Guild of Writers

Hi all.

A friend of mine, Quas NaArt, who I know from a private IRC network, has designed essentially D'ni-Informal. I heard it mentioned elsewhere, but I believe there has never been any texts with it. Essentially Quas noticed that written D'ni characters have a similarity to some surface languages, or at least in form. The only two I can really remember Quas mentioning are English and Hebrew, but I vaguely remember them referring to some other ones, too.

Quas then used knowledge of these languages, to devise a "informal handwriting" format for the language, such as would be written with a pencil or a ball-point pen.

http://guildofartisans.org/dnistuff/lin ... sNaArt.png

I'm not sure what transliteration format Quas used, but, I'm sure the linguists would be able to figure it out.

Its been done for a while, but when I was originally going to post it to the linguist site, their site had just recently died, and lost all the post data. Still haven't posted it there, either. But, I think its time to get this out there.

I'd also imagine the calender isle numbers would probably fit this style of thing fairly well, too.

Let me know what you think =)

Very cool Kaelis! Is this open to use, as in - for a puzzle ...

I believe it is, yes.

Nice, this will be usefull. Probably a bit cryptic to some, but doable if used right.

Better than D'ni-formal. I can't find the character bounderies in it. >_>

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.

Welcome Quas NaArt.
Your system looks pretty nice.

One thing I notice is that your simplifications of the characters, while useful as long as they're printed neatly, seem to break down when you're actually writing quickly. This is the case for a couple of letters: b and sh, r and m, and l and n. There's a tendency for strokes to run together and become more fluid during quick writing, and the fact that these pairs of characters are differentiated only by the curve of their lines and, in the last case, by a brief period of lifting the writing utensil off the page, means that that could get easily confused in normal handwriting.

Your point about engineers with their clipboards is a good one, though it's possible that a carpenter pencil, frequently sharpened and made with a hard graphite, might be able to make the calligraphy-like "normal" D'ni letters.

Nice work, in any case! I don't know what's up with the D'ni Linguists site, but I think they have a bevin in MOUL...

Shoggoth, while I can see your point for the last pair, (for which I debated the same thing you mentioned, but couldn't come up with a better solution) the first two are straight lines versus rather curved arcs. Personally, no matter what the speed, I can still draw a straight line long enough for text. In fact, I'd be more worried about over-rotating from 's' into 'w'. It would be of great use and interest to me if you (and anyone else interested) could take scans of identical phrases written at different speeds to give an idea of what sort of trends form using this writing system.

Preempting a few more comments with basic answers:
Not all cusps are mandatory - 'm' and 'th' (' þ ') can be smoothed.
This is on graphing paper for a reason: Relative height matters - 'uh' ('u') and 'oo' (' ú ') will always be taller than 'h', "-tor" flags must go above half-height, while everything else should stay below, unless it's full-height. (This is a mirror of numeral component heights.)
I know 'ee' (' í ') is cramped.

If you'd like to address and discuss these issues in more detail, please do, as I'm still trying to improve this system, but just pointing them out won't help much.