The orthography, or writing system, of Classical Tepat consisted of a large set of logographic klût (glyphs), and later a smaller complementary set of phonetic symbols. The klût are called logographs because each written symbol represented a word (and a syllable, because most words were monosyllabic). Glyphs could be combined or altered to make new glyphs. In fact, most glyphs could be broken into at least two parts - one part suggesting the sound of the glyph, and one part suggesting the meaning. Tepatic glyphs were used to write the language of Tepat, and later of the Swíra, Moqali, and Hamtum states.
The region now known as Tepat was originally inhabited by the people later called Milim. They left behind no intelligible records, but there is an uncanny continuity in art and writing between the Milim and the Tepat who replaced them. The Milim watched and charted the heavens, erected monuments, similar to Stonehenge, which may have been calendars or temples, and created ornate pottery. They covered walls, stones, caves, and pots with bright, almost psychedelic paintings. In the paintings are many repetitive, recognizable symbols. They must have meant something to the artisans of Milim, even if we cannot read them.
 |
The first Tepatic dynasty, the Nyow, came down from the foothills of Notoq to establish loose feudal hegemony over the plains. Their kings raised cleanly hewn, polished white monuments, announcing the boundaries of their lands, the locations of their burials, and the dates of their reigns with inscriptions. These archaic glyphs were stiff, blockish, and angular, suitable to etching in stone. The most iconic signs continued directly from Milim art. For example, the swastika of prehistoric paintings became the symbol for “sun” and “day.” But this new writing was much fuller, representing everything from easily visualized objects to grammatical particles of the most elusive senses. For the first time writing was complex and powerful enough to express narratives, and they began to incise into tablets the chronicles of their quasi-mythical Phlat rulers, who allegedly preceded the Nyow.
When the Nyow crumbled amidst civil war, the monumental tradition
persisted among local lords, who established their legitimacy
physically with imposing monuments to echo the might of the former
kings. But as with many aspects of Tepatic culture, the Period of
Division was the period of greatest creativity in writing. The
eyes of society turned to the emerging class of lyup,
intellectuals who served as advisors to competing lords. The Lyup
attempted not merely to record, but to interpret history, and
defend their interpretations against schools of rival Lyup. New
ideas flowered and new glyphs sprouted.
The Lyup began using brushes and ink to write, and poured out millions of words onto thin planks of reeds. The planks, much cheaper and more plentiful than marble and granite, were bound into folding books like Venetian blinds. Soon Tepat discovered how to make parchment and paper. Writing much more rapidly and smoothly with brushes than chisels, glyph segments ran together and their angles were smoothed into curves and loops. During this time, the “One Glyph - One Stroke” principle appeared.
The first true calligrapher was Lyem, a Lyup who is better known for advocating self-interested political apathy. Playing with the shape of glyphs, Lyem linked and turned and bent glyphs around each other in ways he liked, and invented the so-called “enclosure” form of glyphs.
Instability in politics permitted instability in script. Although all the warring states had evolved more fluid forms of lettering, it was a parallel evolution. A particular glyph might not resemble its equivalent in another region, even if both were equally curvy.
The period of division ended after 400 years when the state of Kwan succeeded in conquering almost the entire area of historical Tepat. In addition to promulgating a new calendar (so the beginning of his dynasty was now Year 0), Lord Kwan sought to unify the nation in everything from the size of a wine flask to the way people wrote, and put his chief advisor Lyep in charge. Lyep aimed to reduce number of variants for each glyph to exactly one, and codified the result in the oldest dictionary in Tepat. His reform also included punctuation and specified that glyphs fit within a square block.
Lyep himself did not last long in the king’s favor, and was put to death a couple of years later. Heck, the whole dynasty ended within 76 years. However the rules of orthography Lyep laid down defined the Classical Tepatic Script for hundreds of years. Classical script was soon adapted to write unrelated languages in Moqali and on the eastern coast of the continent. Resistance came in the form of Notoq, the only ancient province that was not reincorporated into Tepat, and which deliberately preserved otherwise obsolete forms in order to be contrarian.
