Kxënt'exo orthography

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Kxënt'exo orthography is the set of conventions used for writing the Kxënt'exo language.

The Kxënt'exo alphabet

Letters

The Kxënt'exo alphabet (lhëxuxom yakxënt'éxo /ɬə.χuˈχom ja.k͡xənˈtʼe.χo/) has 26 letters, the name of each letter is composed of the consonant sound + the open vowel /a/, and a noun starting in that letter (except for most vowels since they can't start words).

The way that letters are named helps disambiguate when they have identical pronunciations, so the letters "fa fimire" and "fa fe" are both pronounced as the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/, but the noun attached to them clarifies which letter is being talked about.

All of the nouns picked for letter names are fairly common terms that most people would be expected to know.

The letters go in the following order:

To see the allophonic variations of these phonemes see Kxënt'exo phonology.

Ordering

Historically there were different alphabetical orders, and some scribes didn't even give them any order at all. Around the time when Classical Kxënt'exo was starting to get standardized the council of the emperor was tasked with adopting one alphabetical order as the official one, and so all scribes had to follow it from then on.

Letters are organized based on the place where they're produced in the mouth when read out loud, they follow this pattern:

• Labial
• Coronal
• Sibilant-like
• Dorsal

And each of these sections of the mouth also follows a pattern based on the manner in which the sound is produced:

• Semivowels
• Plain occlusives
• Other sonorants
• Ejective occlusives
• Fricatives

Not every section of the mouth has all of these consonant types, but when one is missing it's simply skipped.

The order of the consonants:

Labials:

• pa piï /p/
• ma míwa /m/
• p'a p'aka /pʼ/
• fa fimire /f/
• fa fe /f/

Coronals:

• ta tupówa /t/
• na noma /n/
• t'a t'eko /tʼ/
• lha lhëxï /ɬ/

Sibilant-like:

• tsa tsï /t͡s/
• ts'a ts'ok'a /t͡sʼ/
• sa süyi /s/
• sa sayï /s/

Dorsals:

• ya yak'e /j/
• ya yiye̋ts'e /j/
• wa wame /w/
• ka kxërit' /k/
• ra rimü /ʀ/
• k'a k'ö /kʼ/
• xa xatsa /χ/

And then the vowels are grouped together at the end, the order vaguely references the consonant order:

• o wopü /o/
• ë wët'ö /ə/
• e yekéwa /e/
• i yi /i/
• u ulhï /u/
• a yana /a/

The rationale for the ordering of the vowels is as follows:

• /o/ is associated with bilabial consonants due to its rounding
• /ə/ is associated with coronals due to being seen as neutral
• /e/ is associated with sibilants for being a "sharper" form of /ə/
• /i/ is associated with the palatal approximant /j/
• /u/ is associated with the labial-velar approximant /w/
• /a/ is associated with uvular consonants /ʀ/ and /χ/

Historical readings

The alphabet was designed back in an ancient stage of the language, and back when it was first adopted everything was spelled entirely phonemically, which is to say that the spelling of the words reflected their pronunciation accurately, each letter corresponded to one phoneme.

Here's the original phonetic values that the letters had.

As shown above a few of the historical pronunciations don't match the alphabetical order, for example the rhotic used to be an alveolar trill [r] meaning it should've been grouped together with the coronals, however it's important to remember that the standard alphabetical order was a later invention, and by that point the phonology of the language had shifted from its ancient form.

The Classical form of the language didn't shift too much from the ancient form, so every letter is still used in Classical Kxënt'exo, however the sound shifts did result in a lot of silent letters all over the language.

Other symbols

Section still hasn't been written.

Spelling

Multigraphs

In order to spell all of the sounds of Kxënt'exo multigraphs are used, which are letter combinations that come together to represent single sounds.

The Ancient form of the language had a syllable structure of CV (consonant-vowel) so consonants would never be placed right next to one another, and the letters were designed to represent every consonant and vowel in the language, so the spelling was fairly straight-forward and there wasn't any need for multigraphs.

It wasn't until the pronunciation of the language started to shift that a lot of vowels were lost and many consonants started being placed next to one another, and these clusters ended up being pronounced a certain way, which then got standardized into the Classical spelling.

