Ayeri’s native script is called Tahano Hikamu Tahano Hikamu, which literally means ‘Round Script’ (script round). This is an old formation based on the word tahan- tahan- ‘write’ that stuck. The current word for ‘script’ is tahanan tahanan ‘writing’.1

Tahano Hikamu is mainly built on consonant bases that are modified by diacritics to transcribe the sound of a syllable. Since the vowel /a/ is so highly frequent in Ayeri, it is also the vowel that is inherent to every consonant grapheme as the syllable’s core if not further modified by diacritics. The script is monocameral, that is, there is no distinction between capital and minuscule letters. Moreover, it is written in lines from left to right, flowing from the top to the bottom of a page.

Typological considerations

Ayeri’s prosody strongly emphasizes the syllable as a unit. Thus, it comes as no surprise that its native script, Tahano Hikamu Tahano Hikamu, is an alphasyllabary (or abugida) similar to the Brāhmī alphabets of India and Southeast Asia (Court 1996; Salomon 1996). Scripts like these are

based on the unit of the graphic “syllable” […], which by definition always ends with a vowel (type V, CV, CCV, etc.). Syllables consisting of a vowel only (usually at the beginning of a word or sentence) are written with the full or initial vowel signs […]. But when, as is much more frequently the case, the syllable consists of a consonant followed by a vowel, the vowel is indicated by a diacritic sign attached to the basic sign for the consonant (Salomon 1996: 376)

For Tahano Hikamu the definition that a syllable consisting only of a vowel is written with an initial vowel sign is only true under certain circumstances, as will become apparent below. Moreover, Brāhmī scripts are often characterized by conjuncts of clustered consonants which may become quite large and sometimes behave in idiosyncratic ways. As far as Ayeri’s spelling is concerned, consonant conjuncts like Devanāgarī त्व tva from त ta + व va or idiosyncratic conjuncts like क्ष kṣa for क ka + ष ṣa are not present. Subscript notation for consonant clusters and special diacritics marking coda consonants like in Javanese (Kuipers & McDermott 1996: 478–479) are likewise unknown to Tahano Hikamu. This does not mean, however, that final consonants are simply omitted in writing, since closed syllables are reasonably common enough in Ayeri to warrant indicating them. Thus, there is

a special mark to eliminate the vowel of the previous syllable, thereby leaving a consonant in a syllable-final position. (Kuipers & McDermott 1996: 476)

That is, a diacritic exists which marks the absence of an inherent vowel, rendering the syllable consonant-only.

Another difference from Brāhmī-family scripts is that vowel length and diphthongs in [j] are indicated by dedicated diacritics, so the long vowels are not doubled versions of their short counterparts. Like in Kharoṣṭhī—another historically important ancient script of India—initial vowels are not represented by unique graphemes, but they are all written like post-consonantal vowel diacritics (Salomon 1996: 377). In Tahano Hikamu, a character without an inherent sound value serves as the base. For this reason, the character is indicated in the table below as ʔ /Ø/; its native name is ranyan ranyan ’nothing’.2

Similar to a number of Brāhmī scripts, Tahano Hikamu puts diacritics not only below or above consonant bases, but also before them. This, however, is not limited to vowel graphemes as in Devanāgarī ि i or Javanese ꦺ e, é/è (Kuipers & McDermott 1996: 478).

Consonants

Consonant letters are simply referred to as pa, ta, ka, etc. Table 1 displays all the main consonants. The customary collation is—similar to the IPA table—roughly grouping the letters according to their sound value by anteriority (front → back) and sonority (low → high).

