Conscripts and Conlangs

What is a Conscript?

Conscripts are constructed scripts.

A person creates a conscript when they want to write sounds of speech or ideas in a new way.

All writing systems were created by a person or a group of people, and all of them have evolved over time, shaped by various needs and limiting factors.

Common reasons for creating a conscript include:

• a language for a fantasy world

• a better script for ane existing language

• a script for an existing language, with a different origin aesthetic and/or foundation

• a script that represents phonic relationships differently, more accurately or more intuitively

• a script that increases visual differentiation

• a script that better contains the language's grammatical morphology

• a script that contains other linguistic features which are missing from the standard script

• for fun

• for one's own private use, a secret alphabet that is easy for you to read & write because of your own personal understanding of language.

I've made a bunch of scripts over the last few years, mostly spontaneously when trying to resolve the differences between English spelling and English pronunciation. From years of teaching English and pronunciation, I've become familiar with the IPA; and with a keen interest in languages & communication, I've also studied the basics of many languages and their scripts. Combining my experiences of phonetics and of other languages' scripts, I've also created several conscripts inspired by them.

My highest-complexity conscript thus far is less a script and more a con-alphabet: it combines letters from Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, and uses copious diacritics to modify both vowels and consonants. It is perhaps acceptable to call it a conscript because, even though it uses existing letters and diacritics, it is an entire alphabet and orthography. An orthography is a way of transcribing the sounds and concepts of a language into the written form; it is the step between a spoken language and its chosen script.

This conscript I have dubbed NewEng, ...

This conscript I have dubbed NewEng (someone else made one with the same name), and at its peak phase it is a lossless orthography — that is, it loses no etymological or grammatical data. Additionally, it increases informational resolution, by replacing identical English letters & digraphs with phonetically and/or etymologically accurate letters.

For example, ⟨th⟩ in English has three sounds: the common two of /θ/ and /ð/, and the rare third of /tʰ/ . In NewEng, /θ/ is ⟨Þ-þ⟩, /ð/ is ⟨Ð-ð⟩, and /tʰ/ is ⟨th⟩.

The digraph ⟨gh⟩ has two sounds: silence, and /f/. Historically, the letter was yogh, ⟨Ȝ-ȝ⟩, seemingly representing a sound similar to modern Greek's gamma ⟨Γ-γ⟩, /ɣ/. Over time, this sound was lost in English, becoming a diphthong closer /j~w/, sometimes aspirated /ɸ/. This is how we have words like sigh /sɑj/, bough /baw/, dough /dɜw/, cough /kɔf/. NewEng represents these two sounds with the letter yogh again, silence as ⟨ȝ⟩ and /f/ as ⟨ȝ̌⟩, as such:

• sigh → sīȝ

• bough → bauȝ

• dough → dȣ̄ȝ

• cough → cȣ̊ȝ̌

My NewEng is usable as an auxiliary script, an unwieldy but accurate storage container for modern English, respecting grammatical morphology, etymology, pronunciation and stress. As such, it is also useful as a starting point for designing any orthography for English that is less detailed, thereby allowing for a somewhat organic reduction in complexity that still pays attention to some aspects of English that are typically difficult to represent.

Recently I've been studying Arabic — only the writing system so far — and so my latest conscript is a phonetic representation system that looks similar to the Arabic style of letters. In the vein of my incredibly creative naming, I've dubbed this AbjAng, abjad + Anglo, although this is heinously inaccurate anyway because the script can represent over 40 different phonemic values, most of which are not present in English — so, this is just a temporary name while it is a WIP.

What is a Conlang?

A conlang is an entire language, and is a dramatically different concept to a conscript.

However, it is common for a conlang creator to also come up with their own phonology and orthography, thus resulting in the desire for a suitable script, so many conlangs also have their own conscripts.

I have not explored creating conlangs. I may in the future, but I fear that starting such a project would consume most of my time for the foreseeable future, and its use would be even more limited than a conscript of my making.

Most fantasy epics in books, series and films have at least one conlang. In many cases, the conlangs are not fully fleshed out, as such a task is enormous and most readers will never directly understand or use the conlang. Therefore, the author or the conlang creator just develops the basics of phonology, grammar and spelling so as to write a few words and phrases.

One sci-fi TV series I loved, The Expanse, features a futuristic conlang based on mutation and simplification of current English, taking into consideration the variety of major accents & influences of English, combined with the cultures present in the future within the storyline. The result is incredible: if you listen to it in the same way as one should listen to a language that you are learning — open-minded, open-eared — you can actually understand the meaning of what they are saying. Moreover, the dialogue script writers introduced the conlang speech gradually through the episodes, wrapped up in contextual situations, so if you pay full attention (i.e. put your fucking phone down you addict) you can actually learn the conlang just by watching the show. Firefly has a similar conlang concept but it only ran for 1 season (😭) so didn't get chance to be developed.

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Series