During the early Age of Councils, when Classical Script had been firmly established, sorcerers explored methods by which mirrors and other magical objects could store texts, and “remember” them when invoked. Early attempts were frustrated because the devices could not read the handwriting of the sorcerers. It was discovered that they dealt with highly regular square forms more easily than with the curvy Classical Script, so the glyphs given to mirrors were retooled. Exaggerating the rigidity of the stone inscriptions, the resulting glyphs featured almost exclusively horizontal and vertical straight line segments with right angles. The densely stacked parallel lines sometimes resembled product bar codes. Due to its form and function, I call this “Barcode Script.”
Annoying to sight-read but convenient for machines, it
flourished among sorcerers and libraries and was unpopular with
everyone else. It also spawned a parody: the city of Luqtal, which
has exhibited a fascination with the number six ever since
Khangnôq laid it out on a hexagonal plan, created (naturally) a
hexagonal script, which has 60- and 120-degree angles and can be
plotted on an isometric grid.
   |
Myaq province written in classical style (left), 'barcode' script (center), and hexagonal barcode script (right)
Although new glyphs and even radicals were occasionally admitted, Classical script hardly changed for 700 years. Eventually the government decided that a modified system would improve literacy. The Glyph Reform Council banished obsolete glyphs, altered the rest to make them easier to write, and published a new list. Some of the new glyphs were unofficial abbreviations of official glyphs, while others were deliberate inventions. The new glyphs were less tangled, and more abstract. Additionally, they lost any resemblance they may still have had to objects in the real world.
The simplification movement never got very far before Tepat
disintegrated again. The Notoq and Hamtum states, which were never
subject to simplification, carried on using old forms. The Swíra
who replaced Tepat also adopted the old forms instead. The
remainder of the old Tepat state, which regrouped in Wasak,
eventually reverted as well when they decided that nostalgia for
traditional glyphs better served their nationalist agenda.
By providing clues to the pronunciation and semantic class of
words, the logographic system served well for most speakers and
writers of the standard Tepatic language. Problems arose when new
words entered from vastly different languages, or when speakers
from different parts of the country used different words or
different pronunciations of glyphs. In these cases, much more
finesse was demanded in representing sounds.
The grammarian Tlamat came up with a new system of indicating
sounds by using two glyphs with an agreed pronunciation to
represent a third glyph. The first glyph represented the beginning
sound of the third glyph, and the second glyph represented the
ending sound of the third glyph. He used them in his Yuktepat
dictionary to indicate regional pronunciations, which sometimes
varied wildly.
Fifty years later, a convention of Lyup created another system.
In principle it was almost identical to Tlamat’s system.[
Incidentally, the slight differences make it possible to document
the history of Yuktepat with very precise certainty in some cases.
For example, we know that the initial consonant /ŋ/ disappeared
from the valley dialect some time in the fifty years between the
two systems.] But instead of reusing regular glyphs, they combined
archaic glyphs, parts of glyphs, and random shapes to make a set
of special phonetic symbols. This system never replaced the
logographic glyphs, but was used to explain them.
Tlamat’s system continued in the form of a game. Instead of
simply saying a word, the players replaced a word with two other
words, which together include the onset and rhyme of that word.
Basically, it was Tepat’s version of Pig Latin.
This explanation deals mostly with the logographs of the
Classical Period of the Script. It is conventional to cite glyphs
(called klût in Tepat) this way:
first, the glyph itself as written in Tepat; second, its
transliteration, in italics; and third, its English translation,
in small capitals.
Since Lyep’s reforms, Mwentepat is written in vertical columns,
from top to bottom. The columns are arranged left to right across
the page, like so:
Written this way, the words appear to move forward in relation to
the writer, and Tepatic culture places a lot of value on being
forward-thinking.
Each simple glyph is also a single long line (clew), which bends, turns, curves, and
folds back on itself. Similarly to Chinese, each glyph fits inside
an imaginary square. Two or more glyphs can be combined to make a
more complex glyph. In the process, the component glyphs, or
radicals, may be moved around or altered, so the entire thing fits
together inside the imaginary square. However, the radicals of
compound glyphs are still written separately, not as part of the
same line (usually).