Table 1: The consonant graphemes
pa ta ka ba da ga
/pa/ /ta/ /ka/ /ba/ /da/ /ga/
ma na nga va sa ha
/ma/ /na/ /ŋa/ /va/ /sa/ /ha/
ra la ya ʔa
/ra/ /la/ /ja/ /Ø/

The character ʔa , which in Ayeri has no sound value but is used as a base for initial vowels, may also serve as the character for /ʔa/. Moreover, nga nga is regularly treated as an onset consonant in writing, which is in part due to /ŋ/’s ambisyllabic nature, as Figure 1 shows.

pa + ngis → pangis
/pa/ /ŋis/ /paŋ̣is/
Figure 1: nga nga as syllable-initial grapheme

Tahano Hikamu contains a few ligatures. First of all, when two na na are in succession within a word, they form a ligature nana nana (Figure 2).

na + na → nana
/na/ /na/ /nana/
Figure 2: Ligature nana nana

This is distinct from conjuncts like in Devanāgarī et alii, though, since the unmodified sound value is still /nana/, not */nna/, so the inherent vowel of each na na is not deleted, and each na na retains the ability to be modified by diacritics. Besides this, Tahano Hikamu possesses a few ligatures of the kind found in Brāhmī scripts, displayed in Figure 3. The difference is that they are not productive, but fossilized.

ka ka + va va → kwa kwa
ka ka + sa sa → ksa ksa
ta ta + sa sa → tsa tsa
Figure 3: Conjunct characters

These conjunct letters are, however, not normally employed by Ayeri. Table 2 shows all additional consonants, added to write other languages. Individual languages may adapt the sound values to fit their phoneme inventories.

Table 2: Additional consonant graphemes
fa wa tsa za sha zha
/fa/ /wa/ /tsa/ /za/ /ʃa/ /ʒa/
cha ksa kwa kha gha
/ça/ /ksa/ /kwa/ /xa/ /ɣa/

Vowels

Table 3 gives the primary vowel marks. Of the vowel marks given there, only schwa ə is not used in Ayeri. au au is the only diphthong for which a dedicated grapheme exists, even though its occurrence is rather limited.

Table 3: Primary vowel graphemes
Diacritics top diacritic i top diacritic e top diacritic a top diacritic o top diacritic u top diacritic ə top diacritic au
/i/ /e/ /a/ /o/ /u/ /ə/ /aʊ/
Independent independent vowel i independent vowel e independent vowel a independent vowel o independent vowel u independent vowel ə independent vowel au

As mentioned above, vowels are written as diacritics that are added to consonants. In principle, every consonant has two slots for vowels, a primary one above it, and a secondary one below it. Vowels added to consonants in the primary slot delete the inherent /a/ of their base (Figure 4).

pa + e → pe
/pa/ /e/ /pe/
Figure 4: Adding vowels to consonants

The independent vowel graphemes in Table 3 are used at the beginning of words or inside words when there is no other way to spell the vowel, which is occasionally the case for secondary vowels. Secondary vowels are those that are not parts of diphthongs (even though another language might use them to spell diphthongs that are not covered by default), but follow the vowel of a syllable directly. Table 4 gives a list of these.

Table 4: Secondary vowel graphemes
bottom diacritic i bottom diacritic e bottom diacritic a bottom diacritic o bottom diacritic u bottom diacritic ə bottom diacritic au
/i/ /e/ /a/ /o/ /u/ /ə/ /aʊ/

Secondary vowels as well are simply referred to by their sound value; ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’, ‘superscript’ and ‘subscript’ or ‘upper’ and ’lower’ may be used to specify their positions; the native names may use iray iray ‘high’ and eyra eyra ’low’ to disambiguate, so e iray e iray denotes the superscript e diacritic while e eyra e eyra denotes its subscript counterpart. Secondary vowels attach underneath a consonant base, for example as in Figure 5.

ya + top diacritic e
→		 ye + bottom diacritic a
→		 yea
/ja/ /je/ /jea/
Figure 5: Combination of primary and secondary vowels

Secondary vowels very occasionally need to be spelled as independent vowels, for example, when the secondary vowel is long. An example is given in the word ruān ruān ‘duty’ in Figure 6.

ru + ā
→		 ruā ≠ rūa
/ru/ /rwaː/ /ruːa/
Figure 6: Long primary and secondary vowels

The example in Figure 6 uses a diacritic, bottom diacritic long , to indicate vowel length. If bottom diacritic long is put directly under ru ru (the bottom diacritic a -a diacritic moves down to where it is not in the way), the syllable will spell /ruːa/ instead of the intended /rwaː/. This is because diacritics modify consonants and primary vowels, but there is no way to modify a secondary vowel directly.

As a further exception, those consonant bases with an ascender ( ka ka, da da, cha cha) move the primary vowel to the secondary slot below the consonant by default while indicating the vacancy of the primary slot at the top with a dot, top diacritic silent . This is done to avoid crossing the ascender of the consonant with a vowel diacritic (Figure 7).

ka + top diacritic i
→		 ki ≠ kai
/ka/ /ki/ /kai/
Figure 7: Slot switching with tall consonants

If the primary vowel slot were not silenced by the top diacritic silent diacritic, it could reasonably be assumed that the consonant is not losing its inherent /a/ and the vowel below the consonant indicates a secondary vowel, spelling /CaV/. However, if a secondary vowel is actually added, primary and secondary vowels will be assigned their respective regular primary and secondary slots again, as Figure 8 shows. The figure also shows that this condition holds true as well for large subscript diacritics like bottom diacritic long , which commonly have precedence over smaller diacritics.

ki + bottom diacritic e
→		 kie
/ki/ /kie/
ki + bottom diacritic long
→		 kī
/ki/ /kiː/
Figure 8: Exceptions to slot switching

Otherwise, the order of secondary vowels and subscript diacritics is iconic in that it follows the order of sounds in the syllable. Thus, secondary vowels appear below the consonant-doubling diacritic, bottom diacritic doubling , whereas they appear above the syllable-final homorganic nasal diacritic, bottom diacritic nasalization . Figure 9 gives examples of both cases.

ppa + top diacritic e and bottom diacritic a
→		 ppea
/ppa/ /ppea/
peN + bottom diacritic a
→		 peaN
/peN/ /peaN/
Figure 9: Attachment of secondary vowels to small subscript diacritics

Diacritics

A few diacritics have already been encountered, though Tahano Hikamu comes with many more. Some of these diacrtics even undergo non-trivial positioning and repositioning. As vowels are primarily expressed as superscripts, diacritics are primarily realized as subscripts, so in the following, I will first describe subscript diacritics; then prepended diacritics, which Ayeri also has a number of, both as graphemes in their own right and as allographs of other subscript diacritics; and lastly, superscript diacritics.

Subscript diacritics

Table 5 shows the bottom-attaching diacritics. These consist of two classes, ’large’ and ‘small’ diacritics.

Table 5: Subscript diacritics
Diacritic Native name Function Example
a. Large diacritics
bottom diacritic long tupasati tupasati ‘long-maker’ Lengthens the primary vowel of the syllable pa pa → pā pā
bottom diacritic ya ya eyra ya eyra ‘low ya’ ya following another consonant, also across syllables. Marks palatalization of ta ta, da da, ka ka, ga ga, and ya ya in Ayeri. ara ara → arya arya; ta ta → ca ca
bottom diacritic palatalized ringaya ringaya ‘raiser’ Palatalizes a consonant (not used in Ayeri) ta ta → tja /tʲa/, /ʧa/
bottom diacritic aspirated ulangaya ulangaya ‘breather’ Aspirates or fricates a consonant (not used in Ayeri) ta ta → tha /tʰa/, /θa/
bottom diacritic glottalized raypāya eyra raypāya eyra ‘low stopper’ Glottal stop coda or glottalization of a consonant (consonant letters with ascenders; not used in Ayeri) ka ka → ka’ /kaʔ/; da da → d’a /d’a/
b. Small diacritics
bottom diacritic silent gondaya gondaya ‘extinguisher’ Deletes the inherent /a/ of a consonant, e.g. in consonant clusters or closed syllables para para → pra pra, par par
bottom diacritic nasalized vināti vināti ‘nasalizer’ Indicates a homorganic nasal or nasalizes the vowel, depending on the language pada pada → panda panda /panda/, /pãda/
bottom diacritic doubling kusangisāti kusangisāti ‘duplicator’ Indicates a geminated or otherwise double consonant pala pala → palla palla

