Conlang guide

Writing systems deep dive

Disclaimer: as always I'd like to remind you that I'm not a linguist or a professional conlanger, I'm just a hobbyist talking about the things I've learned from conlanging and consuming pop linguistics content over the years, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

cover image

(Detail of Codex Dresdensis drawn by Lacambalam from Wikimedia commons)

Table of contents

Preamble

I recommend that you work on your language's writing system after you've already figured out its phonology (system of pronunciation), as such this page references some IPA, but even if you don't have your language's pronunciation or you don't know IPA it's ok, I explain things in detail and give examples so hopefully this page is understandable for everyone.

This page will teach you about the main types of writing systems that exist around the world, this isn't a guide on how to create a script, rather, it's an introduction to different systems so you can become aware of the variety that exists, and you can more easily create something that doesn't work just like the roman alphabet does (the alphabet we use to write English, Spanish, German, French, etc.)

There will be a few links at the end to places where you can learn more about writing systems and even the actual design process for how to make them. Creating scripts (also known as neography) is not always tied to conlanging, it's possible for you to invent a new writing system for a natural language, so even though this page is focused on conlanging it could still have useful information if conlanging is not what you're after.

Writing Systems

Writing systems (also known as scripts or orthographies) are the way we represent languages visually (or in a tactile way, in the case of braille, the writing system designed by visually impaired people).

It's important to keep in mind that a writing system is not a language, these are two separate things, after all, if I started writing English in a made up alphabet, that wouldn't suddenly turn it into a different language, sure, people wouldn't be able to read the text if they don't know my alphabet but it's still English text, any English speaker who learned the new script would be able to read and write just fine because all of the words and grammar are the same, it's only the written down symbols that changed in this example.

Because of this it's possible to make a language with no writing system at all, so if you don't feel like designing a whole script or you think your fictional civilization wouldn't have scribes or anything like that, that's also perfectly fine! In fact, Dothraki is an example of a conlang with no writing system, we can write down Dothraki words irl with the roman alphabet for convenience, but in-universe no one actually writes down Dothraki, this is known as a romanization, I'll write about romanizations and how to make them in the future, the point is that it's not a writing system that is actually used in-universe.

But ok, let's say you want to make a script for your conlang, all you gotta do is come up with a bunch of symbols for consonants and vowels, and then put them one next to the other to write words, right? Well, sure, you could do that, but there's actually a lot of other options you may be unaware of, so let's explore them.

See, writing is a technology, it got invented a long time ago and people have come up with all sorts of different types of scripts over the millennia, I'll start by explaining the most ancient ones and work my way to more modern ones (it's not a completely linear history since writing existed in many different places and evolved in many different ways, but this is roughly the order they developed in as far as I'm aware).

Logographies

(Egyptian hieroglyphics from Wikimedia commons)

(Maya glyphs from Wikimedia commons)

(Chinese calligraphy from Wikimedia commons)

A logographic writing system is one where the symbols (also known as "glyphs" or "characters") don't actually represent any single sound, they stand for whole ideas or concepts, so you could have a symbol for "tree" and a symbol for "person" but no symbol for the /s/ consonant or the /a/ vowel. In order to know how words are pronounced you just have to memorize it because you can't sound it out based on the way the language is written; there is no correlation between the shapes of the glyphs and the way they're read out loud.

Because of this logographies tend to have thousands of characters, after all, languages don't just transmit a few dozen concepts, we encounter hundreds of different things and ideas every day.

This also means that these scripts are incredibly time consuming to make and keep track of, so you don't see them super commonly in conlangs, but there's some conlangers that actually do make this type of writing system! And I think it's awesome, I love that there's a decent amount of logographies made for conlangs.

Examples of logographies made for conlangs:

(High Valyrian text by David J. Peterson from a Lexember post on Tumblr)

(Lexember entry displaying a logographic glyph by Sannehnagi from Tumblr)

Here's an important detail: the symbols in a logography tend to be used for multiple purposes, so if a new word is coined, instead of creating a whole new glyph, what scribes might do is pick 2 glyphs that already exist and put them next to each other to represent the new word, for example if you coined a word for a type of bird maybe it's written with a symbol meaning "bird" and a symbol meaning something else like a characteristic of said bird, and so when you put those 2 symbols next to each other they're read as one singular word, they may even be combined into a new symbol containing the two previous ones squished together.

Something that happens fairly often as well is that one of the symbols is actually used to hint at the meaning of the word while the other one gets used to hint at the pronunciation, but wait, these symbols don't represent how words are pronounced, so how can that be? Well, the thing is, some words sound similar to other words, so you can use that to your advantage.

