Qentish Romany

Ian James
© October 2018, May 2021

script name

This is a revision of my Kentish Romany script. I felt the script had some nice features, but the stacking and conjoining features were neither appealing nor necessary. So after some simple geometric transformations, I made it into a linear alphabet. The vowels and consonants are still separately modeled, but are now both sitting on the baseline, low and tall respectively (in a similar way to the Feandishleigh Simplex script). A vertically-written ornamental style is also available.

Vowels

Vowels have a semi-featural system which supports the complete IPA vowel space. They are listed here with closeness decreasing from left to right, and frontness decreasing from top row to bottom. Rounding is shown with a vertical bar set within the simpler unrounded form, arranged here in the righthand rows.


Consonant system

The consonants are assembled from simple phonetic parts, as with other scripts in the Phonological Cypher series. A vertical stem has marks attached to its left. On the bottom half is a mark or two indicating phonetic location, on the upper half is a mark indicating manner of production. Voicing is indicated by a short vertical stroke at lower left. The upper mark signifies roughly: plosive (base); aspirated approximant & approximant; ejective & nasal; fricative. This is the original Kentish assignment, which is not strictly regular. Other assignments may be possible, depending on the target language.


Byzantine mode

An ornamental style called byzantine takes the words and rotates them right by 90 degrees, so they fall vertically. Then, the vowels are centred.

Example

This is a transliteration of the beginning of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, for comparison with versions of SIGIL etc etc.

 Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day ...

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All material on this page © Ian James.