How to make a good orthography

From KneeQuickie

This page contains tips for creating an orthography for a conlang using the Latin alphabet, although I hope some of what it says will be useful for those interested in other types of orthography.

Contents 1 Goals of an orthography 2 The range of options 2.1 Digraphs or polygraphs 2.2 Diacritics 2.3 Modified letters 2.4 The apostrophe 2.5 Non-letter symbols 2.6 Letters from other alphabets 2.7 Unused Latin letters 2.8 Capital letters

Goals of an orthography

1. There are two main types of orthography: ones with a one-to-one correspondence with a conlang's native script, in that each glyph of the script is always represented the same way; and phonemic orthographies, in which each phoneme is always represented the same way. (Of course, in either case the "always" could allow for contextual rules, like the Nahuatl reversal of word-final <cu> to <uc>.)
2. Orthographies should be externally consistent. Nearly every natlang with a Latin orthography uses <m> to stand for a labial nasal, so it would be downright silly to use <q> for this purpose.
3. Orthographies should be internally consistent. If you use <p'> and <t'> for bilabial and dental aspirated plosives, it would be absurd to represent the aspirated /k/ as <kh>.
4. Orthographies should be elegant. Unfortunately, different people have widely differing aesthetic standards; however, some things, such as overabundance of diacritics, are almost universally agreed to be ugly.
5. Orthographies, now that we live in the computer age, should use symbols available both to you and to your target audience. If your conlang is to be posted on a website, you can use Unicode characters, but be aware that not everyone will be able to read them.

The range of options

Of course, there is no problem if you have a very small phonology, or happen to have a range of sounds that fits very nicely into the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. If, however, you have to go outside the basic 26 letters, the options are:

Digraphs or polygraphs

That is, two or more letters representing one sound. (An example is the English "th" for /T/.) Some conlangers have a rabid prejudice against digraphs, citing the principle "one symbol, one sound"; however, digraphs are often the best option. The groundrules for using digraphs are:

• Try to avoid ambiguity. For instance, in English <t> and <h> can sometimes come together in that order, as in "boathouse". Digraphs are best used when their separate letters can never come together in this way, although this is not to say you should always shun them when it might cause ambiguity. Just take more care.
  

(An apostrophe or a medial dot can be used to distinguish two letters adjacent from two letters forming a digraph.)

• Be as consistent as possible. Digraphs with <h> as the second element are often used to show aspirated sounds, fricativised or palatalised stops, or voiceless sonorants. It would be a very confusing orthography if <mh> was a voiceless /m/ while <nh> was palatalised.

Diacritics

Diacritics are modifications of basic letterforms – for example, the tilde on Spanish ñ. Diacritics can often be more convenient than digraphs, but they are harder to read, especially if several letters in a row can end up with different diacritics.

Always try to use diacritics consistently – the same diacritic on different letters should modify it in the same way – especially with vowels.

Modified letters

Several letters have available modified forms other than those formed with diacritics. Examples are the Turkish "dotless i" and the eng. These have the same advantage as diacritics (they are single symbols) but are much easier to read, because they are more different from the basic letters.

The apostrophe

An apostrophe placed after a letter is often used as a sort of diacritic, most often for aspiration, palatalisation, or glottalisation. It is also used as a symbol in its own right (see below) or, of course, as a punctuation mark, usually signifying omission.

Non-letter symbols

Symbols that are not letters at all have the advantage that they are easy to distinguish at a glance from letters; however, they often look ugly and refuse to fit in with the "flow" of a Latin text. It all depends on your own aesthetic preferences. One disadvantage of non-letter symbols is that, as they are not used in most natlang orthographies, they do not suggest any particular sound. There are exceptions to this, such as:

• IPA symbols, including the click symbols. These should really never be used for sounds other than those they were designed to represent.
• The apostrophe and question mark, both of which are sometimes used for the glottal stop. (The question mark is used because it resembles the IPA glottal stop symbol.)
• Arabic numerals: 7 has been used for a glottal stop, again because it resembles the IPA symbol. Some languages use a glyph similar to the numeral 2 for /dz/, so it would not be unreasonable to use <2> for this sound. Some orthographies for Mayan languages have used glyphs based on the numerals 3 and 4 for ejective consonants, and 4 has also been used for /tS/ because of its resemblance to the Cyrillic letter for that sound.

Letters from other alphabets

Letters from other alphabets have much the same advantages and disadvantages as non-letter symbols, except that some of your audience may know what sounds they represent in their original alphabets. Because of this, using them for the same, or at least similar, sounds in your orthography is very advisable. Also, be wary that some alphabets are more compatible with Latin than others; anything other than Greek or Cyrillic should probably be avoided.

Unused Latin letters

Some letters, especially <c>, <q>, and <x>, get used for a variety of sounds simply because an orthography has no other use for them, and has some left-over sounds to represent. Indeed, <x> has been used for at least 50 different phonemes in orthographies that I know of.

Capital letters

One trick sometimes used is to treat capital and lower-case Latin letters as separate glyphs, thus doubling the available number of letters. This is best avoided; firstly, it is inherently confusing to the reader; secondly, the device is so closely associated with Klingon that another language using it is liable to look like a Klingon-clone even if it is different in other ways. (The reason Klingon uses capital letters in this way is that it was written for a television series, and the actors reading the lines needed to be warned when a letter was pronounced differently from English.)

It should be mentioned that the rules for using capital letters vary widely between different Latin-alphabet orthographies, and there is no reason not to make your own capitalisation rules. English capitalises all proper nouns and their derived adjectives; German capitalises all nouns, but not derived adjectives, and only capitalises the first word of titles; French does not capitalise days of the week. Some conlangs, including kardii, do without capitals altogether, even in transliteration.