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 position represents the initial consonant, and the movement afterwards would represent the vowel.

Bullywug writing system starting positions from “mud” brainstorm session

Another thing we kept in mind as we brainstormed, is that Bullywugs only have four fingers. So, you can see that all of our possible glyphs can be made without the pinky finger. 

The next step was to look at my phonotactic rules and determine how many possible syllables there were, and therefore, how many glyphs we needed. After realizing that with 17 consonants and 7 vowels, we would have way too many syllable options to make a reasonable and realistic abugida, we decided to combine some similar vowel sounds for a total of 5 glyphs. The table below shows all of Bullywug’s possible syllables:

To fit the existing Bullywug words better, we decided to add glyphs for all of our consonants (without vowels), which allowed for the CVC syllable structure. This might mean that Bullywug’s orthography is actually a semi syllabary, not an abugida. 

Next, the goal was to create as many glyphs as we could. This step is basically a continuation of our initial  brainstorm, just on paper and more condensed. Having a large amount of glyphs to work with will help us better understand the possibilities of our writing system and find a more or less logical way for our glyphs to work. As of right now, I have only documented 97 glyphs; I am going step by step, and 97 seemed like a good number to start with so we could see how easy it was to come up with our desired amount. As it turns out, it’s very easy! I only used 3 different starting positions in all 97 glyphs! Here are those 97:

Another part of this process, is coming up with phonotactic rules to explain why certain glyphs represent two vowels instead of one, and determining the later stages of Bullywug’s writing system (ex. shifts in materials and tools used to write) and how they affected the language. Here are some of my brainstormings: