Tag Archives: Ahom script

Tahano Hikamu and Handwriting?

My conlang’s ‘native’ writing system as it is presented here is more or less how I imagine it could look like if you adapted the characters for modern printing, so the character shapes are rather elaborate. What I’ve long wondered is how things might look like in day-to-day handwriting. That is, how could some things be simplified if you just want to jot down some notes? After all, you don’t want to sit and take ages to meticulously draw a word – at least in our modern world you wouldn’t want to. Hence – peeking at some documentation of the Ahom script in Hosken/Morey (5, 7) for inspiration – I came up with this chart, which most notably shows simplified versions of the consonant characters ⟨ta⟩, ⟨ba⟩, ⟨ga⟩, ⟨na⟩, ⟨la⟩ as well as some simplifications in the ⟨length⟩ and ⟨i⟩ diacritics:

Besides, since this posting is already on the topic of Tahano Hikamu, I tried mapping the vowels of English to Tahano Hikamu in a halfway consistent manner a while ago, just for fun, and with a winking eye to all the various attempts at reforming English spelling that come up every now and then. There may be some inaccuracies in this list due to the fact that I’m not a native speaker of English. There’s also not much caring about etymology, I just adapted the spellings according to the respective pronunciation I learned.

  • Hosken, Martin and Stephen Morey. “Revised Proposal to add the Ahom Script in the SMP of the UCS.” DKUUG Standardizing. 2012. Dansk Unix User Group, 23 Oct. 2012. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. ‹http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n4321.pdf