World Building Series: Language Construction -- Part III

Well kiddos,

As promised, here is the Third installment of the Language Construction Series, part of my larger World Building Series.

When creating written characters for your language, there are a few questions you must ask yourself:

• What will the characters of your language look like (runic, script, hieroglyphic, or other)? 
• Will there be more than one representation (i.e, a runic for one class [or a specific race/species] and a script form for another)?
• Will your language resemble any known languages (Futhark, Arabic, Cyrillic, Mandarin, Korean, Egyptian, Irdu, et cetera)?
• In what direction will your language be written (left to right, right to left, vertically)?
• What will the punctuation look like—if any?
• How will numbers be represented (digits, or symbols to represent specific quantities)?
• Will you use a different character for each sound, or will diacritics be used?

There are obviously more questions that can be asked, but those are a few to ask yourself in the very beginning stages of planning.

I'm not going to mislead you in any way.  Creating the language was the easy part for me; creating the written form of it, however, was no easy task.  I struggled with it for years, even long after I had nearly finalized the actual language itself.  So many times I scrapped sketches, never happy with the way it turned out.  Believe it or not, I finished my first manuscript months before I finally sketched out a set of characters with which I was happy.  

Although, not completely.

It took a few more months of tweaking, but I finally completed it...

Copyright (C) Joshua Allen Mercier (The Bearded Scribe)
Unauthorized Reproduction Prohibited

Please feel free to leave comments with any feedback or questions you may have on Constructed Languages, and Good Luck with your own languages!

Happy Scribing,