Appendix:Ts'íts'àsh orthography

The Ts'íts'àsh language from Disney and Pixar's Elemental is written using a syllabary created by David J. Peterson and Jessie Sams.

Orthography

Ts'íts'àsh is written with what is defined by Peterson as a syllabary, a script which represents syllables, including their onset (consonant) and nucleus (vowel or consonant), as single, combined glyphs, called syllabograms. However, it appears to function in many respects like an an abugida, a script thats consists of base consonant glyphs which are modified in predictable ways to indicate the quality of the following nucleus. This means that glyphs in the script with common phonetic elements share graphical similarities. An important difference from most abugidas, however, is that the basic consonants glyph do not have an inherent nucleus that can pronounced.

The orthography appears to be somewhat historical, meaning that older phonetic elements of the language that have since changed pronunciation are represented in the orthography. Consequently, there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between the graphical elements of the written form and the phonetic elements of the spoken form.

Parts of the syllabogram

The Ts'íts'àsh syllabogram or glyph starts with the onset, called the "fuel" or àkh (red in the image below), at the bottom. Above it there is the "pan" or dàr (green in the image below), a slightly curved horizontal element, which separates the onset from the nucleus. Above that there is the nucleus represented by the "result" or róshà (blue in the image below):

In many syllabograms there is an angular element between the "pan" and the "result" which seems to generally represent a vowel with tone. In such cases, the "result" can represent a coda consonant. Not much is known about this graphical element. Examples of this are seen in the spelling of the name of the language, Ts'íts'àsh:

Onsets

Nuclei