Glyphs that are pronounced the same

Sounds can be written in multiple different ways, the reason for this is that these different spellings actually used to be pronounced differently in an earlier stage of the language, but eventually their pronunciations merged, so people no longer made a distinction between the different sounds when speaking but they still keep the distinction when spelling.

This is the reason why the following sets of letters are pronounced identically in the Classical language; they didn't use to be identical.

Silent letters

Another consequence of historical spelling is that there are lots of silent letters at the end of words, this is because fricatives used to be able to end words in an older stage of the language, but in Classical Kxënt'exo you can no longer end a word in a fricative, so the sound gets dropped.

Another instance of silent letters is the sequence of sounds /wə/ spelled {wy} which ended up getting lost, as the mid central vowel /ə/ was prone to being dropped when at the end of words, and the labial-velar approximant /w/ also eventually faded from the word-final position.

The reason why these silent letters weren't dropped from the spelling by the emperor's council is because they would often convey information that would be deemed important, for example the words {vimiv} and {vimiwy} are both pronounced /fiˈmi/ however the former is an infinitive verb, as indicated by the final silent {v} and the latter is an inanimate noun, as indicated by the silent {wy} ending (the words mean "to hear" and "ear" respectively).

Ultimately this distinction isn't crucial because word order would often disambiguate which word is being used, and the words inflect differently depending on their part of speech, that is to say, different forms of the word are used to convey verb tenses and grammatical cases or grammatical number.

For example if you hear /fiˈmik/ you know that's a verb because that's the past perfective conjugation, whereas if you hear /ja.fiˈmi/ you know that's a noun because that's the genitive case, and there's basically no overlap in the inflections of different types of words.

Because of this the distinction being lost between the base forms of related verbs, nouns and adjectives doesn't actually end up impeding communication a whole lot.

The council of the emperor decided to keep these silent letters at the ends of words because they usually tell you which type of word you're dealing with, like infinitive verbs ending in {v}, inanimate nouns often ending in {wy}, animate nouns often ending in {x}, animate adjectives ending in {l} and so on, but as illustrated above, that's information you can deduce or gain from other places.

For a list of all the class marking suffixes (both the silent ones and the non-silent ones) see Kxënt'exo grammar.

The Standard Galactic Alphabet

Background

The Kxënt'exo alphabet is based on the Standard Galactic Alphabet (SGA for short).

The SGA is a cipher first used in the series of games Commander Keen, which then got added to Minecraft as an easter egg, as such, it was originally designed to represent each letter of the roman alphabet with a one-to-one equivalence.

This is why the tables above come with a column labeled "On the keyboard", if you install one of the many fonts of the SGA created by fans the symbols will be mapped to the roman alphabet to match the way the cipher was originally designed, so the tables show you which key you should press on your keyboard in order to get the Kxënt'exo letter.

Assigning phonetic values

The mapping of SGA characters to roman letters helped inspire their phonetic values, some of them may seem a bit confusing such as the characters typed with {x} and {j} being both read as /j/, but if we look at their historical readings it might seem a bit more clear why they're transliterated into Latin the way they are.

The decisions I took when mapping the sounds to the glyphs are as follows:

• The voicing distinction of the stops in Latin {p} - {b}, {t} - {d}, {k} - {g} are equivalent to plain vs emphatic distinctions in Kxënt'exo /pˤ/ - /p/, /tˤ/ - /t/, /kˤ/ - /k/ and the emphatics evolved into ejectives in the Classical language.

• The voicing distinction of the fricatives in Latin {f} - {v}, {s} - {z} is present in Proto-Kxënt'exo, but got lost in the Classical language, resulting in two letters for each of these fricative sounds.

• The letters {x} and {j} got used for the postalveolar fricatives /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ given that they get used similarly in some natural languages, and both of these sounds merged with the palatal approximant /j/ in the Classical language.

• The letters {c} and {q} got used for the postalveolar affricates /t͡ʃ/ and /t͡ʃˤ/ since both are used for the postalveolar affricate in some languages, and {q} is associated with uvular sounds (which is kind of close to pharyngealized sounds), both of these became alveolar affricates.