The large diacritics ( bottom diacritic long through bottom diacritic glottalized ) cause the secondary slot of consonants to move down below the diacritic. The ‘small diacritics’ ( bottom diacritic silent through bottom diacritic doubling ) can attach in this place as well as secondary vowels, as does the homorganic nasal diacritic bottom diacritic nasalized in the diacritic-fraught example in Figure 9 when it is combined with bottom diacritic ya .

cān + puluy → cāmpuluy
/ˈʧaːn/ /puˈluj/ /ˌʧaːmpuˈluj/
Figure 9: Indication of homorganic nasals

Diacritics like bottom diacritic ya are applied progressively to words as a whole, not stopping at morpheme and syllable boundaries. So, for instance, even though toryeng ‘she sleeps’ is composed of tor- tor- ‘sleep’ and -yeng -yeng ‘she’ (=3SG.F.A), and syllabifies as /tor.ˈjeŋ/, the spelling is not tor-yeng to·r·ye·ng, but is commonly contracted to toryeng to·rye·ng.

Although the primary position for small diacritics is underneath consonants, the diacritic deleting the inherent vowel, bottom diacritic silent , very commonly also appears after a consonant letter at the end of words. This strategy is advantageous in that Tahano Hikamu tends to leave little space between individual words: Ya nimreng pangan narānyena. Ya nimreng pangan narānyena ‘At the end of words is where it appears’. With the dot after the final consonant, word boundaries are more visible.

Prepended diacritics

The example in Figure 9 leads directly to the next class of diacritics—those that are prepended to the consonant letter, either because they are simply placed there or because of allography. Table 6 lists those diacritics that appear in front of consonants obligatorily.

Table 6: Obligatorily prepended diacritics
Native name Function Example
leading diacritic rising diphthong lentankusang lentankusang ‘double-sound’ Makes a diphthong in /j/ pe pe → pey pey
leading diacritic umlaut tilamaya tilamaya ‘changer’ Marks raised vowels (i.e. umlaut; not used in Ayeri) po po → pö /pø/
leading diacritic retroflex hiyamaya hiyamaya ‘roller’ Marks retroflex consonants (not used in Ayeri) ta ta → ṭa /ʈa/

As the table shows, the only obligatorily prepended diacritic that Ayeri uses is the one that marks diphthongs, leading diacritic rising diphthong . However, leading diacritic rising diphthong changes into ya ya proper when a vowel follows, but stays leading diacritic rising diphthong when ya ya follows. The change in spelling driven by the semivocalic nature of /j/, as exemplified in Figure 10.

haday → hadayang
haday ‘hero’ hadayang ‘hero’ (hero-A)
tipuy → tipuyya
tipuy ‘grass’ tipuyya ‘in the grass’ (grass-LOC)
Figure 10: Semivowel causing spelling changes in inflection paradigms

Besides leading diacritic rising diphthong , there are a number of diacritics prepended to consonants as well, but as context-sensitive allographs. These are given in Table 7.

Table 7: Allographically prepended diacritics
Native name Function Example
leading diacritic long tupasati marin tupasati marin ‘anterior long-maker’ Lengthens the primary vowel of the syllable sya sya → syā syā,
na na → nā nā
leading diacritic ya ya marin ya marin ‘anterior ya’ ya following another consonant, also across syllables. na na → nya nya
leading diacritic palatalized ringaya marin ringaya marin ‘anterior raiser’ Also used as an allograph for the palatalization proper diacritic. sha /sʰa/ → shya /sʰʲa/
leading diacritic aspirated ulangaya marin ulangaya marin ‘anterior breather’ (Pre-)Aspiration or frication of a consonant (not used in Ayeri) nga nga → ngha /ŋʰa/;
ta ta → hta /ʰta/

The selection of the variant diacritics is not random or up to the aesthetic eye of the writer (even though the device itself is certainly a matter of aesthetics), but it is governed by rules. The prepended forms listed in Table 7 are thus triggered:

  1. When there is no stem or bowl for the regular subscript diacritic to attach to, which is the case for na na, nga nga, va va, and wa wa, as shown in Figure 11.

