Appendix:Gandal orthography

Shul is an alphabet by David J. Peterson used to write the Gandal language from Tencent Games' Arena of Valor. This appendix explains characters written in the [[:Category:| script]].

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Orthography

The Gandal orthography, known as the Shul or "pure" script, directly evolves from the Veda orthography. The glyphs of Gandal are shown with their Veda source in the following table:

File:S1.png

It can be seen as a Romanesque script with a few notable features, particularly with regards to the representation of Gandal phones (i.e. sounds). In this script, Gandal phones replace Veda phones, leading to certain glyphs that represent the same sounds as others in the Veda script. For instance, former Veda "q" now functions as another "k" in Gandal. However, one variant of "k" enforces a following back vowel, while the other allows front vowels.

A significant shift is observed in Gandal's vowel system, as it introduces a full set of vowels. Some vowels derive from former Veda semi-vowels, and these characters require a dot above them to signify their status as semi-vowels. Additionally, Gandal introduces new characters that make phonological sense within its system. Punctuation marks have been added, with the period and question mark borrowed from Veda, while others are unique to Gandal. These characters are summarized in the table below:

File:S2.png

When examining a noun declension table, it becomes apparent that Gandal's spelling conventions require learning how to use the script separately from learning how to spell it. This distinction is illustrated by the differences in spelling between V-initial accusative singular and plural forms, both pronounced the same due to their shared initial "u," as seen below:

File:S3.png