For example if English was written with a logography maybe the spelling of the word "to write" would be the character for "pen" 🖊️ and the character for "right" ➡️, so it would be written like this:

🖊️➡️

The first character hints at the meaning while the second one hints at the pronunciation. The word "to write" and the word "right" aren't related in meaning at all, and it's not like the symbol for "right" was made to represent the sounds /ɹaɪt/, it was made to represent the concept of "right"ness, the reason it's used in this example is purely as a hint of the pronunciation of the new word being written.

This whole strategy where symbols are used to hint at the pronunciation of words is called the rebus principle.

Keep in mind that all languages evolve over time, so words that used to sound similar might fall out of use or their pronunciation might diverge, sometimes when a logographic symbol is being used to hint at the pronunciation of a word it no longer sounds like the word it's referencing, and so the resulting 2 glyph combination will seem fairly random and just has to be memorized by the learner.

This is part of the reason why it's important to keep in mind that a writing system is not a language, the actual words of the language won't necessarily correspond one to one with the glyphs of its logographic writing system, sometimes a single word is written with one glyph, sometimes it's written with 2 or more, sometimes the glyphs hint at the way the word is pronounced, sometimes they hint at the meaning, sometimes they do both and sometimes they do neither because of language evolution.

Here's an interesting detail, at least in the case of Chinese writing, the glyphs are made out of "radicals" which are repeating segments that get used across different symbols, for example the character for "to rest" 休 is made out of the glyph for "man" 人 and the glyph for "tree" 木 being squished together, in this case representing the image of a man leaning against a tree; resting, but the point is that these radicals get used in many other characters as well, in fact learning these can help you to learn the glyphs faster because you will recognize the repeating elements.

I'm not entirely sure whether these started out as two separate symbols used to represent one word or if they just got combined into one symbol from the beginning, but this happens a lot in Chinese writing, and a lot of the time they do the same thing I described earlier where one of the radicals represents the meaning of the word while the other one hints at the pronunciation. I don't know if this is a thing that a lot of other logographic writing systems do but it's certainly a thing they can do.

Logographies are fairly complicated and if you want yours to be very naturalistic it won't be as simple as making a new symbol for every word in your conlang, but they're incredibly awesome, so it's worth the effort, and of course a big advantage is that you can condense more information into less space, you generally need less glyphs to write a sentence in Mandarin Chinese when compared with the number of letters used in an English translation of the same sentence.

Another important detail is that logographies usually fit languages with lots of tiny words, Mandarin Chinese doesn't change its words to mark plurality or verb tense, so words rarely change form, this means you can represent them with a simple glyph and not have to worry about how to represent little affixes attached to them, so languages like German or Korean with lots of conjugations and affixes might not be very well suited to be written logographically, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, just a bit more tricky to pull off.

I'll admit that I'm not very familiar with these types of scripts so I'm sure there's important details I'm missing, but this is the general idea of how these types of systems work.

Syllabaries

(Cherokee syllabary from Wikimedia commons)

(Document written in the Vai syllabary from Wikimedia commons)

(Japanese hiragana chart from Wikimedia commons)

Syllabaries, like their name implies, are scripts where each glyph represents a whole syllable, so for example if you look at the Japanese hiragana glyphs for "ka", "ki", "ku", "ke" and "ko":

か き く け こ

You can see that there is no part of the glyph that represents the /k/ consonant and a separate part that represents the vowel, the glyph as a whole represents the combination of the consonant and the vowel, they're not able to be separated.

Syllabaries also come with the advantage that they let you condense more information into a smaller space, and in this case you don't need to create nearly as many characters as you do for a logographic writing system! However it's important to keep in mind the syllable structure of the language being written, it matters because syllabaries work best with languages that have fairly simple syllable structures, let's compare Japanese and English to clarify what I mean.

Japanese doesn't have that many possible syllables because it doesn't have that many consonants and vowels in total, plus the rules for putting together syllables are fairly simple: most syllables consist of only a consonant and then a vowel, and only the /n/ consonant is allowed to end a syllable occasionally, so you almost never get consonant clusters anywhere, words are mostly made out of sequences like consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel etc.

And I mean, sure, Japanese hiragana has some special character combinations and stuff but counting only the basic consonants and ignoring long vowels Japanese has a total of 128 syllables by my count, and if you make a special character for the /n/ consonant that can appear at the end of syllables you only need roughly 64 characters to represent the whole language.

you can cut down on this even more by making special markings for sounds that are similar to each other, for example /ɡa/ /ɡi/ /ɡu/ /ɡe/ and /ɡo/ are just voiced versions of /ka/ /ki/ /ku/ /ke/ and /ko/, so you can write a special mark over the symbol to indicate voicing and now you can re-use the same symbol for the unvoiced and the voiced version of the same consonant:

unvoiced か き く け こ vs voiced が ぎ ぐ げ ご.

