Appendix:High Valyrian orthography
The High Valyrian writing system (Nekesse Valyrio) is a mixed script that is composed of a logographic (“iconic”) component, an abjadic (“alphabetic”) component, and a grammatical (“paradigmatic”) component, which are often used alongside each other[1]. The individual characters making up the system are referred to as “glyphs” (nekesse, singular nekes (“glyph”)).
External history
George R. R. Martin first made note of “Valyrian glyphs” in the A Song of Ice and Fire book series. In 2012, David J. Peterson was commissioned by HBO to create the High Valyrian language for the third season of Game of Thrones. During the run of the series, in the rare instances of written Valyrian appearing on-screen, it did so in the Latin alphabet (the romanization). It was not until the production of the first season of House of the Dragon, the prequel series to Game of Thrones, that HBO commissioned an official writing system from Peterson[1].
Size and development
The script comprised around 400 glyphs as of late 2022. Peterson then stated that he aimed to create about 700 glyphs for the system in total. However, there is no fixed upper limit to the number of glyphs, and more will be added as deemed necessary[1]. He has later stated that the system will be considered finished when House of the Dragon ends it run, and that he may add glyphs to it until then. At that point, a definite, in-universe alphabetization order for the glyphs may also be decided.
Internal history
As exemplified by David J. Peterson's sketches[2], the script evolved from pictograms, i.e. symbols depicting the thing they are referring to, and ideograms, symbols depicting an abstract concept, similar to how many writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters, developed in our world. As the system evolved and the symbols were written again and again by different writers over time, their appearance was simplified into the more abstract shapes that make up the current system. Their usage was also abstracted to represent sounds instead of things and concepts, on the basis of phonetic similarity; that is, an alphabetic usage. For example, the glyph for ziksos (“neck”) was used to represent its inital consonant phoneme /z/. Their use was also extended to a paradigmatic one, to convey grammatical information by depicting elements common between paradigms, like the j-/i- root of jagon (“go”) being used for the -i- element of aorist verb forms.
Glyphs
The phrase valar morghūlis (“all men must die”) is shown above as an example.
Iconic glyphs
Iconic glyphs can stand for whole words on their own, but are also used as a base to write inflected forms and derived forms.
is an iconic glyph for vala (“man”).
is an iconic glyph for morghon (“death”).
Alphabetic glyphs
Alphabetic glyphs are used to represent a phonetic value (a sound). They are used to write consonants and long vowels, and sometimes sequences of sounds. Short vowels and diphthongs with only short vowel elements are not written, however. This makes the High Valyrian script an impure abjad.
is an iconic glyph for ūly (“hook”). It is used here to write the similarly sounding sequence -ūlj-.
is a now purely a phonetic glyph for the phoneme /z/, though it was originally the glyph for ziksos (“neck”). Here it is used for third person agreement. As a whole, the word reads morghūlis (“must die”).
Paradigmatic glyphs
Paradigmatic glyphs also have iconic and alphabetic functions, but are used in verbal, adjectival and nominal paradigms to indicate information such as inflection and word class.
is an iconic glyph for kāro (“pile”), but is also used in noun paradigms to indicate the collective number. Together with the first glyph, it reads valar (“all men”).
is an iconic glyph for jagon (“to go”), but is also used in verb paradigms to indicate the aorist tense.
Punctuation
is used to separate words, similar to spaces in the Latin alphabet. All full words are separated by single dots, to make it clear where one word ends and the next begins.
is used to mark the beginning and the end of a sentence, and fill the role of full stops. The double dots are used for all types of sentences, including statements, questions, or exclamations, and so also fill the role of the question mark and the exclamation mark.