Native alphabet
Being a constructed language of a fictional species in a fictional world, the speakers of Cenyani of course have never heard of the Latin alphabet, or any other writing system from Earth. Instead, they have invented their own alphabet for communication in writing.
For several reasons – mainly that Cenyani has a vertical script which is almost impossible to represent without images and which is almost impossible to integrate into horizontal text – this is one of very few places on this website where the native Cenyani alphabet actually appears.
You can download the Cenyani Native font (OpenType, 142 kB), and there is a full glyph listing.
Basic letters
First of all: Cenyani is written in vertical columns, from top to bottom and left to right, starting (of course) in the top-left corner.
Furthermore, the Cenyani alphabet is a so-called IMFI system, not unlike Arabic or the Hudum Mongolian script, where each letter has four forms: initial, medial, final and isolated. The letters are also connected and run along a sort of central pivot.
- Initial
- is used when the letter is the very first letter of the word.
- Medial
- is used when the letter is neither the first nor the last letter in the word; when it’s in the middle of it. This is by far the most common form.
- Final
- is – indeed – for the very last letter of the word; the final letter, if you will.
- Isolated
- is logically for words which consist of only a single letter.
In all the images below, where letters appear in groups of four, the forms displayed are, from top to bottom: initial, medial, final and isolated.
Vowels
Starting off with the vowels, here below is a little image for you with all the vowels in their respective forms. An important thing to note is that the native Cenyani alphabet makes a distinction between consonant and vowel y!
Feel free to notice how the different forms of each vowel are actually not very different at all. Also note the small line to the right of all the long vowels: placing a little stroke to the right of any letter indicates that it is a long sound (if the sound can be lengthened, anyway).
Consonants
Consonants are just as easy and straightforward as vowels, though they have slightly more variation between their different forms.
The letters t and d are written without dot if they are directly adjacent to any other consonant. The only exception to this rule is when t is next to s, ss or šš.
The letters rr, ss and šš are written without the line on the right if it is entirely obvious that the consonants are syllabic. This primarily means whenever the letter is surrounded by consonants (as in CSC), or, in the case of rr, when it is the first or (unless preceded by consonant y or rh) the last letter of the word. For example, rrca is written as rca, and prrn as prn.
Furthermore, r is actually sometimes written without its two dots, rendering it technically identical to ð. This is done only where it is entirely unambiguous what the letter refers to, which is mainly when the sound is adjacent to a voiceless consonant (where neither ð nor d may appear). This tendency is far more common in handwritten texts than in print. For instance, the aforementioned rrca might be written as if it were ðca, which is not a valid Cenyani word; and oxra would be written as oxða, which is also not a valid Cenyani word.
Illustration of the above rules (PNG)
Ligatures
Nothing related to the Cenyani language would be complete without a rather large “but”, so here it is: in addition to the letters above, there are also a load of ligatures. A ligature is simply two or more letters joined into a single letterform; in the Latin alphabet, for example, “fi” is often turned into an fi-ligature (fi) in professional typesetting.
au/ao and Vy ligatures, and the formation of VN ligatures. Click for a list of ligatures.
A frequently used pair of ligatures is the au/ao-ligatures, which are exactly what they sound like: an a (or á) followed by u or o. These ligatures were mainly invented to emphasise the fact that these vowel-pairs are diphthongs rather than separately pronounced vowels. In these ligatures, the first component may be lengthened, but not the second one (it is then instead written as a separate letter; no diphthong).
When a word ends in a vowel followed by a consonant y, the y is encoded by means of a small upstroke at the end of the bowl of the vowel, as shown in the image to the right.
However, the by far most common type of ligature in Cenyani is the so-called VN ligature, which consists of a vowel V (which may be an au/ao ligature!) followed by a nasal consonant N, that is, an m, n or ŋ. The consonant may be long, which is indicated by placing a small stroke to the right of the consonant component, just like with any other lengthened character. VN-ligatures are formed by removing the top bit of the nasal consonant – the near-horizontal thing at the top – and joining it with the bowl of the vowel. See the adjacent image.
There are also -Ns and -Nš ligatures, which are simply any nasal consonant followed by either s or š. Note that the second component may not be lengthened into ss or šš; if those letters are to follow a nasal consonant, they must be separated. Also note that these ligatures only exist in the final form, and that they can be combined with vowels, enabling ligatures such as aums or ónš. Finally, there are a pair of similar ligatures with c and x in place of the nasal consonant; these cannot be combined with vowels.
Punctuation
Compared to English, Cenyani has a very small list of punctuation characters. A description of each punctuation character is given below the image.
- Full stop
- terminates a sentence, just like the full stop in English.
- Commas
- are used as separators between clauses and list items. Unlike English, commas in Cenyani do not encode pauses. To represent a pause in speech (or interrupted speech), three consecutive dots are used instead.
- Colon
- typically precedes a list, a quotation, or a dependent clause that functions as a description or explanation to the clause/sentence before the colon.
- Abbreviation dots
- are used in abbreviations or acronyms. For example, the abbreviation “abbr.” would use an abbreviation dot. The abbreviation dot is only put at the very end of the abbreviation or acronym; “U.S.A.” would be represented as USA followed by an abbreviation dot and with each letter in the isolated form (to indicate that the letters belong to different words).
- Exclamation and question marks
- are used as in English: for exclamations and questions respectively. Question marks are mandatory for all questions, but are sometimes left out if the question is clearly rhetorical. Exclamation and question marks replace the full stop of a sentence.
- Quotation marks
- surround direct quotations. It’s really as simple as that.
- Parentheses
- surround additional information (like this), without which the sentence would still be perfectly understandable. Nesting of parentheses is considered extremely bad style in Cenyani.
- The paragraph start mark
- is used at the beginning of every paragraph other than the first one in a scene, chapter or otherwise logical section. It is pretty much equivalent to indenting the first line in Western typography. A large, centered paragraph start mark is often used as a visual separator between scenes in fiction, much like a triple-asterisk “***” in Western typography. This glyph is sometimes omitted entirely in informal documents, especially handwritten ones.
