Invented Scripts

Most scripts grew slowly through borrowing and change. A few were designed by a person on a particular occasion. This chapter looks at four of them: the Korean Hangul, the Canadian syllabics, and two scripts built for fiction, Tengwar and Klingon pIqaD. Cherokee (Chapter 4) is the other famous example.

Hangul

From Wikipedia's Hangul article (first 100,000 of 212,572 characters read).

• Creation. King Sejong the Great (r. 1418 to 1450) was responsible for its creation. It was announced around late 1443 to early 1444 and officially published in 1446 in the Hunminjeongeum, which was also the script's original name.
• Inventory. Mainstream orthographies use 24 basic letters (jamo): 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Modifications and combinations bring the total to 51.
• Featural design. According to the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, the shapes of five basic consonants are based on human speech organs, and the other consonants are derived by adding strokes for "harsher" sounds. Vowels are linked to Chinese philosophy: ㆍ represents yin and earth, ㅡ yang and the sun, and ㅣ man (neutral).
• The dispute. The "featural script" label was coined by Sampson in 1985, questioned by DeFrancis in 1989 and rebutted by Chin-Woo Kim in 1997. Pae, Winskel and Kim argue the designation is difficult to falsify and uncertain.
• Syllable blocks. Letters are grouped into blocks of an initial consonant, a vowel and an optional final consonant, with a silent ㅇ when no initial sound is needed. Vowels with a long vertical stroke go to the right of the initial; those with a long horizontal stroke go below it; a final consonant goes at the bottom.
• Count. 19 initial consonants, 21 vowels and 28 final consonants (including none) yield 11,172 syllables, though scholars estimate only about 2,000 see regular use.
• Literacy. The article says hanja's difficulty contributed to high illiteracy, and that within a decade of the post-1945 push, a significant majority of Koreans in both Koreas became literate in at least Hangul.

So Hangul is a script designed to look like an alphabet and write like a syllabary: letters are phonemic, but they are stacked into syllable blocks. For learning it, the site has the Korean Alphabet 1 course.

Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

From Wikipedia's Canadian Aboriginal syllabics article (first 100,000 of 198,188 characters read).

• Creator. James Evans, a missionary, developed the script by 1840, probably with Indigenous language experts, working with Cree and Ojibwe speakers. Cree oral traditions give a different origin, crediting a Cree man named Calling Badger.
• Principle. Each consonant has a fixed base shape, and the vowel is shown by rotating that shape. The consonant p is a chevron that points up, down, left or right to mark different vowels.
• Classification. Despite its name, the article says it is an abugida rather than a true syllabary.
• Use. All Cree languages and Naskapi, regionally Ojibwe and Blackfoot, and Inuktitut, which is co-official with Latin script in Nunavut.
• Reception. Resisted by colonial and missionary authorities (the Hudson's Bay Company declined to import a printing press for Evans), but the Cree community quickly took to it; a Bible was published in Cree syllabics by 1861, and the article says Cree literacy rates were possibly among the highest in the world by the late 19th century.

Tengwar

From Wikipedia's Tengwar article (first 100,000 of 119,846 characters read).

• Creator. J. R. R. Tolkien; probably developed in the late 1920s or early 1930s, with the first published sample in 1937. In his fiction the elf Fëanor invented it.
• Featural design. "The shapes of the letters correspond to the distinctive features of the sounds they represent." Most letters combine a stem with one or two bows: doubling the bow voices a stop, raising the stem makes a fricative, and shortening it makes a nasal.
• Grid. Four series (témar) by place of articulation: dental, labial, velar and labialized velar; six rows of manners of articulation.
• Modes. The orthographies are called modes. Vowel-diacritic modes can be treated as abugidas, while the "full writing" mode writes vowels as letters; other modes exist for English, Spanish, German and more.
• Encoding. Not officially encoded in Unicode; Michael Everson proposed it in 1997; the unofficial ConScript Unicode Registry maps it to U+E000 to U+E07F in the Private Use Area.

Klingon pIqaD

From Wikipedia's Klingon scripts article (whole answer as returned).

• Origin. The Astra Image Corporation designed the letters for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, often wrongly credited to Michael Okuda. They were based on Klingon battlecruiser hull markings by Matt Jeffries and on Tibetan writing, with sharp forms evoking bladed weapons.
• Size. 26 letters with a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds, plus ten digits.
• In practice. The vast majority of Klingonists prefer Latin-based romanisation. The script occupies U+F8D0 to U+F8FF in the Private Use Area; Everson's 1997 proposal to encode it was rejected by the Unicode Technical Committee in May 2001, reasoning that the script saw almost no communicative use.

The site's Klingon courses use the romanisation, which fits the article's description of common practice.

The "Designed to" column is my own summary.

Seeing the Design in Python

My own example; I ran it and copied the output. It splits a Hangul syllable into its letters and reverses the arithmetic by which Unicode lays out all the syllables, then looks at Canadian syllabics and the Private Use Area.

What the output shows (my reading): 한 is one precomposed code point that splits into three letters (initial ㅎ, vowel ㅏ, final ㄴ), and the block U+AC00 to U+D7A3 holds exactly 19 x 21 x 28 = 11,172 syllables, so the position of a syllable in Unicode is computed from its letters, which confirms the article's syllable count. The syllabics example shows the PI/PII/PO/POO series sitting side by side, consistent with one base shape in different orientations. The category Co means "private use": Tengwar and pIqaD have no standard characters, so a font must supply them.

Try It Yourself