Tetral

tetral is an artistic language designed to be used by cyborgs and robots in science-fiction stories. Therefore, it is also highly logical, in order to sound very computer-like. The language is designed around a base-4 numeral system.

=Phonology= tetral name is originate from the amount of symbols in its basic system. There are only four of them. These symbols correspond to four digits (0, 1, 2 and 3), and have several ways of being represented - either on paper, orally, or any by any mean to represent a base-4 number. This is a big advantage of tetral : you can commumicate either by speaking, writing, sending smoke signals, slapping on the wrist ...

Another advantage of this system is that it is easily encoded on a computer, since a computer can only encode numbers (there is a one-to-one mapping between base-4 numbers with one figure and binary numbers with two figures). Hence, tetral text is very compact on a computer.

In this document, we will use the spun dashes writing system The spun dashes alphabet represent 0 as a vertical bar, 1 as slash, 2 as a backslash and 3 as a dot centered in height. Here is the table :

tetral figures are usually put together in group of 3 figures called codons. The codons are the actual basic units in grammar. Let's just glimpse a bit in it, and note that there is two types of codons : the structural codons are wodons with three times the same figure, the regular codons are the 60 others.

In the spun dash writing system, figures of a ame codon are written vertically (downwards), wheras codons are written horizontally (left to right). The direction of txt and codon may vary, but this the usual way. Let's just give a sample of text written with the spun dashes alphabet.



Here is an alphabet based on the same principle, but with different character for figures, which are more suited to be printed by a stamp. Little translation or rotation of a character does not affect its meaning, therefore it is very aesy to write with stmaps in tetral (like a machine could do)



=Grammar=