This is the 34th version (rendition c) of the SIGIL script. It seeks to appear fluid and mysterious, and has a few glyphs reminiscent of the undeciphered Voynich script. It is fully cursive and follows the phonotactics of the language closely.
Consonants
The main motif in the consonants is a doubling of strokes which makes a voiced from an unvoiced form. Morphological endings are reflections of the plain form. For long nasals, there are two styles, for use in different grammatical situations. Plosives without an attached vowel come with an implicit schwa. Here and below, phonemes not used in SIGIL are drawn in grey.
The ejectives have a unique grammatical function, and are made to stand out clearly in the glyph-stream. The flap is a medial phoneme, its glyph based roughly on that of /th/.
Where words and morphemes begin with a vowel (or semivowel), special soft/null and hard onsets are available. To make an affricate, a marker is put before the partner fricative. For rounding of long fricatives, a special prefix is used. To show that a word is a proper name, an armless ‘ankh’ is placed before it.
Vowels
There are two forms for each vowel phoneme, odd and even. The even vowels tend to be unstressed and semi-consonantal, and come after an odd vowel or soft onset. The top row is odd, the bottom row even:
Possible digraphs for other vowels, all in ‘odd’ position:
Tone is shown by a semi-numerical suffix after a vowel or diphthong. The low-toned /a/ is used in some morphemes.
Caesurae & numerals
As with earlier versions of SIGIL, breaths may be directly encoded to show caesurae. In addition, inflow plosives may occur at caesura boundaries, and each has a semantic function.
The numerals remain the same since version 30, except for ‘four’:
Sample text
This is the beginning of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 again (transliteration), for comparison with other versions of SIGIL etc.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the
darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”