Wednesday, February 14, 2001

Malt§egj Project 04.20.01.02.14.14.06

I have completed my little runic font, and it’s actually quite lovely! Observe:

Consonants:




Liquids and Nasals:





Vowels (when a vowel stands alone, it is occupied by q, hence its transliteration as א.):



[Editor's note: The following two paragraphs are full of characters that can't feasibly be displayed on this blog, so I'll be posting them in their entirety as image files.]


Malt§egj Project 04.20.01.02.14.14.06

That little experiment shows me that i definitely need to work out something with the diphthongs and
streamline the font a bit. Unfortunately, due to space and usage concerns with the font, i’m going to
change the orthography again by a bit; as much as i like using c instead of k, i am going to reinstate k as
the unvoiced uvular plosive, and in turn make c the unvoiced postalveolar fricative, because i’m just plain
sick and tired of typing §.

Malt§egj Project 04.20.01.02.14.11.13

I have been neglecting malt§egj for a while now in persuit of other ventures, in particular working on creating a unicode font, which i would more than love to use to write this journal, but for some reason my Adobe Acrobat doesn’t like it and refuses to make any sort of PDF file out of it...just one letter of m font and it gives a big nasty post script error message!

Anyway, last night i played around a bit with some runes for malt§egj They’re quite beautiful! I’m actually rather proud of them. I haven’t completely figured out how i’m going to do the accent mark thing i mentioned in the last section yet, but i do know that the primary accented syllable will be noted by a small vertical line beneath the character. As far as diacrtics above the characters, i’m reserving that right for vowels, a bit like hebrew. Actually, this is my vowel schematic: a = circumflex, å = breve, e = acute, i = dot, o = grave, u = caron, y = diæresis. I’ve also decided, rather arbitrarily, (as if i decide anything in any other way when dealing with malt§egj!), that an exclamation point is a sort of small circle with a vertical line on either side.

In other news, a new rule: Interrogative words and particles precede the verb. In other words, rather than saying “how are you?” the structure would be, “you how are?” (melem mlycþid ec?) I think i may have already decided this at one point, but i don’t remember, so i’m stating it here again. This will also affect the word “§ylþ,” as in “he is well” (pul ec bjolet) versus “is he well?” (pul §ylþ ec bjolet?).

In the meantime, i shall go and make a quick rendition of a font for the runes, and hence i doubt i shall return today.