Appendix:Fjerdan orthography

Fjerdan Language Navigation: Home, Phonology, Grammar, Vocabulary, Orthography, Dialogue

The Fjerdan language is written with an alphabet created by Christian Thalmann for the potential spin-off series of Netflix's Shadow and Bone, Six of Crows.

Orthography

Fjerdan is written with an alphabet. As such, it features full characters for both consonants and vowels.

The script has letters for aspirated (voiceless) consonants which are formed off of the base (voiced/unaspirated) consonant glyphs in a predictable manner, which makes the system partly featural. There are also glyphs for palatalized (postalveolar) consonants formed off of the glyphs of the corresponding alveolar sounds.

The Fjerdan script is young and thus still mostly phonetic, with a few exceptions:

• Voiceless consonants can be written with the corresponding base (voiced) letter in unvoiced clusters or word-finally. This reduces visual clutter. For example, strüpfet could be written in Fjerdan script as sdrüpved.
• The gemination mark is mostly used for disambiguation of minimal pairs, and is not used otherwise. For example, ulle is written as ule, while verret is written with the gemination mark to distinguish it from veret.
• The sound zh [ʒ] is an allophone of the phoneme y /j/, and is consequently spelled the same. For example, nezh is spelled ney and aizhor is spelled ayor. Compare this with yarl, which is spelled with the same y glyph.

Diachronic evolution

Over the course of its history, the Fjerdan script evolved through many styles and writing mediums:

From top to bottom: wood runes, vernacular handwriting, calligraphic blackletter, utilitarian blackletter, rectangular blackletter, and grotesque/sans serif.

Letters and punctuation

The Fjerdan letters for consonant and vowel sounds as well as punctuation marks are shown below:

 s

 

Numerals

The Fjerdan numeral system is base-10, with a sub-base of 5. It is shown below: