Week 8: Writing it down

Five ways to write a language, and what a script tells you about who could read it, what they wrote on, and how quickly they worked

12 April 2027

Tolkien’s Tengwar is not a font. Its letters are built from a small number of parts — a stem, one or two bows, dots and marks — and those parts are not arbitrary: the shape of a letter tells you something about the sound it stands for, so letters that look similar represent sounds that are articulated similarly. A script where the graphic form encodes phonetic features is called featural, and there is exactly one famous real-world example, Hangul, designed in fifteenth-century Korea for essentially the reason Tolkien’s in-world account gives for Tengwar: it was designed deliberately rather than inherited.

Most scripts were not designed. They developed over time, and their history is visible in them. An alphabet gives you roughly one symbol per phoneme. An abjad writes the consonants and lets you infer the vowels, which is efficient in a language where the consonants carry the root. An abugida hangs vowel marks off consonant letters. A syllabary gives each syllable its own symbol, which is fine if your phonotactics are simple and impractical if they are not — which is why your week five syllable formula limits what you can choose this week.

The physical medium matters too. Cuneiform looks like that because of what a reed does to wet clay. Letterforms that are quick to carve are not the ones that are quick to write with a brush. Decide what your speakers wrote on before you decide what their letters look like.

Outline#

• alphabet, abjad, abugida, syllabary, logography — five strategies and their costs
• featural scripts: Tengwar and Hangul, where the shape tells you the sound
• why your syllable structure has already narrowed your options
• clay, reed, brush, chisel: how the material shapes the letterform