Na'art for August 13, and an open-eneded word game in one:

[capri0mni]

It's a page from an alien kids' "ABC" Book, and I thought it might make a fun puzzle:

(click to enlarge)


Yes, the word has a specific sound in my head, and there's a logic to the letters.

First, I came up with the name, and wrote out how it would look, in English.

Then, I broke the word down into sounds, and made a symbol for each, with rules, and here they are:

The alien language (conveniently) has all the same phonetic sounds as English, and like English it is scanned top to bottom, left to right.

The shape of each letter is based on how it felt, in my mouth, when I said it, including hardness or softness, abruptness, if it flowed, and amount of vibration (such as tongue on the roof of my mouth, teeth on lips, and so on).

Letters with a similar sound have a similar shape.

Vowels are enclosed shapes with open middles; unlike English however, "long" and "short" vowels are actually treated as different letters. Where we use the same letter in hop, hope, hoop and food, the aliens would use different letters.

Consonants are linear.

And finally, where we sometimes write a sound by mixing two consonants (such as nd or pr) the aliens give the most common blends their own letters.

So. Given all that, what do you think the word on the page sounds like?

Just curious to see how your brains interpret things differently than mine.

Comments

[scarfman]

To me it looks like ... "VOWASSQ4"? I'm not sure I've exactly met the spirit of your question.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

No, I was trying to make letters that were very different from the Roman alphabet, and worked on a different logic.

(besides, the digit '4' doesn't have its own phonetic sound).

I was approaching this more synestheically, as in this experiment, described in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Links_with_other_areas_of_study).

[jekesta]

Ever since I learnt shorthand I have trouble separating phonetic sounds from the shapes they are in shorthand into the ones they are in my head, so I find picturing letters in different ways more difficult now. I love that you made a system, though.

Is the first sound the three dots and the shape? I assume that's all one sound because it's made big, like the letter would be in a similar human book.

I'd probably see that as a SCR, sound, something soft leading to something harder? Then I'm going for an ow sound, then the sort of W shape would be a sort of nuh, then an A (as in pale), then I'm a bit lost with the wiggly lines, I can make them be all sorts of things in my head, and the end is the reverse of the beginning which confuses me, and so in my language it woudl be CRS sort of sound.

Are you going to tell us the actual answer?

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

So your word would be Scrowna (something) crs.

Interesting.

Are you going to tell us the actual answer?

Maybe someday... after more people get a chance to guess.

[jekesta]

Yes! mine is not a great word. Probably something like Srownayshcrs. It sounds a bit like a creature snuffling:) I love that you have iconned your hedgehog. That's lovely:)

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Thank you. He's rather pleased, himself... But he's too shy to say so, in public :-)