This script is a Phonological Cypher, being an easily written, phonetically constructed alphabet like others in that series. The name comes from the 16th century English poet Edmund Spenser, for no reason at all. As with Æsklon, this script features separate styles for consonants and vowels. Another feature is the option to join words and leave spaces only for punctuation.
Consonants
Consonants are formed from parts and grouped by related place-of-articulation, in an almost perfectly regular fashion. They all have a roundish bowl shape (or two), and sit either convexly or concavely on the baseline. The concave ones are for the labial group and the back groups (velar, uvular). The convex ones are for the middle groups (dental, alveolar, alveolo-palatal, post-alveolar, retroflex, palatal) and the glottal group. All phonemes have one of four tail-strokes at their right, representing plosive, fricative, nasal/trill and approximant. Voiced and unvoiced usually share the same head and tail strokes, but differ in their central part. The tail strokes are used as attachment points when joining to vowels and other consonants (see details below).
First, the dental through palatal groups. Some spots in the system are not logical or practical so are left blank.
Now the labial, velar, uvular and glottal groups. There is a both a plain nasal and a trill in the uvular group. The simple forms in the glottal group are unattached suffixes, to make a preceding plosive or fricative into an ejective, and to make a preceding vowel nasalized.
Vowels
Vowels have a more rectangular shape, some with parts suggesting the tongue’s position, and some resembling the Latin equivalent. There are 17 available. They attach to a consonant at the left end of their base. Unrounded vowels feature a high downturned tail at the left, rounded vowels a middle upturned tail. Vowels do not attach to consonants at their right in normally spaced printing (but see below).
In a sequence of vowels the upper-right stroke merges with the left tail of the following vowel. Their bases don’t connect.
Joining consonants
There are three kinds of join for a consonant – vowel, adjacent consonant, and an optional connection when consonants meet between words. This last option makes long flowing passages, breaking only for punctuation. The inter-word option can also be used for elision to an initial vowel, without the need for a [glottal-plosive]. If connecting words, vowels connect to consonants at their right, in the fashion shown below.
Examples
This is a transcription of the beginning of Spenser’s great poem Faerie Queene. And please excuse any errors in the Tudor pronunciation. 1 = normal spacing, 2 = word-connected (note the use of hyphen).
(1)
(2)
Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske
The font used in the above examples, and in the charts, has a rather bold & uncompressed style. A thinner, compressed style would better suit printing of long text. Here’s the script name from the top of the page, written at the same height but at 60% of the original length. It looks a bit like Oscareen, but here the serifs are significant.