    na + bottom diacritic long
    →    		 nā
    /na/ /naː/
    nga + bottom diacritic long
    →    		 ngā
    /ŋa/ /ŋaː/
    va + bottom diacritic long
    →    		 vā
    /va/ /vaː/
    wa + bottom diacritic long
    →    		 wā
    /wa/ /waː/
    Figure 11: Use of the prepended vowel length diacritic

  2. When a large subscript diacritic would be added after another large subscript diacritic—this position can only be occupied once, so further large subscripts take their prepended form, as shown in Figure 12.

    ta + bottom diacritic aspirated
    →    		 tha + bottom diacritic ya
    →    		 thya + top diacritic i
    →    		 thyi + bottom diacritic long
    →    		 thyī
    /ta/ /tʰa/ /tʰja/ /tʰji/ /tʰjiː/
    Figure 12: Stacking of diacritics with reordering

    The order of diacritics follows the logic of the respective language’s phoneme inventory, so for example, if there are retroflex consonants and both dental and retroflex consonants can be aspirated, retroflexion would be marked first, then aspiration. If there is a palatalization contrast on top of this, the diacritic would be added after aspiration.

    When adding large diacritics to stemless consonants, they are prepended from the beginning, as given in Figure 11. Combined with the example in Figure 12, this principle continues for Figure 13.

    na + bottom diacritic ya
    →    		 nya + bottom diacritic long
    →    		 nyā + leading diacritic rising diphthong
    →    		 nyāy
    /na/ /nja/ /njaː/ /njaːj/
    Figure 13: Stacking of diacritics using na na

  3. With consonants directly following na na, to avoid a clash with its swash (* napā, but ugly ), as shown in Figure 14.

    na + pā → napā
    /na/ /paː/ /napaː/
    Figure 14: Diacritic fronting after na na

    An exception to this exception occurs, however, when the consonant is not directly following. In this case, no reordering happens, only na na may reduce its swash in size to accommodate the following prepended diacritic better (? napay, but slightly more ugly ), as in Figure 15.

    na + pay → napay
    /na/ /paj/ /napaj/
    Figure 15: Reduction of na na

  4. In other cases where a clash of subscript diacritics needs to be avoided:

    di + pā → dipā
    /di/ /paː/ /dipaː/
    Figure 16: Diacritic froting to avoid overlaps between diacritics

    Alternatively, the solution in Figure 17 is not perfect, but less awkward than having the vowel and the length marker overlap as in * dipā, but ugly .

    di + pā → dipā, with top vowel i
    /di/ /paː/ /dipaː/
    Figure 17: Less awkward overlap with ascender

    When two long syllables follow each other, as in bāmā ‘mom-and-dad’, one of the length diacritics may be pulled to the front, as in Figure 18. A subscript length marker bottom diacritic long on both consonants may look cramped: ? bāmā with prepended length marker on ba and subscript length marker on ma .

    bā + mā → bāmā with subscript length marker on ba and prepended length marker on ma
    bāmā with prepended length marker on ba and subscript length marker on ma
    /baː/ /maː/ /baːmaː/
    Figure 18: Diacritic fronting with two large subscript diacritics

Generally, prepended diacritics apply only to a single consonant grapheme, not a whole consonant cluster as such. Thus, for instance, in words like pray ‘smooth’, leading diacritic rising diphthong appears before ra ra, not before pa pa, since ra ra is the closest consonant before the syllable nucleus which is modified by adding leading diacritic rising diphthong . Since in the case of pray the inherent vowel of pa pa is silent, it receives a diacritic bottom diacritic silent to mark this fact: pray with the diphthong marker between pa and ra . Essentially, /praj/ is split into /p/ + /raj/ for purposes of spelling, rather than /pr/ + /aj/ (* pray with rising diphthong marker at the start of the whole syllable ).

If necessary, it is also possible this way to distinguish, for instance, ṭsa /ʈsa/ from tṣa /tʂa/. It would be up to the respective language’s orthography to decide whether either combination spells /ʈʂa/ or whether the leading diacritic retroflex diacritic is needed on both consonants—that is, ṭṣa —to spell the retroflex affricate.

