Here is an idea that I had regarding the creation of an ancient language to use for my novel. I was contemplating using special characters from many different languages (probably Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin) to map to the English alphabet. In other words, something like...

a: ﻎ
b: טּ
c: ӟ

And so on. Next, I would come up with a symbol to represent that something is plural (say ς) and I would also put that at the beginning of every plural word instead of the end (like we do with the letter 's'). Finally, I would also choose symbols for many common letter pairings (say ʯ for th, ʖ for sh, ξ for en, and so on) just to make things more interesting.

Finally, I would then come up with my own sounds for each symbol (that would not match up with their English counterpart). And behold, I have a language that I can translate things into rather easily, and I can sound out the words for the readers rather simply if I need to. Actually, I could easily write a script that would translate anything I type in, giving me both the written form, and how to pronounce it.

Any thoughts? Anything I am missing? Anything you think I should do differently? Thanks.

I don't know about 'en' since it's the only one of those three combinations that actually speaks the letters in it. What are you doing to solve the C-K-Q problem? I'm curious to see how you'll switch the sounds around... That bit was a little confusing to me. It all sounds neat though.

Well, I made a few changes to my thoughts. First, I decided to ditch Arabic and Hebrew because it was just too difficult to work with those fonts and others at the same time since they wanted to type into different directions. So now I am strictly using Coptic, Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin. I have assigned symbols and sounds to all 26 letters of the alphabet, as well as some to the most popular bigrams (and also several vowel bigrams so that I can increase the number of vowel sounds that I can easily use). I also removed the idea about plurals. So, here is a basic example using the phrase "The Lord reigns over all the earth"...



Th is the most common bigram, so it has one character (ϡ). Also, based on the sounds I assigned, this is how you would say it phonetically...

chu nejt jueysgl eyng on chu uhjch.

Obviously quite a mouthful and not particularly easy to pronounce, but I am happy with the basic concept. I might tweak it some, but I am content for the moment since the characters won't be speaking it much and it is really just there to highlight certain things.

I like it - very much Seems an easy and efficient way to create something that's not exactly a code

Andrew

Thanks. It works because whenever I want to write or say something in the language, it is rather easy to translate and at the same time ensure that anything else I had translated before will match up correctly. Also, all of those characters are part of unicode, so they are embedded in most fonts, so I won't have to worry about people not being able to see it when I post it online.

Anyhow, I claim no ownership on the idea. Anyone else is willing to take it and run with it. Enjoy!

How does it work as far as pronunciations go? Wouldn't it sound the same?

No, each character has been assigned it's own sound. For example, the ԇ character (which is for the letter A) actually users the sound /o/ (as in cone, boat, etc.). All vowels and vowel bigrams have a vowel sound, but they are all mixed up from the original. Likewise, all consonant and consonant bigrams also have their own sounds (except q which I made silent). Make sense?

Wow! This is a fantastic idea, Mr Garrett. I've never actually written a language for a fantasy world before, but I've heard a lot of different ways how to make one. This one seems to be the most simple, and very effective.