Appendix:Kwandon script
Kwandon is an abjad by David J. Peterson used to write the Sondiv language spoken by the alien Atrian people from The CW's Star-Crossed. This appendix explains characters written in the Kwandon script.
Orthography
Sondiv's script, known as Kwandon, is an abjad, a writing system that primarily represents consonantal sounds. Vowels are typically not written or are only written in specific contexts. Peterson designed this script for the Atrian language in the TV show Star-Crossed, aiming to give it a distinctive appearance reminiscent of seaweed.
Design concept
Kwandon was created to have a unique appearance inspired by seaweed and oceanic elements. The goal was to emphasize consonants, with a particular visual style that included lines written over and under glyphs. Peterson had previously created scripts like abugidas and a syllabary for the show Defiance, so he aimed to do something different for Star-Crossed.
Root system
Similar to Arabic, Sondiv employs a root system that allows for the easy formation of new words. There are twenty-four basic nominal patterns and an adjectival pattern for word building. Patterns have broad semantic categories, such as "Animate A" and "Animate B." The script is a tool to encode these patterns unambiguously using only consonant letters and certain modifications to those letters.
Orthography encoding
Peterson devised a schema with four modifications to accommodate two and three consonant roots. The goal was to minimize modifications while ensuring unambiguous encoding. All glyphs occupy the same vertical space for efficiency. Glyphs have two modifications above and two below the character.
Glyph examples
Oral Stops: Represented by glyphs like [k], [g], and [b].
Basic Fricatives: Glyphs for fricatives like [s], [z], and [f].
Liquids and Nasals: Includes characters for [l], [m], and [n].
Glide Group: A set featuring [h], [w], and [j].
Vowel Group: Characters for former long vowel versions of [e] and [o], sometimes used as consonants in roots.
Foreign Sounds: Glyphs created for foreign sounds like [tʃ], [dʒ], [ʃ], and [θ].
Additional Characters: Characters for the vowels [e] and [o] were created for special use cases.
Consonant modifications
Modifications 1 and 2 are written over one or two consonants to the left, modification 3 is written under one or two consonants to the right, and modification 4 occurs before a single consonant or between two consonants.
Pronunciation
Sondiv uses two and three consonant roots. Noun patterns apply to biconsonantal (e.g., S-K) and triconsonantal (e.g., S-K-T) roots. Patterns, signified by Roman numerals in the table below, involve singular and plural forms, the latter of which are signified by a special glyph, referred to as P, and modifications, signified by Arabic numerals, in the tables below:
In the following table, a Ø represents no modification or marking. If two or three letters follow each other without modifications, they will be read as the determiner pattern above. The second root letter, rather than the third, is modified for the male name pattern pronunciation. The third root letter modification covers only the second letter, not the first, for the female name pattern pronunciation.
Number system
Sondiv employs a base-10 number system with special words for prime numbers up to twenty. Symbols for numbers are taken from the alphabet, and a special number sign differentiates numbers from words.