by Quas NaArt » Sun Feb 14, 2010 12:32 pm
It came upon me when I first decided to learn D'ni, that it'd be rather hard to practice penmanship without a pen. It made no sense to me that the D'ni, with all their technology and skill, would only use quills, dipped pens, or fountain pens at the most advanced. All of these can be very messy and not very portable. It's very easy to imagine a D'ni foreman with a clipboard in hand and a pencil behind his ear. But, since formal D'ni needs a square nib, ink, and patience to properly write, it's hard to imagine such a scene with those instruments substituted in. Then what? We've got the foreman here with his pencil and he's still in a rush. It's possible to follow the same stroke patterns as formal D'ni with a pencil or other fine-tipped writing device, but it's still very slow going if one wants proper letter differentiation. In Domahreh's The D'ni Student, he includes common mistakes in character recognition; such as 'f' versus 'z'; 'ee' versus 'g'; and 'y' versus 'h' versus 'ts'. It struck me as absurd that there would not be a writing method that would take out all the ambiguity created by the need for rapid writing, so using what I know about the relation between D'ni numerals and letters, the Hebrew handwriting system, and a bit of trial and error, I devised a system that would be readable and writable by any D'ni with minimal effort and would be unambiguous even with small errors added in for whatever reason.
I made an original sheet of just the letters, but that would be a poor introduction to the community, so I made this, a stroke-by-stroke primer on how to write informal D'ni. As a personal proof, I added two sentence examples to the sheet, written with a reasonable degree of haste. I realized later that I made some spelling errors in the second sentence sample, but I'm decently satisfied with the characters themselves. I'll make a better stroke-by-stroke primer with colours, examples, and exercises later.
They're all in order, so it should be very easy indeed for the linguists to decipher my transliteration. It's just a method I'm used to from reading other transliterations. Come to think of it, I should include IPA in my next one too.
At the beginning, I'd make a new line even for accented characters, but then I realized I could just add another stroke to the same line, so I did that for each one after 'k'.
Finally, I would like to confirm that this informal D'ni method is indeed open to use and copy.