As a result Japanese hiragana only has 46 basic symbols you need to learn in order to use it, you can learn how to spell every single syllable that exists in the entire language with only 46 characters and a couple of extra things here and there, it's fairly manageable and it allows you to condense information very effectively since most syllables consist of only a consonant and a vowel, so you can write most Japanese syllables with a singular glyph without any special markings.

In contrast English is estimated to have around 100,000 possible syllables, I mean, think about it, words like "strengths" /stɹɛŋkθs/ "crafts" /kɹæfts/ and "sixths" /sɪksθs/ are only one syllable long, English allows all sorts of consonant clusters to happen in both the beginning and the end of the syllable, plus it has more vowel sounds than Japanese and it has a lot of consonants, so if you were to create a syllabary to write English you would probably need more symbols than if it were a logography, even if you try to create certain shortcuts like what Japanese does with the voiced sounds and such, it's simply too complex for a syllabary to handle.

To write English with a syllabary you would not only need characters for /kæ/ /ki͡j/ /kɪ/ /ku͡w/ /kʊ/ /kə/ /ko͡ʊ/ /ke͡ɪ/ etc. but also for all the clusters: /kɹæ/ /kɹɪ/ /kɹʊ/ /kɹə/... /skæ/ /skɪ/ /skʊ/ /skə/... /skɹæ/ /skɹɪ/ /skɹʊ/ /skɹə/... and so on.

So syllabaries only really work with languages that have relatively simple syllable structures like Japanese, hence why they're kind of rare since many languages have complex syllable structures or lots of consonant and vowel sounds.

I mean, you could make a syllabary for a conlang with complex syllables but it would probably have loads of glyphs, lots of complex rules and it'd be fairly difficult to use, a lot of the time when a civilization invents or adapts writing they modify it to better satisfy their needs, though in real life there's examples of people trying to use a writing system that doesn't really work with their language anyway, so it's not necessarily unrealistic to do that for your conlang, just be aware that certain systems are better suited to certain languages.

And I'm not trying to say that only languages with the simplest of syllables can use syllabaries, it's perfectly fine to have a few hundred glyphs if that's what you're going for, if you want to make it a bit more manageable you can always use tricks like what Japanese does with the voicing of consonants, or when they put 2 characters next to one another to represent a single syllable, like how they write /t͡ɕa/ as ちゃ (using the character for /t͡ɕi/ plus a small version of the character for /ja/), you could even combine both of those into one singular glyph, like what conlanger Levuna does with one of their conlang's syllabary.

Examples of syllabaries made for conlangs:

(Valya text by Levuna from a post on Tumblr)

(Bwezhi sentence written in the zezhi script by Margaret Ransdell from a post on Tumblr)

I like syllabaries, most of my conlangs tend to have lots of clusters everywhere and fairly big inventories so I usually don't create these types of scripts for my languages but I'd like to make more, they're very aesthetically pleasing to me and they feel fairly elegant.

Abjads

(Phoenician inscription from Wikimedia commons)

(Hebrew text at the synagogue in Łańcut from Wikimedia commons)

(Pages from a handwritten book in Arabic from Wikimedia commons)

Abjads are interesting, these are sometimes called "consonantal alphabets" and I think that's a pretty fitting term because these are basically scripts where only consonants are written down, and maybe there's a couple of vowels here and there, for example if a language makes a difference between short and long vowels then the long vowels could be written by re-using some of the already existing consonant letters while the short vowels get completely ignored.

You may be thinking "how can that work? how could you read something if it doesn't have the vowels written down?" and this is another case where it depends a bit on the language, but even some English text can be read without any vowel markings, for example:

Th qck brwn fx jmps vr th lz dg.

Yeah, that sentence is not commonly said in conversation but if you speak English you could probably figure out what it says, if you get used to this way of writing it's not actually that difficult, especially if the language is fit for an abjad.

In a system like this several words will overlap in spelling despite having different vowels but this is not that different to how some words overlap in English like "record" vs "record", they look identical and it's important to tell them apart because they mean entirely different things, but we know that if you read the sentence "I'm going to record a video in a bit" it's a verb and you read it with the stress on the second syllable, whereas if you say "that's a new record!" it's a noun and you read it with the stress on the first syllable, in an abjad you just do the same thing but with more words that overlap.

