat... :3
Lol, Shin is my favorite Hebrew letter.
Tha's right. I'm a nerd. >:3
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Awesome. It's my favorite as well, though I also like Aleph.
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Cool. Not so different from Hangul, although you're combining whole words into visual blocks, rather than just syllables.
So then, what happens when you get a word that is very long? Does the visual block get bigger? Or does it stay the same size but get more complex? Or maybe it's morphemes, rather than words that get visual blocks. So rather than one enormous symbol for "international," you get a series: "inter"-"nation"-adj
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Sorry for the long wait in response. I've been very busy in the boring but important part of my life that doesn't involve doing anything fun like making artworking or replying to comments. I haven't worked it out, but I think it'd depend on whether or not the word is from the language, or borrowed from another language. In the case of the former, it might be like your morpheme idea. If determinatives are used, those would indicate the ends of words. If from another language, it might be just syllables, since the morphemes of a foreign language might not be obvious to them.
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You and your ability to make letter forms interesting and artistic... Though hard to read I'd think if all the words were like that.
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Thank you, and I'm not sure. I stole the idea from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and they did pretty well with them.
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I see the letters follow a similar pattern as we can observed in Egyptian hieroglyphs, sometimes being written above each other when the general way of reading is horizontal
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Yup. 
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