• There is no lateral approximant /l/ in Kxënt'exo but there is a lateral fricative /ɬ/ so the {l} letter got used for that sound.

• The character for {h} got used for a velar fricative /x/ which then evolved into a uvular fricative in the Classical language.

• The character for {y} got used for the mid central vowel /ə/ which isn't common, but the letter is sometimes used to represent vowel sounds, so that's what I decided to go with, as a result there's 6 basic vowel letters in Kxënt'exo instead of 5.

Ideally these decisions help set the Kxënt'exo alphabet apart from the roman alphabet, combined with the letter names, the alphabetical order and its unique spelling rules it should have a unique identity that feels more original.

Visual design

The image above illustrates the various versions of the SGA, with all the letters in columns at the top right and the phrase "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" at the bottom.

Looking at the green columns and rows we can see the way the SGA looks on the default Minecraft game, that is to say, if you install the game and open up an enchanting table that's how the letters are going to look like in the user interface.

On the red columns and rows we can see the version of the SGA present in the Faithful resource pack.

Resource packs are downloadable files that you can get from the internet and install into Minecraft, and when you install them they can modify all sorts of things about the game, the Faithful resource pack specifically modifies the look of the game so that the visual aesthetic is identical to the one in the default game but in slightly higher resolution, so all the different textures and fonts are made out of more pixels than usual.

As a result of this the SGA used in the Faithful resource pack is basically meant to be identical to the default one, but in higher resolution, which makes it more legible.

Finally in the blue columns and rows we can see the forms of the letters I designed, a lot of them are identical to the SGA from the Faithful resource pack, however some have changes.

Changes

When designing the new look for the SGA I didn't want to stray too far from the original design, I wanted it to be recognizable so if someone knew how to read text written in the SGA they'd still be able to read my version.

At the same time I had an issue with the look of the script, the individual look of each letter is quite pleasing, however a lot of the letters have inconsistencies that make the text look a bit disjointed when you put them next to each other, as if characters from various different scripts were being used to write one singular line of text.

So the main focus when redesigning the characters was to remove some of the inconsistencies and add some repeating patterns that would add a greater visual harmony and make lines of text look less disjointed, while still retaining the charm of the original design of the letters.

Here's the list of changes:

• I replaced curves with more angular shapes, curves only appeared in {a} {n} and {o}, making them stand out from the rest of the script.

• I made sure to make the widths of the characters more consistent, {c} {p} {s} and {y} became wider and {e} {m} {q} {r} {t} {w} {x} and {z} became narrower, so now a lot of letters share the exact same width. It's important to keep in mind that glyphs still need to have some blank space, if all of the elements in each letter are too close together the script becomes harder to read at smaller sizes.

• The glyphs for {e} and {m} got their dots moved away from the edge, since in these letters the dot would usually feel like it was closer to the adjacent letter because of its positioning, making it harder to read.

• The dots on the {l} glyph got moved closer together to help with legibility; the closer the elements are the more they read as being part of the same symbol.

• The shape of {j} got changed to have dots at the top and bottom, which is more consistent with other shapes like {c} {p} and {t}.

• The shape of {q} now matches the {o} glyph because the original box shape stood out a lot from the rest of the script.

• The letters which weren't full height {d} {f} {u} {w} are now consistent with each other, all of them aligning to the top edge of the line of text and they all now have the same height, and {u} was modified to be more similar to {d}.

The R glyph

I considered changing the shape of the {r} glyph, since having a glyph that consists of only four dots is quite weird and I'm not sure it's very naturalistic considering that it'd be more difficult to write something like that on a book than something involving lines, and I experimented with changing the shape of the glyph as illustrated below:

In this case I made the letter match the short letters: it sticks to the top of the line of text and it's the same height as the other short letters.

Perhaps this is an alternate way of writing the glyph that some scribes use, but I decided to stick with the original shape for the standard Classical alphabet because I got used to it and despite it being weird I think some of the charm of the original SGA comes from that weird letter.

Other links

• Back to the main Kxënt'exo page
• Standard Galactic Alphabet