Once again the advantage of scripts like these is efficiency, as discussed earlier English has lots of vowel sounds, but imagine a language that only has 3 short vowels: /a/ /i/ and /u/, and it also has lots of consonants, something close to 30, well, that description actually fits Arabic, it also has long vowels /aː/ /iː/ and /uː/ but those can be written down re-using the glyphs for the consonants /ʔ/ /j/ and /w/, so realistically you can leave the short vowels out and just let context do the work of disambiguating which word you mean.

You end up saving a decent amount of ink and paper (papyrus? parchment?) without sacrificing on that much legibility, and saving these resources was very important back when they were very expensive, you can see the incentive for an older civilization to develop a writing system like this if their language can be read without writing short vowels, plus this type of script requires the least amount of characters since you only need as many symbols as you have consonants.

As far as I know in Arabic and Hebrew the consonants do a lot of the work of conveying the meaning of the word, the short vowels don't transmit as much information, so you can generally guess which word is being used just based on the context of the sentence, I don't know how true that is because I don't speak any Arabic or Hebrew, but it's definitely possible to get used to a system like this, it may be a bit vague but it's good enough for daily life, if you need to disambiguate in edge cases you can always clarify.

Examples of abjads made for conlangs:

(Kmitmuk Ksu text by me)

(Veda text by David J. Peterson from a Tumblr post.)

Out of all types of scripts I think abjads are the rarest in the conlang community, despite being easy to make they're also fairly ambiguous and depending on the way your language works they might be pretty hard to read, imagine that you made a lot of important word variations that depend entirely on the vowels, maybe your past, present and future conjugations all keep the consonants the same but they change the vowels, maybe your nouns have a lot of different case forms but they mostly vary based on vowels and nothing else, if that's the case then it might be pretty hard to read a line of text because you could read it multiple different ways and every different reading will be valid, with no way to easily disambiguate or tell what tense the writer intended to use in the sentence, which is a pretty important detail to know.

And this is where I should mention another important point: As far as I know most abjads have a way of marking vowels, it's just that they don't always use it, it's optional, reserved for important things where ambiguity isn't desired, like in religious texts and legal documents, so in their everyday lives Arabic speakers and Hebrew speakers don't write down vowels, but in special cases they have special symbols for clarifying the specific vowels of the text.

(Example of Hebrew niqqud (short vowel marks) marked in red from Wikimedia commons)

(Example of Arabic ḥarakāt (short vowel marks) marked in blue from Wikimedia commons)

I do enjoy when my scripts are more clear and there is no confusion as to which word I'm writing, so I haven't made many abjads, but I'm considering making more, they're fun and they feel fairly unique, they may seem difficult to work with but hey, millions of people around the world write using primarily abjads, so I'm sure I could get used to it if I tried.

Alphabets

(Inscription utilizing medieval runes from Wikimedia commons)

(Abkhaz text written in the Georgian alphabet from Wikimedia commons)

(Latin inscription in the roman alphabet from Wikimedia commons)

And now we've finally arrived to alphabets! Colloquially people call any writing system an alphabet (saying things like "the Chinese alphabet" or "the Arabic alphabet") and that's not necessarily wrong because that's just colloquial speech, but technically speaking, in linguistics and in the conlang community an alphabet is a very specific type of script.

Since you're reading this in English I assume you know how alphabets work: you have glyphs representing both consonants and vowels, and you just put them next to each other in order to represent words, the fact that these are so familiar can feel a bit boring to some conlangers but there's ways to make them more interesting and unique.

The advantages of alphabets are that they're a lot more flexible, so they can represent any kind of pronunciation system easily, you don't need to make as many characters as you would for a syllabary and you won't have that many more characters than an abjad does, you only need a relatively small number of glyphs.

There's also the fact that these are familiar to most people in the world, because of how widespread the roman alphabet is, so it's not too mind-bending to introduce people to a new one, it's fairly approachable even for audiences who don't know much about linguistics.

And then there's also the advantage of reduced ambiguity when it comes to spelling because every phoneme is represented in writing, which makes them a bit less interesting but also means that they're easier to learn... kind of.

The thing is, the way that a language's pronunciation changes over the millennia ends up making spelling weird, it introduces what's known as "historical spelling" because people write words the way they used to be pronounced, for example, the reason why the English word "knight" is spelled with a silent k at the beginning and a weird gh near the end is because the word actually used to be pronounced more like /kniçt/, i.e. none of the letters were silent, it was just the obvious way of writing the word, over the centuries the pronunciation of English changed (because all languages are in a constant state of evolution) but the spelling remained fossilized, and so we ended up with historical spelling.

