Orthografoolery

I have a hobby/habit of playing with writing systems and devising scripts. Maybe it's just because I'm too lazy to construct a whole language (although there have been attempts at such.) I like to write my name on things with them and then show them off to my Anonymous Benefactors. And now, I'm showing them off to you :D

Feel free to use any of these for your own nefarious purposes, just as long as you don't act like you invented them.

English Scripts

These are meant to be used for writing English, but they're analogous to the Latin alphabet so they can theoretically be applied to anything of that sort.

"This Goofy Alphabet"

tga.gif

I made this one I think either early 2024 or sometime 2023. It started with me trying to squish the Latin alphabet into a 3x3-pixel space, then I rotated the results upside-down and "reinterpreted" them into a higher resolution as though they were entirely different letters, and then decided that they're written top-to-bottom, left-to-right. Just to obscure its similarity to plain English a little more. The result is very geometric, and looks pretty sci-fi to me.

Also interpuncts, because I was all excited about interpuncts I guess. (I mean, it's true, they are cool.)

Number Runes

numberrunes.gif

This one was made sometime after This Goofy Alphabet. It's really just a set of seximal numerals that can also be used as an alphabet. Still, it looks all cool and runic, and the regularity makes it relatively easy to remember which letters are which.

Arienopanish Magnalph (formerly Latgul)

magnalph.gif

Possibly my favorite, definitely the one I use the most. I made the first version around November 2024 and since then I've been tweaking glyphs and mechanics to make things prettier, more cohesive, easier to write, etc. until it reached its current form, which I'm almost entirely satisfied with.

Vowels are placed on top of a consonant preceeding them. If no consonant preceeds a vowel cluster, the "null" letter is used instead. Either Y glyph can be used for any occasion, but obviously the consonant one is for when it's a consonant and the vowel one is for when it's a vowel. Recently I've toyed with writing it top-to-bottom, in which case I've putting vowels on the right side of consonants while still leaving everything upright.

I write this in all sorts of places, whereever it won't be be counter-productive or arouse grievous suspicion to do so. I'm quite happy with how it looks and works, although there are a few letters (J, L, U) that look a bit too similar to their Latin script counterparts that I'd like to change but am not sure how. Regardless, it was really fun going through the slow, pseudo-naturalistic process of makinga and evolving it.

Conlang scripts

These ones are specifically made for certain constructed languages.

Sitelen Leko

sitelenleko.gif

This is just a shrunken-down version of the Sitelen Sitelen syllable glyphs for Toki Pona, small enough to be used at (some) pixel art resolutions. According to the file timestamps, I made this sometime in 2022. It was an interesting challenge trying to squeeze everything down to this size; in order to make all the glyphs have the same height, every glyph has a space for an "-n" even if it doesn't use it. I like to imagine them as some kind of bricks or tiles, with the little rectangle at the bottom being the bottom side of them.

The punctuation symbols on the last row are (in order): period, comma, colon, exclamation mark, question mark, cartouche/capsule.

Various ways of writing V0tgil

votgil.gif

I've tried tweaking the alphabet of Jack Eisenmann's old language, Votgil, mainly with the goal of making it nicer to look at and perhaps easier to write. Most notable is probably the purple one near the top-right corner, in which all the cells of the same color are written as one joined line. I don't have any regular pattern established for how the dots should be connected, tho.

It's worth noting that I am neither fluent in speaking nor reading Votgil, so I don't know if any of these actually make it easier to read.

A few more for the road

misc.gif

Some more English alphabet corruptions, plus another Toki Pona abugida inspired by some Canadian Aboriginal abugida I don't remember the exact name of that used orientation to denote vowels. You can probably find it on Wikipedia since that's where I found it.

I've probably made a few more ones even less notable than these.

----------

Back home