One last reason is that it's different. This is a quite personal reason, (that's why this is a blog, anyway), but I really like being different. I became aware of this tract of my personality recently, it's rather subconscious.
OK, 'nuff off-topic. I'm not completely satisfied with the system I've developed, but I'll document here my first steps.
First, remember that I'm Brazilian, so when I'm handwriting, I'm writing in Portuguese. I do write a lot in English, but I use the keyboard for that. The reason I'm emphasizing this is that Portuguese has a good equilibrium of vowels and consonants (for those who aren't used to it, it's quite similar to Spanish). The method described here will work if other languages, but if your language isn't so vocalic as Portuguese, it may work not so well.
Keep in mind also that I'm reading Tolkien at the moment (The Silmarillion), so now you'll see from where the idea came from.
The method
The idea of using Tengwar as it was created was something that I didn't actually like; I would have to learn a new writing system and them adapt it to Portuguese. It wouldn't be that hard, I remember I did it some time ago, though I forgot most of it, and I don't have the papers anymore, but I'd like something simpler.
My idea was to take the basic idea of Tengwar (consonants with diacritics indicating the vowels) and adapt it to the Roman alphabet. Without even thinking much about it, we can see it has it's advantages:
- It's more "dense", I can write the same stuff using less space
- I don't have to learn new symbols as I would with Tengwar or some writing techniques that use ideograms for common words.
- As the diacritics are written above and not beside, I know how much space a word will take by writing only about half of its characters, so I can write a complete sentence in a run and then put the diacritics.
How it works
The rules I (arbitrarily) decided are that a diacritic over a consonant means it's followed by an vowel. Each diacritic means a different vowel, being:
- "^" - a.
- "´" - e.
- "·" - i
- "°" - o
- "¨" - u
Although they're arbitrary, I tried to make them related to their meanings:
I added one other for nasal diphthongs (in Portuguese, they are "-ão", "-ãe" and "-ãos"), which is represented by "~" (obvious, right?). I'm also using one character from the Cyrillic alphabet to represent roughly the same phonem: щ.
Actually, It's not as simples as that. There are two ways to write this phonem /ʃ/, like in this phrase, "Xícara de chá" (cup of tea), both "x' and "ch" represents the same phonem, but when I'm writing, I keep "x" as "x" and replace "ch" by "щ". Replacing "ch" by "x" feels... wrong.
Some improvements that can be made.
Some words in Portuguese start with a vowel, but there's no way to represent these vowels using diacritics as there's no other character to put it over. I could use a "null consonant", probably a dotless i, and use the diacritics over it. I don't like this solution very much, but I'm thinking about this, yet.
Another problem are diphthongs and triphthongs. Currently, I've been putting a diacritic over the other, in a recursive fashion: if b+^ means "b followed by an a", then "b+^"+· means "b followed by an a followed by an i". I don't like it as it easily gets unreadable, so I have to take care with it.
The problem of this approach is that I have no way to differentiate hiatus from diphthongs. Notice the diacritic over the i: "cai" (he/she falls) and "caí" (I fell). In the last word, the "i" is pronounced a little longer. A quick hack to solve this would be to represent diphthongs as they are now, and use the null consonant to represent hiatus, so it would be:
The last problem I can think of by now is that some common digraphs could have their own symbols. Almost all consonants can be followed by an r in Portuguese, so I could think in a way to represent this encounter. Another common case is the nasalization of a vowel by putting an n or and m after it. I can't use a simple ~ as all vowels can be made nasal, so only a tilde would be ambiguous. There other cases such as ch (see above), nh and lh.
Drawbacks
- It's only efficient on paper. I can't write the same way using a keyboard (although my keyboard settings accepts weird combinations such as ś, not all consonants can have a diacritic) and even if I could, it wouldn't help, as I'd had to press basically the same number of keys.
- It's rather simple, so I guess there wouldn't be a big problem teaching someone to read it. At the same time, it's quite similar to the "normal" way of writing, so it can't be used for cryptic writings.
Conclusion
As I said, I'm not completely satisfied with it, but considering the idea was created and developed in some hours, I like it so far. I haven't put it in heavy tests yet, so I can't say how efficient this really is. Some quick tests with phrases that came out of my head showed that I write something between 60% and 70% of the original number of characters. Of course the improvement is not so big as I have to write diacritics now, but I already had before (as I exemplified with "cai" and "caí"), and considering the vowel i, there's always this dot, so I just had to change its place.
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