I’ve been thinking about how I could improve this Zirka, and two specific things always come to mind: the sounds and the “smoothing letters”.
First of all, I developed Zirka long before I knew anything about linguistics and standard linguistic tools like the IPA and other helpful things like that, so I have a low-level layman presentation of how to use Zirka. While I do definitely want to keep it accessible to the layman, I would also like a bit more precision, so I’m going to at least update the Usage page to also include IPA explanations. This should help better explain the confusing fact that translating /a/ and /æ/ produce the same Zirka character, resulting in the words “bat” and “bot” both translating into the same ([kut]) spelling and pronunciation.
Second, the smoothing letters (a.k.a. digraphs, if you’re in the linguistics camp) that have been available are not sufficient, and at least one (“ly”) is completely useless thanks to /li/ just plain making more sense to use. This plus the fact that I want more and more interesting sounds like /t͡s/ to exist in Zirka, I am going to update this list and some letters.
Here is what I am thinking for the updated full codex (including digraphs), written in IPA:
A ( /a/, /æ/, /ɑ/, etc.) => U /u/
Dr ( /dɹ/, /dɻ/ ) => Bis /bɪs/
E ( /e/, /ɛ/, /ɜ/, etc. ) => O /o/
Fr ( /fɹ/, /fɻ/ ) => Z /z/
Gr ( /gɹ/, /gɻ/ ) => Pas /pæs/
Kr ( /kɹ/, /kɻ/ ) => Ts /t͡s/
Pr ( /pɹ/, /pɻ/ ) => Mus /məs/
Th ( /θ/, /ð/ ) => J /d͡ʒ/
U ( /u/, /ə/, /ʌ/, /ɞ/, etc.) => I /i/
V/W ( /v/ or /w/ ) => V /v/
J/Z ( /d͡ʒ/ or /z/ ) => W /w/
For reference, the word to be translated is stripped down to its most basic sounds, for example “clever” changes to klevur [klɛ vɞr], which would then be translated to trovis [tɾo vis], and “pulley” breaks down to puli [pɞ li], which translates to mira [mi ɾa].
I will obviously need to revamp the alphabet a bit to account for the new digraphs, but I think this change will allow for a much more usable experience when translating from English into Zirka, plus I get to have some of my favorite IPA sounds in the language, so it’s a big win overall!
Dith ishot’klif, -Robbie :)