The reason why spelling stays fossilized is because updating spelling takes effort, people have to go out of their way to consciously alter the way they spell things, so sometimes people just don't do it, it's convenient to spell things the same way over your entire life-time, and it means you can look at older texts and be perfectly familiar with all of the words you're seeing, since spelling just remains a constant regardless of the passage of time, so despite English being written with the roman alphabet it's not very easy to learn to read and write because of all of the historical baggage.

To be fair, historical spelling happens with every system, in fact Japanese has some historical spelling in hiragana, and we've discussed how in logographies the characters that are used to hint at the pronunciation of a word might no longer sound the way they used to, making the hint kind of useless, but the reason I'm bringing this up is because if you decide to make an alphabet it doesn't have to be uninteresting or perfectly phonetic, you can add some interesting things by evolving your language, so your alphabets don't have to be just plain 1 to 1 representations of the phonology of your conlang (unless that's what you want, in which case that's perfectly fine too).

Examples of alphabets made for conlangs:

(Text in the tengwar script by J.R.R. Tolkien)

(Chart of the Valannic alphabet by @ValannoLyore@mastodon.world)

An important thing to keep in mind is that not all alphabets have the same set of letters, a beginner conlanger might make an alphabet that has exactly 26 letters and they're each equivalent to:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

But that could be a sign that the language was made by someone who isn't very experienced with conlanging, the reason why those letters exist in the roman alphabet is because of the phonology of Latin and the history of Europe, but in a fantasy universe with no connection to our world there's no reason why their alphabet would have a perfect 1 to 1 equivalence to ours.

Since the roman alphabet was based on the Greek alphabet it shares some of the same letters, for example Latin doesn't have a vowel pronounced like /y/, but Ancient Greek did, so they borrowed the letter upsilon <Υυ> to represent that sound in Greek loanwords.

And the Cyrillic alphabet (used for writing Russian and many other languages) was also based on the Greek alphabet, so all three scripts have similar sets of letters, plus they all have uppercase and lowercase versions of every glyph, but if a completely unrelated alphabet were to be invented it won't necessarily have equivalents of all the characters or a set of uppercase and lowercase characters, maybe it would have some symbols to represent sounds Latin or English don't have, and it might be missing some that Latin or English do have.

You can check out other resources to learn how to create your writing system, but for now what I want to highlight is that you should think about the phonology of your language and the history of your world when designing an alphabet for your conlang, that way you can avoid it being too English-y or Latin-y and it will be more interesting and original.

However if you want to you can always make something heavily inspired by the roman alphabet or even just use the roman alphabet itself, I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's only a problem when you didn't intend for your script to be Latin-y or have connections with the real world and you added those connections accidentally, but it's perfectly fine to do that if it's what you want, you're allowed to do anything you want with your conlangs.

Abugidas / Alphasyllabaries

(Tibetan writing from Wikimedia commons)

(Thai inscription from Wikimedia commons)

(Palm leaf manuscript written in the Devanagari script from Wikimedia commons)

And the last type of script commonly discussed is the abugida, also known as an alphasyllabary, (some people use those terms to refer to variations of this type of script but I use them interchangeably since most abugidas tend to be alphasyllabaries and vice-versa) this one is kind of similar to an alphabet but it works slightly differently, and that difference throws some people off but it's not actually that big once you get used to it.

Basically in an abugida or alphasyllabary you have glyphs that represent consonants, and then in order to indicate which vowel is paired with the consonant you add marks around the consonant glyph, let me illustrate with a couple of examples.

In Devanagari (a script used for many indic languages) the consonant "k" is written like this: क and in order to write vowels you add markings around it:

का (kā) - कि (ki) - की (kī) - कु (ku) - कू (kū) - कॆ (ke) - कॅ (kê) - के (kē) - कै (kai) - कॊ (ko) - कॉ (kô) - को (kō) - कौ (kau) etc.

As you can see the base symbol क stays the same but the markings around it change, some vowels go to the right of the consonant, some go to the left, some go above and some go below, so unlike a syllabary you can actually see the different components that make up the consonant and the vowel of the syllable.

That's not all though, another detail that I didn't mention is the fact that usually these types of scripts have what's known as an inherent vowel, so if you see a consonant on its own it's not just read as a consonant, it's read as if it had the inherent vowel attached, in the case of Devanagari the inherent vowel is /a/ so the glyph क is actually read as "ka", and this goes for all the other consonants, for example the glyph न is the symbol for the /n/ consonant and it's read as "na" because of that inherent vowel.

You may be wondering how to write consonant clusters then, well it's fairly easy, when a script has an inherent vowel it also has a mark that cancels the inherent vowel, so if you want to write just /k/ in Devanagari you do it like so:

क्

You just put that little tick below the letter and now it's just read as the consonant.

