Notes about Orthography
...for the sake of laying it out somewhere, here’s the basics of the orthography I’m developing for Koskeve:
So far I have 143 unique glyphs, each of which stand for a root word, and which may additionally either stand for a syllable (onset and first vowel of the word they represent), and/or be used as a determinative—that is, a character that helps indicate the meaning of following glyphs.
I have much fewer “composite” glyphs (I’m continuing to add to both categories on an ad-hoc basis). These glyphs also stand for words (or sometimes individual or strings of morphemes), but are composed of multiples of the unique glyphs I mentioned.
Often, the first glyph will be a determinative (so above, the string for nevm/silver begins with the glyph tain/stone, helping to indicate we’re looking at something hard or stone-like), which can be marked with a small circle below or to the side. The following glyphs use the syllabic readings—usually, there are two syllabic glyphs per square, stacked one on top of the other. So still looking at nevm, following the glyph for tain is a composite of net (forehead) and veq- (to swim). Since no glyphs stand for consonants on their own, the consonant coda is represented by a syllable containing an echo vowel of the preceding syllable (often, syllables with a short /i/ are also used for codas—however, there are no roots where /v/ precedes /i/ in the language).
So, all together, we have the determinative, telling us the word is in a class with stone-like things, and a phonetic glyph giving us the first syllable nev(e). Taken together, the interpretation is nevm, silver. These combinations are largely conventionalized (tho I imagine there’s room for variation in spellings), and must be learned—you can’t really guess what the pronunciation of a given collection of glyphs will be unless you’re already familiar with the word and the context makes it clear.
(ps: if anyone has a great idea for how to digitize these for easy searchability, let me know! Figuring out how to make words/glyphs findable is my next challenge—the thought of having to individually uploading each glyph/cropping out each glyph separately is haunting me...does anyone else who has made a logographic script have a system?)