Writing in The Acidic Jazz House

The Acidic Jazz House does not permit you to write in the language of The Alkaline Metal Field (England?)

Place your hand in this box.

What's inside the box?

A biro.

I thought I would start with a little description of the two scripts I invented, just for fun, during both recovery periods.

To start, here are some example pictures.

Ok the wifi is too slow, the pictures can wait.

The first one I created was broadly based off of the English (handwritten) and Arabic scripts. English in that it was designed for me, the idea being that it was based off of single stroke letters that were quick to write, such as the letters n, m, or o, when written quickly.

For example, my handwriting of the word cannon, looks like this:

It’s very quick to write, but the letters lack distinctiveness from one another, which in English is fine, because I recognise the shapes of words well enough to only need a few letters, and the size of the words as tells to figure out the whole word. However, in my own script I would

1.      need more letters which can be written in simple strokes.

2.      need them to be distinctive enough for me to read the words letter by letter.

It is also based off Arabic in that all letters are joined, in all cases, and there are no capital letters. Unlike Arabic there are no isolate forms of letters, as in quick writing this rarely is necessary. However, when isolate forms are required, such as with I, A, or in other cases, the letter is written, with tails either side, exactly the same as in a word.

Also, I didn’t really bother with initial, medial, and final forms of the letter, though through writing a lot, some letters have lost their tails when at the start or end of a word. E.g.

‘O’ and ‘G’ are written:

 

 

But at the end of the word they can become

 

 

This can be seen in the word ‘gorging’

 

 

Which, by the way, is extremely difficult to write on a laptop.

There is also a non-joining letter, like in Arabic, which is L, written as:

 

And some letters which take from the right, but don’t give to the left for your delectation:

 

Anyway, the wifi has arrived, so here is an example of Script 1, apologies for the lack of pixels, I don't know where they have gone, and I don't know how to get them back. 

 

 The script is a direct substitution of the letters of the Latin alphabet, bar the ‘th’ combination, which is written:

 

 

Here is the alphabet in its entirety:

Similar sounding letters are often differentiated by a horizontal line, such as D and T, where T is just D with a horizontal line. F and V, U and W, and S and Z.

I and Y are differentiated by a horizontal line.

What we lack in pixels we make up for in unparalleled enthusiasm.

Since X and Q were such uncommon letters, I found it pointless to give them separate shapes, since I came across them so rarely that I would forget their symbol, so since they often make a K sound, K, X and Q all have the same shape.

The letter R is derived from the Arabic letter Ray, but mirrored for a left-to-write script.

The letters H, M, N, are all based on the English version, just in a stretched handwriting.

In order to prevent N from looking too much like M, A, or D when written too quickly it has a line underneath. Mad right?

The only problem in reading is the letter H, which can look a lot like PA. However, this is rarely a problem as the rest of the word will tell you what the first letter is. Also, when written on a line, the second vertical line in H should drop slightly below the line, whereas A stays above the line.

 

 

 

That’s it I think, riveting stuff isn’t it?

Anyway, on to the next script.

This one is different in that it is non-joining, each letter is made up of one or two symbols, and the rules for writing are a little bit different.

Separate words should be written vertically, so the script is read from top-to-bottom, then left-to-right.

The words themselves are written largely vertically, hence the vertical writing system. If they were written horizontally (which is what I tried first) it looks messy because they all go different distances below the line, so they take up too much space, and you can’t write consistently line to line.

Therefore, it is better to write between the lines.

It looks like this:

 

 

In terms of letters, the only letters which share a meaningful similarity are the vowels:

When writing, consecutive consonants, or consecutive vowels, are written horizontally.

However, when writing a consonant next to a vowel, or vice versa, they go vertically.

For example the word ‘meeting’.

 

 

 

Initially I was going to write consecutive vowels vertically, with a spacer letter, which would look like this  in between, so you can differentiate between the vowels when they are stacked.

I realised that this was way too long-winded, if you see the combination ION, in that style:

 Given that this letter combination is so common, its much better to write it like this:

Here I was practicing both the scripts.