Chaatai writing by Concavenator on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

It's built on a pseudosyllabic system, like the Korean hangul - each single character represents a full syllable, but it's composed in turn of phonemic elements. The main part of the character represents the onset (starting consonant) of the syllable, which can only be one of 15 (k g k' t d t' ch dj ch' kr gr k'r ʻ ! /, roughly corresponding in IPA to /k/ /g /k'/ /t̪/ /d̪/ /t̪'/ /ʨ/ /ʥ/ /ʨ'/ /kr̥/ /gr/ /kr̥'/ /ʔ/ /ǀ/ /ǁ/, the last three being glottal stop, dental click, and lateral click). 12 of those are arranged in a pattern with a voiceless, a voiced, and an ejective form. (Note that, in the transcription, the apostrophe represents an ejective consonant when it follows a consonant, and a glottal stop elsewhere.) The symbol for the nucleus (vowel or diphthong) is added to the central part of the character, and that can be one of 6 (a i u aa ai au, corresponding to /ä/ /i/ /ʊ~ɯ/ /ɑː/ /aj~ej/ /aw~ow/). Note that aa is not only longer than a, it's also pronounced more posteriorly. An additional symbol is added above to represent palatalization (effectively inserting y or /j/ between onset and nucleus; ʻy- simplifies to y-).

There is never any coda (final consonant). Every possible syllable is either CV (one consonant, one vowel) or CyV, with the caveat that kr gr k'r count as one consonant each and ai au as one vowel.

Successive syllables are written in a row from top to bottom, generally along a continuous thread (in modern times, sheets often come pre-printed with writing threads). There are no spaces between words, but there usually are between sentences. A bunch of common words are given below, e.g. ʻikra, "person" (and its specifically male counterpart ʻikrika); tagra, "world" *; kikri, "feather"; krukaa, "woolly iguanodont"; and so on. (The stress always falls on the first syllable of each word.)

The three blocks of text on the right are the same quatrain, written in different fonts.

I should note that the word tagra represents either the "world" in the general sense of existence as a whole, or the Antarctic continent, which is effectively all land inhabited by the 'ikra; the common term for planet Earth would be dji (literally "egg", but might be translated as "globe"), while the universe in a physical sense would be commonly referred to as t'aakaiʻa (literally "all-around").