Bullywug Writing System — Part 1
After reading the Orthography section of the linguistics book we’re reading, The Art of Language Invention , and letting seeds of possible Bullywug orthography roam around our brains, we’ve begun to actually create one. The first thing we started with was what Bullywugs were going to write on and with. We decided that it made the most sense for them to write on mud with their fingers, at least for the first stage. So, we got some clay mixed with water to act as mud, placed it on trays, and brainstormed some possible glyphs. Here are some pictures of glyphs from that brainstorm session: While we drew in “mud”, we decided that the writing system for Bullywug was going to be an abugida. An abugida is, basically, a writing system where each glyph represents a syllable, instead of a sound, like an alphabet would. Tamil is an example of an abugida. We also experimented with what some starting positions might look like. We had the idea that maybe each starting posi...