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There’s this pretty handy script me and folks around use for numbers, we call it Arabic numerals, even if the Arabs call them “hindian numerals”. They’re pretty handy. Beats roman numerals at everything but looking classy!
I have thought about developing an alternate script for Norwegian/Scandinavian based on the old runes, really just because I think that would be fun and interesting, but insofar as I haven’t done this yet, I don’t know of any alternate scripts for Norwegian, and obviously there isn’t much point in talking about English.
So I will instead share an alternate script for a language I do not speak: Circassian, or specifically West Circassian or Adyghe.
Father and son duo R. I. Daur and I. Yu. Daur together developed an alternate script for that language in I think 2012. The script was dubbed “Mifo-Circassian”, and as I understand it, it’s an attempt to give the Circassian language a more unique visual identity, by using letters based on old inscribed symbols — I think the emblems of clans more specifically — rather than using an adapted foreign alphabet like Latin, Arabic, or Cyrillic. Furthermore, Circassian has a very unique inventory of sounds that interact with each other in unique ways, that foreign alphabets can’t really do justice, so this alphabet is more uniquely suited for the challenges that come with representing Circassian in writing. Mifo-Circassian writing seems like it may be used both alphabetically and alphasyllabically, but the alphabetic form is far more common.
Well, “more common”, not that many Circassians actually do use this Mifo-Circassian script to begin with. Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic have the benefit of being supported by Unicode and of also being used by neighboring languages, and they work well enough for representing Circassian. So it seems like the primary usage of Mifo-Circassian is not necessarily for communicative writing, but rather for more ornamental or artistic usage.
I’d love to see your attempt at an alternate script for Norwegian. I do however speak Swedish but I could probably use it for Swedish to.
Also, regarding Norwegian while you don’t have any alternate scripts you do have two ways of spelling, right? In Swedish there called “bokmål” and “ny norsk”, but I don’t know the names in Norwegian or English.
I love the idea of a modern runic script, suitable for contemporary Scandinavian languages. Would you care to elaborate on your thoughts on this?
Nothing is exactly set in stone (no pun intended), but my current idea essentially involves updating the letter forms to be better suited for writing on paper, and I was also thinking of using a dot diacritic for voicing and umlaut, and having the staves be x-height normally but extend downward for doubled consonants.
Ideas that are more sort of “on the table” are whether to use monographs for ⟨sj⟩ and ⟨kj⟩ etc, and monographs for the diphthongs; whether to have an optional diacritic form of ⟨r⟩ to represent the assimilation of /r/ in Eastern Norwegian; whether to use the same letters for certain sounds in complementary distribution; whether to extend the usage of the dot diacritic to alternate between otherwise similar sounds, rather than only voice and umlaut; and whether the runes should indeed have staves at all.
The problem is that depending on how many of these ideas are implemented, and the ways in which they are implemented, you eventually end up basically abandoning the idea of “modern runes” in favor of basically reinventing Shavian script but for Scandinavian. So it’s difficult to strike that sort of middle ground between ancient and modern, especially when trying to balance that with practicality of use and ease of learning. Another matter is of course which forms of runes to actually base the script on: if we stick to just Scandinavia, we have Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark, medieval runes, staveless runes, and Dalecarlian runes, and these often have very different letter forms from each other.
There were some that were made for french to make the orthography of words easier. They use accents generally. I do not use them and I do not know anyone that uses them.
I was thinking of Adrien Féline (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k423752r/f42.image). I never heard of Franabugida, but it is very interesting even if I find it harder to read
Cló Gaelach / Lámh Gaelach
Cló Gaelach means Gaelic print. Lámh Gaelach is the same thing but handwritten, it means Gaelic Hand. It’s not an alternative to the Latin alphabet, just a dialect of it, like how German was written in Blackletter up until quite recently. Most letters are similar to the boring mainstream print, but T (Ꞇ), G (Ᵹ) and D (Ꝺ) are quite distinctive, and the letter H is not used.
There is no aspirated h (h as a consonant) in Irish, it’s used to mark softened phonemes, so m represents one consonant and mh in Cló Rómánach (Roman print) represents a softer sound. Cló Gaelach favours the superdot ṁ instead of using h.
This is the part of constitution declaring Irish the official language of the country, with English a secondary official language:
The government phased it out for official use in the 1970s because they are idiots. I still use it when I can, I never write Irish by hand without it.
Ogham
Using what we’ve just seen, we can call it ‘oġam’ instead of ‘ogham’. It’s not a G-sound then a H-sound; it’s a soft G more like English ‘owam’.
Ogham is much older. It was used around the year 400. It is a tree-themed alphabet, branches coming off a central column, and the letters mostly have names like ‘birch’, ‘oak’, 'hazel. Ogham is climbed as a tree is climbed, which is to say it’s written bottom to top. It was created by the god Ogma; similar to how Thoth created writing in Egypt. An 14th-century text called In Lebor Ogaim talks about various ways of putting ciphers upon it. Posts about ogham: https://lemmy.ml/post/16545296 , https://lemmy.ml/post/18046303
ᚔᚄ ᚑᚌᚆᚐᚋ ᚓ ᚄᚓᚑ but that won’t display on all people’s operating systems.
Ogham tattoos are common enough nowadays.