Superscript diacritics

Ayeri’s standard position for diacritics is below consonants, but sometimes it is nicer to put them on top, especially for the letter na na due to its swash, as well as for va va since the space below its flag is empty otherwise, thus not providing much of a visual connection. The only diacritic that is normally attaching to the top of consonants is that for the glottal stop—its subscript allograph is documented above. Since Ayeri’s phoneme inventory does not possess a phonemic glottal stop or glottalization, this diacritic is not used in Ayeri. The list of superscript diacritics is given in Table 8.

Table 8: Superscript diacritics
Native name Function Example
top diacritic silent gondaya ling gondaya ling ‘upper extinguisher’ Deletes inherent /a/ of consonant, e.g. in consonant clusters or closed syllables vara vara → vra vra
top diacritic nasalized vināti ling vināti ling ‘upper nasalizer’ Indicates a homorganic nasal or nasalizes the vowel, depending on language/context naka naka → nanka nanka /naŋka/ or /nãka/
top diacritic doubling kusangisāti ling kusangisāti ling ‘upper duplicator’ Indicates a geminated or otherwise double consonant pana pana → panna panna
top diacritic glottalized raypāya raypāya ‘stopper’ Glottal stop coda or glottalization of a consonant (not used in Ayeri) ta ta → ta’ /taʔ/;
sa sa → s’a /s’a/

At times, it may be necessary to attach both a superscript diacritic and a vowel sign above a consonant, see Figure 19. In this case, the consonant-modifying diacritic is placed first, with the vowel diacritic in turn placed on top of it—this is exactly equivalent to the rule exemplified for subscript diacritics in Figure 9.

vva + top vowel e
→		 vve
/vva/ /vve/
vva + to diacritic nasalized
→		 vvaN
/vva/ /vvaN/
Figure 19: Diacritic stacking of small superscripts

Numerals

Ayeri uses a duodecimal number system, that is, a system based on powers of 12, which is a typological rarity (Hammarström 2010: 27–31; Comrie 2013).3 There is a digit for zero, so the system is positional, like the Hindu–Arabic digits used by the Latin alphabet. The numerals for the numbers from 112 to 1012 are shown in Table 9.

Table 9: Numerals
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 A B 10
7 8 9 A B 10

Punctuation and abbreviations

Tahano Hikamu’s syllable-modifying diacritic inventory is large and intricate, and so is its collection of punctuation marks. Table 10 lists the ones commonly encountered, Table 11 the ones not so commonly encountered.

Table 10: Common punctuation marks
Native name Function Example
full stop dan dan ‘dot’ Full stop Sarayāng. Sarayāng. ‘He left.’
divider dan-dan dan-dan ‘little dot’ A separator for small things, like clitics and abbreviations; divides the constituents of reduplication ada-nanga ada-nanga ‘this house’; 5:pd 5:pd ‘5 hrs’; dan-dan dan-dan ‘dot-dot, little dot’
dash puntān puntān ‘dash’ General sign for a longer pause, equivalent to a dash, colon, semicolon, brackets Yan—saru! Yan—saru! ‘Yan—go!’
question mark damprantan damprantan ‘question point’ Marks questions Manisu? Manisu? ‘Hello?’
exclamation mark dambahān dambahān ‘shouting point’ Marks exclamations; strong exclamations may be marked by the strong exclamation mark variant. Manisu! Manisu! ‘Hello!’; Yi! Yi! ‘Urgh!’

The two vertical lines of the full stop mark full stop do not look very much like a dot or a point, unlike its name suggests. Instead, the mark is derived from old full stop , that is, a stack of two small circles. There is no mark for a comma as such, so a dash dash cannot be used in this way. Instead of a comma, a wide word space is used to separate syntactic units. A long dash long dash is also sometimes found at the end of paragraphs or texts to mark their end. The strong exclamation mark strong exclamation mark may appear in its exclamatory function at the end of a line, but does not necessarily indicate strong emphatic force in this case, but just an emphatic statement.

Besides the common marks listed above, Table 11 contains those with more specialized functions. In Ayeri’s orthography at least, they are not in common usage.

