Osrican orthography

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Osrican orthography is the set of conventions used for writing the Osrican language.

The Osrican alphabet

Letters

There are 25 letters in the Osrican alphabet, and they go in the following order:

To see the allophonic variations of these phonemes see Osrican phonology.

Borrowed letters

Most Osrican letters come straight from the Greek alphabet and as such they have similar names and readings, however there's some letters that aren't present in the Greek alphabet and which may have unexpected readings.

E umlaut (Ëë) was borrowed from the neighboring language Albanian, in both languages it's used to write a mid central vowel /ə/.

Wau (Ff) looks identical to Latin F, however it's used to represent the labial–velar approximant /w/ because it actually comes from the archaic Greek letter digamma (Ϝϝ) which has a similar appearance to Latin F and was also used to represent the labial–velar approximant sound.

Tkhürisë (Ψψ) looks identical to Greek psi (Ψψ), but it's used to represent the alveolar stops /t/ and /d/. This is because the letter was borrowed from the Gothic letter thyth (𐌸), which was used to represent the dental fricative /θ/, and Old Osrican had dental fricative sounds /θ/ and /ð/, so they needed a way to represent them in writing. The Modern language no longer has dental fricatives, they now get pronounced as alveolar stops, but the words which used this letter didn't get respelled.

Langë i (Jȷ) is dotless, to match yoeta (Ιι), and it's used to represent the palatal approximant /j/, it was influenced by a development that happened in many languages that use the Latin alphabet. Originally the letter I was used to represent both a vowel sound /i/ and a consonant sound /j/ but some languages started to write the consonant sound by adding a tail to the letter i. The name of the letter (literally meaning long i) was influenced by Italian "I lunga", a language that doesn't use the letter much nowadays.

Ve (Ww) is used to represent the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, it was borrowed form German, which uses it to represent the same consonant sound.

Notes

In Old Osrican an alpha with a grave accent (Ὰὰ) was sometimes used to represent the mid central vowel /ə/.

In Greek the letter sigma (Σσς) has a special form which is used at the end of words, and it was also used in Old Osrican, but most fricatives at the ends of words ended up disappearing and they're no longer spelled, so the word final form of sigma got dropped. Fricatives can still appear at the end of words in Modern Osrican, but they only happen in loanwords, and the regular form of sigma (σ) gets used to spell a word final /s/ consonant sound now.

The greek letters eta (Ηη), theta (ϴθ), psi (Ψψ) and omega (Ωω) aren't used in Osrican writing, though some people used them in Old Osrican.

Other symbols

A diaeresis (◌̈) is used on üpsilon in formal writing (Ϋϋ), called ιυπσιλον διαλιυτικα · (üpsilon dialütika) /ʏp.sɪˈlon di̯ɐ.lʏ.tɪˈkɐ/. The purpose of the marking is to differentiate between the digraph representing the monophthong ιυ (read as ü /y/) and the one representing the vowel hiatus or diphthong ιϋ (read as iu /i.u/ or /iu̯/). In casual writing people tend to leave the diaeresis out.

The punctuation of Osrican is basically identical to that of Greek, which means that it differs from English punctuation in the following ways:

• Quotations are written in guillemets (« ») instead of the type used in English (" "), they're called ισαγχυȷικα · (isawuyika) /ɪ.sɐ.wʊ.jiˈkɐ/
• Questions are marked with a symbol that looks like a semicolon (;) instead of the one used in English (?), it's called ερυτιματικο · (erutimatiko) /e.rʊ.tɪ.mɐ.tɪˈko/
• A raised dot (·) is used instead of a semicolon (;) it's called γχαυχë τëλëȷια · (ğaukhë tëlëyia) /ˈɰɐu̯.xə tə.ləˈji.ɐ/
• Decimal points are written with commas (,) instead of periods (.) so 1.5 (as in one and a half) is written as 1,5
• The decimal separator is a period (.) rather than a comma (,) so 1,500 (as in, one thousand five hundred) is written as 1.500

Spelling

Multigraphs

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

Note: the multigraphs that utilize langë i (Jȷ) change depending on whether they happen at the end of the word or not, at the end of the word the langë i goes before the other letters so it's ȷ◌, but otherwise it goes after, so it's ◌ȷ.

Historical spelling

The way a word is spelled typically allows you to figure out exactly how it's pronounced (with a few exceptions) but the way a word is pronounced doesn't necessarily tell you how it's spelled, because sometimes there are multiple ways of writing the same sound and you just have to memorize which one is the correct one, this is due to something known as historical spelling.

Basically sounds that can be written in multiple different ways used to be pronounced differently in an earlier stage of the language, but eventually these pronunciations merged so that people no longer made a distinction between the different sounds when speaking the language but they still kept the distinction when spelling.

Keyboard layout

You can download the Osrican keyboard layout for Mac here, it’s a dmg file made using the Ukelele app. Currently there isn't an Osrican keyboard layout for Windows.

Other links

• Back to the main Osrican page