The Scripts of
Mattias Persson

My name is Mattias Persson, and I live in Uppsala, about 70 kilometres north-north-west of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. I was born in 1967, in a smaller village called Sala, located about 50 kilometres west-north-west of Uppsala.

As long as I can remember, at least since I was 5 years old, I have loved letters, alphabets, syllabaries and other writing systems. When I was young, I just played with plastic letters, but nowadays, I create new writing systems and research writing from all over the world (using the Internet). I had learnt the Latin alphabet already before starting school, but several years had to pass before I learnt to read properly, at about 11 years of age. At 12, I learnt the Ethiopic abugida from a retired missionary who worked at my school. Greek and Cyrillic followed soon after that, and later, Arabic, and Devanagari (for Hindi). At 17, I met another pair of missionaries, who taught me the Mongolian vertical script, and the Kannarese or Kannada script from southern India.

My favorite type of writing system has always been the Indic so-called syllabic alphabets, and the favorite among the many such scripts in existence has always been the Burmese “round script”, Sa Loun, and its extensions.

When I create a new writing system, I often put the letters in the same order as in the Indic scripts (but not always).

I sometimes produce more than one completed script per week. I also sometimes borrow ideas from, or extend, other peoples’ invented scripts, as I usually find other peoples’ scripts better than my own creations. In such cases, I generally try to get in contact with the original creator, so he or she does not get annoyed or angry. I do not mean to steal the other person’s creations; instead, it should be seen as flattery, and really means that I like the other’s script.

It was such an incident that brought me into contact with Mr Ian James. I had found one of his creations, that I liked, and made a new script in the same style. I wanted to show Ian my script, and found his email address at Simon Ager’s excellent writing system web site, Omniglot.

Of course another important web site for me is www.unicode.org where I often find inspiration, despite their rather odd transcription that makes it difficult to learn how to pronounce the new letters.