And if you're wondering how to write a syllable with no initial consonant there's usually versions of the vowels that are standalone letters or there's placeholder glyphs that go where the consonant would usually go, so they don't make any sound and you can attach the vowel symbols to it, and this way you'll be able to spell anything you want.

These types of systems are probably one of my favorites, and they're very popular among conlangers for a reason: they have tons of advantages from different systems without having many of their disadvantages.

For starters they're fairly different from an alphabet, so they feel more unique and truly foreign without having to invent anything too crazy or even mess with historical spelling or other features too much, they can also have all the flexibility of an alphabet since they can write any sequence of consonants and vowels you could possibly need, regardless of the characteristics of your language, so there's less potential for friction between the language and the script than there is when designing a syllabary or an abjad, and they're also fairly easy to learn, you just need to learn the glyphs for consonants, the markings for vowels and maybe an extra placeholder character, and that's it! So it's way simpler than learning a syllabary or a logography.

If you make it so consonants have an inherent vowel the script will work pretty well with languages that have a lot of simple syllables of the form "consonant-vowel" whereas if you don't have an inherent vowel the system can work a bit better for languages with more complex syllables and lots of consonant clusters, so just this small tweak can make the script fit better with your conlang regardless of its syllable structure.

Examples of abugidas made for conlangs:

(Text in Aazh Naamori by quothalinguist from a Lexember post)

(Text in Kala by C. Buck from his blog)

The one big disadvantage I would say these systems have is the fact that they're more difficult to make fonts for when compared to an alphabet, I'll get into the topic of font-making another time, but suffice to say that you'd need to create a lot of ligatures (I mean, making fonts for syllabaries can be harder and of course, making fonts for logographies is near impossible, but still).

At the end of the day an alphabet is still the easiest type of script to make a font for because computers are biased to work better with things that resemble the roman alphabet, but that hasn't stopped me and many others from making fonts for their abugidas and alphasyllabaries before, and it's not like you couldn't handwrite it instead, so don't let that discourage you from making a non-alphabetic system.

I guess the other slight disadvantage is that at first some people might find it a bit hard to read text written in an abugida, after all we're used to alphabets and how linearly they work, so we expect that all the sounds are going to be in a straight line one after the other, but when you write a word in an abugida some of the vowel markings might go before the consonant and some might go after, so for example if we treat the roman alphabet as an abugida for a second and we decide that the letter "e" goes before the consonant it's attatched to, a sample word like /lek.ta.mos/ would be written as:

elḱtmoś

I'm using the acute accent (´) as a way to cancel the inherent "a" vowel here, but the thing I want to draw attention to is the fact that a lot of people might get confused with the "e" going before the consonant "l" and so even if they understand the whole inherent vowel thing they might misread this word as /elk.ta.mos/, so there's a bit of a learning curve for people who aren't familiar with abugidas, but I think it's not that difficult to get used to, you just have to keep practicing and eventually it will become second nature, just as easy to read as an alphabet in my opinion.

I think the thing that helps the most is changing the way you look at these words, you're not seeing a string of symbols that represent the phonemes of the word one by one, instead you're seeing syllable blocks, chunked together, with each syllable being made out of a core consonant glyph and surrounding vowel markings, when you see it that way it starts looking more linear and intuitive.

And I should also mention that you don't have to have vowel markings that go before the vowel, maybe all of them could go on top, or below, or a combination like on top and also after, so if you find vowels going before consonants too confusing you don't have to put them there, you could even start to blur the line between an abugida and an alphabet by placing all vowels after their consonant but keeping the inherent vowel concept, so you still end up with something that feels different.

In fact, the difference some people draw between the terms "abugida" and "alphasyllabary" is that some people use the former exclusively to refer to the type of script that has an inherent vowel, so without an inherent vowel it's not technically an abugida, whereas they use the latter term to refer to the type of script where the vowels don't go in a linear order, so if you can't have the vowels above, below, or before the consonant glyph it's not technically an alphasyllabary. And of course you can have combinations of both systems or only have the characteristics of one and not the other.

I lowkey find that distinction to be confusing because those features tend to go together most of the time, as far as I know it's pretty rare to have inherent vowels in a linear order or have non-linear order without inherent vowels, so they feel like different aspects of the same concept. I use the terms interchangeably, of course it doesn't really matter which words you use to describe these systems, what matters is how the script actually works.

Extra

There is one writing system that is very popular among linguists, linguistics enthusiasts and conlangers alike, and it's one that I find a bit awkward to classify into any of the previous categories because it feels so different in the way it works, so I thought I should also briefly talk about it: The script is Korean Hangul.

