The Orthography of Gweydr
As mentioned on the main page, Gweydr has two orthographies—one older, written upon stone walls; one newer, used in writing. This is a description of the latter system. To see a description of the former, go here.
An alphabetic script is used to write Gweydr. The use of the alphabet is not very different from the use of the Roman alphabet in English: The script is written from right to left; punctuation comes at the end; the first word in a sentence begins with a capital letter. Another similarity between Gweydr's script (called Sattówš Ästrälä) and English's orthography is that the the script is not strictly phonemic. So, for example, the Gweydr word for "two" is pronounced as tén, but it's spelled ténd, with an extra d on the end there. This is because, historically, the word for "two" did have an audible d on the end, and even though it's now been lost, the orthography hasn't kept up.
Since we're on the subject of orthographical conventions, three such conventions have made their way into the Gweydr script. They're not letters of their own, because they're still listed (alphabetically) as a sequence of two letters, the first followed by the second. As such, they won't fit into the alphabetic presentation of the script I'm going to give below, so I'll go ahead and show you the ligatures below:
Upper/Lower Case |
Allophone |
Example |
Romanization |
|
 |
áy |  |
máy, "I" | |
 |
ts |  |
tsostr, "leg" | |
 |
ks |  |
kweksin, "crow" | |
The table above is a miniature version of the table below, as far as formatting goes. The table below will present the whole alphabet in Gweydr alphabetical order. Here it is:
Alphabet
Upper/Lower Case |
Allophone |
Example |
Romanization |
|
 |
á |  |
'ál, "one" | |
 |
a |  |
safl, "rabbit" | |
 |
b |  |
bént, "nose" | |
| p |  |
stóp, "elbow" | ||
| |  |
ĥumb, "wood" | ||
 |
k |  |
kámíš, "purple" | |
 |
é |  |
'ézíny, "sword" | |
 |
e |  |
lebeš, "here" | |
 |
f |  |
fór, "bark" | |
| v |  |
"óví, "door" | ||
 |
d |  |
derk, "seed" | |
| t |  |
þrât, "trout" | ||
| |  |
end, "skin" | ||
 |
g |  |
greč, "iron" | |
| k |  |
brók, "swamp" | ||
| |  |
stang, "thorn" | ||
 |
í |  |
íl, "land" | |
 |
i |  |
ixtos, "house" | |
 |
t |  |
tónúks, "arm" | |
 |
č |  |
čázótl, "boat" | |
 |
j |  |
jánú, "log" | |
| č |  |
mâč, "finger" | ||
| |  |
prenj, "toe" | ||
 |
p |  |
pálínú, "animal" | |
 |
ó |  |
ĥórs, "dog" | |
 |
o |  |
ot, "fruit" | |
 |
m |  |
moxtóws, "feather" | |
 |
n |  |
négwínr, "rock" | |
| n* |  |
"öngr, "fire" | ||
| n* |  |
nanču, "bridge" | ||
 |
l |  |
lasl, "king" | |
 |
r |  |
répé, "word" | |
 |
ú |  |
húčés, "axe" | |
 |
u |  |
ĥusy, "mouse" | |
 |
s |  |
saf, "zero" | |
| z |  |
zbeš, "there" | ||
 |
š |  |
šél, "bird" | |
| ž |  |
tâžâ, "hair" | ||
 |
þ |  |
þäksl, "fox" | |
| ð |  |
gâðírâ, "thing" | ||
 |
â |  |
hâzíf, "knife" | |
 |
ä |  |
'ändr, "every" | |
 |
ô |  |
ħôlôs, "chin" | |
 |
ö |  |
östr, "salmon" | |
 |
û |  |
'ûltâ, "milk" | |
 |
ü |  |
"ütsä, "store" | |
 |
x |  |
xâlík, "horse" | |
| ğ |  |
šóğúš, "to rust" | ||
 |
y |  |
yíldá, "evening" | |
| y |  |
'ézíny, "sword" | ||
 |
w |  |
wuš, "leaf" | |
| w |  |
sregw, "belt" | ||
* Though both of these letters are represented the same way as the letter for n in the romanization and in the orthography, they make different sounds, as specified in the phonology section.
Punctuation
Punctuation is a relatively new topic within Gweydr orthographics (sometimes spelled with an "x" to make it more XtReMe). For a long time, there was little to no punctuation, save a few marks used here and there, such as those below:
The glyphs above are versions of the same mark (the latter a stylistic variant of the former, usually used in hand written documents) used to indicate that an entire thought (usually corresponding with a sentence, but not always) has come to an end, of one kind or another. You will find this mark at the end of a sentence or clause. This is the oldest form of punctuation in Gweydr, and is used fairly consistently. Somewhat less so are the lesser stops:
These are used to break up longer chunks of text in semi-consistent ways. The first is like a comma followed by "and". It's used primarily when what follows it is going to add new information, or build on what has already been said. The latter mark is kind of like a comma followed by "but". It's used when the new information is different from, or standing in contrast to what has already been stated. Both are used almost exclusively in longer sentences (so not in something like, "I go, but he stays").
Another commonly used mark can be seen below:
These marks come from a simplification of a kind of cartouche-like glyph used in the stone script. Originally, it was used to enclose proper names. These marks, however, tend to get used to enclose a proper anything, dependent solely upon the writer's whim. If you see a text with these things all over the place, then, you can draw what conclusions you will about the character of the author.
Hereafter, the picture gets a little fuzzy... You see, Gweydr and Zhyler come from the same place, way on down the line, but the folks just don't like each other very much. As a result, they're always competing at everything. Zhyler, as it happens, has a rather developed punctuation system, and Gweydr literati, in order to keep up, decided that Gweydr needed an equally advanced punctuation system. Drawing on what they knew of Zhyler's system, and their own wit, they came up with the following marks:
We'll call the first the colon, the second the exclamation point, and the third the question mark. There are very detailed rules on how and when to use these, but no one knows what they are, and everyone disagrees about them. It doesn't help that the question mark looks a lot like an é, and the other two can resemble other letters when one is writing quickly. Nevertheless, there they are, for all to see and make fun of.
Number System
Gweydr has a base ten number system, like Zhyler, and the astute observe will notice that some of Gweydr's numerals look similar to some of Zhyler's (which can be found here). These are the digits 0 through 9, in ascending order from left to right:
Of course, the two of Gweydr doesn't look like the two of Zhyler, but this is probably due to intentional mischief (which, no doubt, probably drove early mathematicians and accountants to tears). The numbers are put together just like they are in Zhyler. Below is the number 19,480:
No surprises.
Conclusion
Yay for closure! This page is done! May it bring you as much joy as it did me. Joy and money. Ah, money, money, money: the Frankenstein monster that steals souls!