Iáþi/Writing Systems

In Se Nil é Λúbace, Iáþi is most commonly written in its native script, known as Se Hízôl. It is occasionally also written in a script borrowed from the Vωjl (Mvöihl) during the colonial era, during which the Vωjl script was required by law and Se Hízôl was banned. After the revolution, Se Hízôl quickly became the more popular script though some people continue to use the Vωjl script. Schools in metropolitan areas continue to teach both scripts, however those in rural areas only teach Se Hízôl nowadays.

Neither of these scripts are encoded on computers, therefore systems of transliteration have been developed to enable writing of Iáþi on computers. There are three main systems of this type. The most popular system is known as the Stón system, and the others are known as the Kajdra system and the Perdis system. These systems are also commonly used to write Iáþi in other countries where Se Hízôl is not used for the official language as well.

Se Hízôl
Se Hízôl was invented in antiquity by Λúbatä scholars. Since this time, the script has changed very little, only developing new styles and a few changes in punctuation.

Se Hízôl is a featural abugida. Consonants in this script are square characters whose shapes represent details about their manner of articulation and whose direction represent details about their place of articulation. Details about a consonant's voicing are represented by the presence of a diacritic above the consonant character. Therefore, consonants that are pronounced similarly look similar. Vowels are written as diacritics below the consonant character. Vowels are also featural, though to a lesser extent. Although there are fifteen oral vowel qualities in Iáþi, there are only eight basic vowel diacritic shapes. The other seven qualities are noted by adding a dot diacritic to the right of the vowel diacritic. Nasal vowels are represented by adding a dot diacritic to the left of the vowel diacritic. For vowels not following a consonant, there is a vowel place holder which takes the form of a line placed at the baseline. Non-syllabic vowels also use a placeholder, however this placeholder is modified by a vertical dash extending from the baseline to the midline, and the vowel is placed above the placeholder so that a following syllabic vowel may be placed below it.





There are additional marks for punctuation. A short horizontal dash placed midline is the equivalent of a full-stop, and a dot placed midline is the equivalent of a comma. A dot diacritic above a consonant is used to denote proper names (this diacritic goes above or to the left of the voiced diacritic if present, depending on the writing style). Quotations are set off using marks resembling Latin brackets.

In the charts above is the square style of writing, which is more angular and is more common in monuments and print. There is also a round style, which uses fewer strokes and is more common in handwriting.

The Stón System
The Stón system, the most common non-native transcription of Iáþi, is a Latin-based script appended with Greek and Cyrillic characters in order to maintain a one-to-one phoneme-to-glyph ratio. This is the system used on all Iáþi articles on this wiki. The system transcribes sounds as follows: The sounds /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are transcribed in this system as ⟨Śś⟩ and ⟨Źź⟩ respectively, however they are not included in the standard alphabet since they are not native phonemes. When included in the alphabet, they are both sorted between ⟨Zz⟩ and ⟨Çç⟩.

The Kajdra System
This system was developed in response to the complaint that the non-Latin characters used in the Stón system are often difficult to type. For this reason, the Kajdra system was developed using only Latin characters. * /β/ should be transcribed with a B with acute, but this character is not encoded in Unicode and is therefore replaced with B with dot above here.

** /ɴ/ is sometimes also seen written as ⟨Ǹǹ⟩ or ⟨N̂n̂⟩.

The foreign sounds /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are transcribed in this system as ⟨Śś⟩ and ⟨Źź⟩ respectively, however they are not included in the standard alphabet since they are not native phonemes. When included in the alphabet, they are both sorted between ⟨Zz⟩ and ⟨Çç⟩.

The Perdis System
The Perdis system was also developed in response to complaints about the earlier system. The Kajdra system resolved the issue of non-Latin characters, however the large number of characters with uncommon diacritics still hindered its use. The Perdis system resolves this problem by scrapping non-Latin and diacritical characters in exchange for digraphs, allowing it to remain within the ASCII character set. This system however suffers from the loss of a one-to-one phoneme-to-glyph ratio, and is therefore rarely used except for when the writer is limited to ASCII characters. This system may require apostrophes to divide vowel clusters that could be mistaken as digraphs. Unlike the other transliteration system, when this system is used for dictionaries and other similar resources, words are sorted using the standard Latin alphabet order, digraphs do not count as distinct letters. This means that, while "tel" comes before "hajla" in the Stón and Kajdra systems, in the Perdis system, "hayla" comes before "tel." The above chart is in that order only for comparison reasons with the other two systems.