Table 11: Less common punctuation marks
Native name Function Example
opening and closing quotation marks danarān danarān ‘speaking point’ Quotation marks Narayāng ‘Manisu!’ Narayāng “Manisu!” ‘He says, “Hello!”’
opening and closing parentheses dankayvo dankayvo ‘beside-point’ Bracketing of text, like parentheses bahis (larau) bahis (larau) ‘a (nice) day’
opening and closing name marks dangaran dangaran ‘name-point’ Explicitly marks a name as such. The closing bracket can be found as top-attaching closing name mark as well. Ajān Savati Ajān Savati; Pila Lay Maran Pila Lay Maran
fraction mark dansinday dansinday ‘number-point’ Marks (duo-)decimal fractions 17.45B82 17.45B82 ‘19.37482’
line break mark adrumaya adrumaya ‘breaker’ Marks line breaks within a phrase

The parentheses opening and closing parentheses visually push off the text around the inclusion rather than encapsulating it within them. The name brackets opening and closing name marks can be useful in that many names in Ayeri are derived from common nouns. For example, Ajān Ajān is literally ‘play, game’, relating to a playful character; Migoray Migoray literally means ‘flower’. The name brackets, make it unmistakably clear that a proper noun is intended rather than a common noun. The line-breaker line break mark serves the purpose of marking the continuation of a clause at the end of a line either generally or where there would be ambiguity with the equivalent of a comma (a large space), which would otherwise be invisible at the end of a line.

Two common abbreviations are symbolic in nature, like the ampersand & in the Latin alphabet. Incidentally, they correspond to it insofar the very common small word nay nay ‘and’ may be abbreviated as nay . Based on this, its reduplicated form naynay furthermore, also may be abbreviated as naynay .

Styles

Just like the Latin alphabet’s upright and cursive type, print and cursive handwriting, roman and blackletter, Tahano Hikamu has different letter styles associated with it. The example used to illustrate the different styles in the following is an Ayeri translation of the first article of the United Nations’ Universal declaration of human rights (United Nations 1948):

Sa vesayon keynam-ikan tiganeri nay kaytanyeri sino nay kamo. Ri toraytos tenuban nay iprang, nay ang mya rankyon sitanyās ku-netu.

[All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards each other in a spirit of brotherhood.]

Book style

Previous examples all used a style I call ‘book’ style since it comes close to printed letters, or also what might be conceivable as being written with quills or nibs on parchment or paper—of course, pen and paper is also what I used to make up the letters in the first place, without a second thought about the limitations of the supposed original writing utensils. The ‘book’ style letters are what I consider the canonical form. Figure 20 shows the above article in this letter style.

Tahano Hikamu, ‘book style’
Figure 20: Tahano Hikamu, ‘book style’

Angular style

I have long found the look of the Javanese script (for instance, see Everson 2008 or Wikipedia) rather interesting and thus I tried applying the general aesthetics of what I had seen of it to Tahano Hikamu at some point. As mentioned above as well, there are no subscript letters in Ayeri, and the number of large swirling diacritics is also rather low, so there is still definitely a difference in appearance. The ‘angular’ style is also the one that is comparable in function to the Latin alphabet’s bold face or italic style. This letter style ( hinya hinya ‘angular’) is displayed in Figure 21.

Tahano Hikamu, ‘angular style’
Figure 21: Tahano Hikamu, ‘angular style’

Overall, the greatest difference to the ‘book’ style is that letter shapes are more stylized. Many of the main strokes double to become a thick and a parallel thin line, and there are no loops, such as on ka ka and ga ga. The shape of na na changes into a simple descending line angular na , the vowel carrier ʔ to a flattened O-like circle, and the bottom curl in ta ta becomes a wedge. While the right side of the sa sa character in the ‘book style’ consists of two strokes—a flag and a separate downwards bow—they connect here to form an R-like shape.