Both Chinese and Tepatic logographs reduce figures to abstract
forms, but in different ways. Chinese simplifies figures by
reducing the number of kinds of strokes and the ways the brush can
move. A character can have an indefinite total number of strokes,
but there are only a definite few different kinds of strokes. Each
stroke can move downward, rightward, or diagonally right-downward,
and each character is constructed from the same tiny set of
well-defined strokes.
Tepatic simplifies figures by reducing the total number of strokes to one: one long, continuous stroke, which can go on indefinitely and bend in indefinitely man ways. Each glyph is written with a single meandering brush movement. Once begun, it can go in any direction - including upward, leftward, and left-upward - and change direction any number of times. A Chinese writer can stop and lift the brush after each stroke, but in Tepat it is bad form to lift the brush before the end of the glyph. (This applies only to the basic glyphs. Each of the simpler glyphs inside a compound glyph is usually written separately.)
Each klût can have several variant forms, or allographs (klût wal), depending on whether it stands alone or makes up part of a compound glyph, and its position inside a compound glyph. A glyph’s shape may change depending on whether it occurs on the left, right, top, bottom, inside, or outside of a compound glyph.
Basic or simple glyphs stand alone. They cannot (synchronically) be analyzed into simpler parts. They are the oldest glyphs, originating from simplified pictures of things, or symbolic representations of ideas.
Glyphs that are made of two or more glyphs are compound glyphs. A glyph that makes up part of a compound is considered a radical/determiner, or a “piece” (xet). Each part contributes to the meaning of the compound (a semantic radical, xet i yem) or to its sound (phonetic radical, xet i hôp). There are three basic kinds of compounds:
The semantic part of a compound, or xet i yem indicates that the word belongs to a certain class of things, such as people, plants, emotions, etc. Most semantic radicals are klût in their own right, and have klût mut forms. However, when they are used as semantic radicals, they are written in an alternate form. Usually, they occur on the left side, top side, or as enclosures.
Glyphs used as radicals represent categories which are much broader than the meaning of the glyph by itself. Sometimes the meaning will be only symbolically related. For example, til arrow forms glyphs for directions like north, south, east, and west. The glyph huy knot forms glyphs for numerals like one, two, three, etc.
| Glyphs as Semantic Determiners | ||
| SOUND | MEANING | CATEGORIES |
| sopak | dog | animals (especially domestic animals) |
| huy | rope/knot | numbers |
| sotoy | book/bundle | groups of things |
| til | arrow | directions |
| wan | bowl | foods |
| xaw | flower | flowering plants, fruits |
| nok | corner | lines, shapes |
| lûy, kyut, sûy | sun, moon, star | time, seasons, colors, light |
| mun | gate | open, close, pass, hole |
| thing | tongue | speaking verbs |
| wot | intestines | emotions |
| hep | ear | sounds |
Phonetic determiners usually occur on the bottom, right, or
middle of a glyph. They are usually a glyph that rhymes with the
compound glyph.
Operators are small strokes that never occur alone. They are
added to other glyphs to modify them. The most common one takes
the shape of a small ‘v,’ although it can be turned in any
direction. It is used to indicate a part of the glyph it is
attached to.
Recursion is essentially glyphs within glyphs within glyphs. A
compound glyph can itself form a part of an even more complex
compound glyph. So there are some semantic determiners that are
themselves compounds. For example: the book radical (for groups of
objects) and the person radical together make the radical found in
glyphs for countries and ethnicities.
Ligatures are glyphs which are combined so they are written
together with one stroke. Usually this works by finding an a
element, such as a loop, that both glyphs have in common, and
joining them there. Some ligatures are so conventionalized that
they have become glyphs in their own right. For example, plit
loom is a combination of muk tree and wap robe.
Eventually, these parts became abbreviated into a single glyph,
which is now a semantic determiner for machines.
Of course, some compounds are much more complex. Their parts are
related in indirect ways, or multiple ways. A good example of
compounding in phonetic elements occurs in the sequence:
Tiptumic languages had periods to mark the end of sentences, but
no question or exclamation marks. This may be due to the fact that
all such languages had explicit interrogative and exclamatory
particles, which made special punctuation marks for them
redundant. The usual ending punctuation is a large open circle.[
Some texts have used simply a blank space to divide sentences.]