#wasp talks

[woozywaspy]

terrorizing families at the public pool with my inflatable russian camo fighter jet and attachable water gun

[definitely-not-a-wasp]

Wasp Talks: Language Invention— Alphabets (Part 2 of ???)

[Language Part 1]

So, you’ve decided to invent a fantasy language. You have the phonemes. You have your morphemes and affixes. You know basic sentence structure. You understand how your verbs function. What’s next?

Not your alphabet, tbh. If you’re writing a fantasy story, you’re probably writing it in a real language that people can comprehend. However, inventing your alphabet can help with descriptions of books, artifacts, which hand people most commonly use, etc. Further, it means you can sort languages into the alphabets they use. Also, it can be a lot of fun.

Without further ado, some things to consider:

Step 1: Medium of writing

Paper and pencil is the obvious go-to, but not the only one. Have fun with it! Do some research! There have been many forms of writing throughout history; making indents in clay tablets, carving on stone, wood, or bone, ink on bamboo slats, etc cetera etc cetera. Consider your fantasy people’s resources and what would be easiest for them to develop, as well as what the alphabet would look like.

Example: My Language-In-Progress uses unfired clay tablets that they write on with a triangular stylus, making their alphabet very linear and geometric in style, and able to be well-preserved after the clay is fired.

Step 2: Direction of writing

Are words and sentences organized left-to-right? Right-to-left? Up and down? Or is it more complicated, based on morphemes or conjugation? This can establish which hand is most commonly used to write, and might establish what society considers the dominant hand. However, one look at Afghanistan can tell you that it may not. Your choice.

Step 3: Symbol creation

There is the option to simply take the english alphabet and make new symbols, but if you’re going far enough to create an entirely different alphabet, I have a feeling that’s not what you want to do. So there are several different types of alphabetic systems one can look at.

First: every different phoneme gets a symbol. This is by far the easiest to organize. The variant of this (that most languages use) is that most phonemes get a letter, while other phonemes share letters (A), some phonemes have multiple letters depending on where they’re used (C and K), and some letters show a specific combination of phonemes (X).

Second: every symbol represents a different morpheme. This leads to a much longer and more complex alphabet, and generally shorter-looking words.

Third: every letter represents a different word. This type of alphabet is very complicated, but is great for a culture that doesn’t have much space for writing, or where writing long messages would make scripts very heavy (such as stone engraving).

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Congrats! You have a functional alphabet!

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[woozywaspy]

obsessed with this picture I found on an invasive animals website. I can’t help it she’s so cute having a little drink

[woozywaspy]

i don’t need no flat chest to be a hot dude

[woozywaspy]

Hey Winkywonky it's your wife I just wanted to ask if you could draw Starscream French 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

BAGEL GET OFF MY FUCKING GIRLFRIENDS PHONE OR I AM GOING TO PUT YOU DOWN LIKE THE SICK ANIMAL YOU ARE

anyways give me a bit I’ll do this

[woozywaspy]

OHHHHHH SHIT

[woozywaspy]

First patch for Fraud is out now, hopefully it fixes some of the problems others have been having!! It was such a cool experience and sucks that other people didn’t get to properly play it

[woozywaspy]

Can I put you in the deep fryer?

- @tgirl-bagel

owww..,