Cursive style

Reproducing the shapes of either the ‘book’ style or the ‘angular’ style by hand accurately is slow, so I wondered what daily handwriting could look like. This presupposes pen and paper again. For Brāhmī and related scripts, Salomon (1996: 377) mentions that inscriptions have been found on copper plates and plates made of other metals, besides stone. Although

very few such documents survive in South Asia, […] we do have early non-epigraphic specimens on wood, leather, palm leaf, and birch bark from Inner Asia. (Salomon 1996: 378)

In this respect, there are many historically attested media besides parchment and papyrus which support being inscribed with styluses or ink pens, featuring graphically complex scripts. Metal plates can be inscribed with metal styluses and should allow similar shapes as modern pens. Wax tablets as used in Europe from antiquity to the middle ages should as well allow for relative freedom of stroke direction, so the character shapes are probably not implausible even without assuming that pen and paper are (widely) available. Figure 22 shows what Tahano Hikamu might look like jotted down by hand.

Tahano Hikamu, cursive style’
Figure 22: Tahano Hikamu, ‘cursive style’

Many letter shapes become simplified, specifically ba ba, ga ga, ka ka, na na, nga nga, sa sa, the vowel carrier ʔ , the diphthong marker leading diacritic rising diphthong , and the vowel i i. Not shown here is the vowel length diacritic, bottom diacritic long , which is simplified to a shape like ɔ. The abbreviated form of nay nay ‘and’ is used throughout, though in a shape that is more similar to its ‘angular’ form angular nay . na na is also taken from the ‘angular’ style angular na , which means that the latter may be assumed as the actual basic shape, rather than the ‘book’ style’s na , or both could be diverging developments of a common ancestor.

Experiment: Blackletter

I’ve also wondered before what Tahano Hikamu might look like if it were adapted to Central European blackletter style. This, of course, constitutes a sharp contrast to Ayeri’s usual look and feel, which made the experiment all the more interesting. Figure 23 shows what the example passage might have looked like at a time when Gothic book hands flourished.

Tahano Hikamu, ‘blackletter style’
Figure 23: Tahano Hikamu, ‘blackletter style’

The letter shapes from the ‘book’ style stay largely intact, though all curves are broken up into at least two strokes, and strokes from the bottom right to the top left are avoided completely. The characters that differ most are ga ga, ra ra, nga nga, and the vowel carrier ʔ . na na again appears in the ‘angular’ shape, though without its descender word-internally and in nay nay. ta ta comes with a diagonal stroke instead of a curl between the stems; sa sa gains a descender, as does ra ra. Not shown here either are changes to the ’large’ diacritics.

References

  • Comrie, Bernard. Numeral Bases. 2013. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), WALS Online. https://wals.info/chapter/131 (December 15, 2024).
  • Court, Christopher. 1996. The spread of Brahmi scripts into southeast Asia. In Peter T. Daniels & William Bright (eds.), The world’s writing systems, 445–449. New York: Oxford University Press. [Worldcat]
  • Everson, Michael. 2008. Proposal for encoding the Javanese script in the UCS. International Organization for Standardization, January 28. https://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n3319r2-javanese.pdf (December 15, 2024).
  • Hammarström, Harald. 2010. Rarities in numeral systems. In Jan Wohlgemuth & Michael Cysouw (eds.), Rethinking universals: How rarities affect linguistic theory (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 45), 11–60. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110220933.11 (🔒). [Worldcat]
  • Kuipers, Joel C., and Ray McDermott. 1996. Insular southeast Asian scripts. In Peter T. Daniels & William Bright (eds.), The world’s writing systems, 474–484. New York: Oxford University Press. [Worldcat]
  • Salomon, Richard G. 1996. Brahmi and Kharoshthi. In Peter T. Daniels & William Bright (eds.), The world’s writing systems, 373–383. New York: Oxford University Press. [Worldcat]
  • United Nations. 1948. Universal declaration of human rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights (December 15, 2024).

  1. This page contains a slightly revised version of the chapter “Writing system” in the Grammar. The description in the Grammar is still valid. ↩︎

  2. I will give the native names of graphemes in tables, but will refer to them by their English names for clarity in the running text. ↩︎

  3. And one possibly overrepresented by invented languages due to its rarity in natural languages. ↩︎