(The oldest known letter written in Hangul from Wikimedia commons)

You may have heard about it before but let me give you a quick rundown in case you're unfamiliar.

Hangul is famous for being basically the easiest writing system in the world to learn, in fact, the creator of the script, King Sejong the Great, is attributed to saying the quote (referring to the letters of Hangul) "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days" and it's no joke, you could literally teach yourself to read Korean in a day (I'm not entirely sure if he's the one who said the quote or not, I can't find any sources, but that's beside the point).

King Sejong the Great wanted to increase literacy by making the most straight-forward, intuitive script, (especially since the previous script that was used for writing Korean was very complex and difficult) so he came up with a system where there are individual symbols for all the consonants and vowels of Korean (just like an alphabet) and then he arranges those symbols into syllable blocks, chunked together (kinda like an alphasyllabary) but the way it works is not quite like a traditional alphabet or alphasyllabary in my opinion.

So you know how in alphasyllabaries the vowels are just secondary markings that go somewhere around the consonant? that's not the case in Hangul, Hangul has full letters for all the consonants and all the vowels, the way they're arranged into blocks depends on whether the vowel is vertical or horizontal, that may sound complicated but it's actually fairly intuitive and easy to learn, take a look at this chart.

(Hangul chart from Wikimedia commons)

As you can see vowels are either horizontal or vertical, and the consonant glyph goes to the left or to the top of the syllable block depending on that, but the thing that makes this even better is the fact that the system is very flexible, you can write complex syllables with consonant clusters by simply putting them in the same block!

(The word "Hangul / Hangeul" written in Hangul from Wikimedia commons)

The final consonant or consonants just go at the bottom of the syllable block, and this means that not only does it have the advantages of an alphabet in terms of intuitiveness and learnability, but it's also more compact and it shows you very explicitly where the syllable boundaries are, you literally know how many syllables a word has just by glancing at its written form, the symbols are chunked together in the same way that the sounds feel like they're grouped together when speaking.

And to top it off, one of the main reasons why people praise Hangul so much is because the shape of each letter hints at its pronunciation, just to show a few examples, the velar sounds (the ones made at the back of the mouth) have a line on the right side of the glyph: ㄱ /k/ ㅋ /kʰ/, the coronal consonants (the ones made near the front of the mouth) have a line on the left side: ㄷ /t/ ㅌ /tʰ/ ㄴ /n/ (and this actually kind of reflects the way the tongue moves in the mouth when producing these sounds).

Then labials look like a mouth shape: ㅂ /p/ ㅍ /pʰ/ ㅁ /m/, and you will notice that there's other patterns going on, like aspirated consonants tend to have an extra horizontal line that indicates the little puff of air when you pronounce them: ㅍ /pʰ/ ㅌ /tʰ/ ㅋ /kʰ/ vs ㅂ /p/ ㄷ /t/ ㄱ /k/.

This means that Hangul is something known as a featural script which is just a fancy way of saying that the glyphs hint at their pronunciation in some way, so similar sounds will look similar in writing, but ideally they'd remain distinct enough so confusion can be avoided between them, which makes them fairly easy to learn.

As you can imagine a lot of conlangers like this idea, so they also make featural scripts. And to clarify, featural scripts don't have to chunk their letters the way Hangul does, they could be alphabets, abjads or abugidas (I don't think a syllabary could be featural though, because the moment you separate the consonant from the vowel it becomes more like an abugida, but whatever).

I could go on, there's even reasons for why some of the vowels are vertical and others are horizontal, but you get the point.

I've always considered Hangul an alphabet because it has full symbols for consonants and vowels but it also works so completely differently from any other alphabet out there. Many people classify it as an abugida or an alphasyllabary, and I mean, sure, the symbols don't go in an entirely linear order but that label doesn't sound right to me either because the vowels are not diacritics, if anything it feels like the vowels are the core glyphs in this case with whole consonant letters positioned around them based on their position in the syllable.

The important thing I want to highlight here is that you shouldn't let these labels limit what you can do with a writing system, if you have an idea for a script that doesn't quite fit into any of the categories mentioned in this page go ahead and make it anyway! Korean people did it without any issues.

I'm sharing these labels so you can know the options that are out there and you can talk about the different scrips that are shared in the conlang community, not to try to limit what you're allowed to do with your art.

If you want to make something different you don't even need an explanation for why your script doesn't fit these boxes, if it doesn't fit them then it can simply not fit them and that's perfectly fine.

At the end of the day these labels came about because linguists explored the world and decided that these terms are good enough to describe what exists, but if we were to come across a completely different type of writing system we would probably invent a new term or just expand the definitions of one of the already established labels, so keep that in mind when crafting your writing systems.

A few important notes

Again, you can check other resources to learn how to create your original writing system, but for now a couple of things that I want to mention are:

1: You can use more than one type of script per language.

Without going too in depth, there's many languages that use multiple types of writing systems in tandem, in fact the examples above are simplifications, for example Japanese is written with a logography and 2 syllabaries, Mayan languages are written with both a logography and a syllabary, and Egyptian hieroglyphics are made out of a logography and an abjad. You could even make it so certain scripts are used for certain social contexts. This topic will be explained further in a separate page.

2: Writing direction can vary.

The direction that the glyphs are put in doesn't change which type of script it is, you may have noticed that most abjads that have ever existed in the real world are written from right to left, but that's not a necessary characteristic of an abjad, you could write it left to right or even vertically, there's even some more complex directions like zig-zagging and reversing the direction each line.

3: Writing materials matter.

Finally I want to add that before you create your script you should keep in mind the materials available to your fictional civilization because the materials used to write a script change their shapes, for example runes look very angular because they were carved into stone and carving tends to be easier when you're making straight lines and sharp angles.

Just like with the writing direction point earlier, the shapes and appearances of the scripts don't determine which type of writing system it is, so don't feel like your logographies have to look identical to Chinese characters or complex picture-like symbols like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Maya glyphs, the type of script you pick doesn't have to constrain the look and vibe of your symbols.

Here's a few videos and sites you can check to learn more about writing systems:

(trigger warning: the narrative device of the video has to do with a pill as the title says, so there's occasional mentions of fictional pills and drugs)

47:24 - posted on 6 November 2015

In this video the entire history of writing is explained with lots of fun animations and visuals, and the explanations are even more detailed and nuanced than the ones in this post, specifying which characteristics of the various writing systems developed first and which ones were later inventions.

I think this is particularly good if you want to get a clearer idea for how writing was invented in your fictional setting, because you'll have a better understanding of how scripts can change over time and which things were usually invented first.

10:06 - posted on 30 April 2021

For a more modern example of writing systems being invented I recommend this video, writing can have a lot of cultural significance and I think it's interesting to see why some people might choose to create a script even if they're already able to use a foreign script to write down their language.

11:45 - posted on 22 January 2021

This video goes over the types of writing system described in this post but it's written by actual qualified linguists and it has a lot details I didn't mention. It's also quite a bit more digestible since it's a fairly short video, which does mean that it lacks a bit of detail in some areas but it's still really good.

19:50 - posted on 8 November 2018

This one is made by a conlanger so it's more focused on the actual process of creating a script, it's the last episode of Biblaridion's series on how to make a language, so it could be a bit hard to follow if you haven't watched the previous videos in the series, but I think it has a lot of really good information for script making, though I have a correction to add to this one:

When talking about logographies, given their high degree of complexity he says that "you'd only ever write something if it was really really important and needed to be permanent, like carving the name of a deity into a temple altar or monument" but as far as I'm aware that's not correct, it's a common misconception.

It's true that only a select portion of the population would be literate given the amount of free time that would be needed to study and learn a highly complex script, but among the literate population the script would most likely be used for all sorts of purposes and not just highly important or ceremonial stuff.

(diagram illustrating survivorship bias in a plane from Wikimedia commons (yes, this is the image that is also used as a bit of a meme))

If you want to hear more about that, and if you want to hear a pretty good explanation of writing systems in conlanging as a whole, I recommend you listen to this talk given at the 10th Language Creation Conference by C. Buck:

28:49 - posted 23 April 2023

https://neography.info is an incredibly useful resource, I seriously recommend you give this site a read before making a script, not only does it cover all the types of scripts I talked about in this post but it also gives a pretty comprehensive guide for the actual steps needed to design a writing system.

And lastly I'd like to mention r/neography, I haven't used Reddit in months but I thought I should mention it because it's a subreddit dedicated entirely to people posting their created scripts, whether they're related to a conlang or not, and I think that can be a big source of inspiration, you will see all sorts of different aesthetic approaches and functionalities and that can help if you're feeling a bit stuck or unsure of where to go next with your writing system.

Conclusion

As always I want to thank you for reading this, it takes a while to write these pages but I think they could be useful. Hopefully you are now better equipped to either create your own scripts that are more unique and different from the roman alphabet, or even for language learning maybe this helped you understand a bit more about the script of a language you're studying.

Don’t forget to stay hydrated and have a good timezone ✨