Epiq Orthography

Man, the future's amazing, isn't it? Remember when you couldn't even run a computer unless it had a disk in it? The funny thing is, some of you may not. Wow. And me, I'm young, so to speak (post-Pong, as I like to say). Anyway, it's always nice to stop and reflect. What I find most interesting is the speed of technological advancements. Rather than being a curve like y=x+1, it's more like a y=x² curve. That is, the further on in time we get, the more advanced we'll get in an increasingly shorter amount of time. One of my earliest dreams was to some day visit space. I now feel confident that, astronaut or no, one day I'll be able to. Isn't that cool? But anyway, back to the lecture at hand, as Snoop once said.

The Writing System of Epiq

Epiq's orthography (whose name is Ilaxošaþ in Epiq) is fairly straightforward. It's basically "one letter=one phoneme" (for an explanation of what this means, go here). There are no capital letters; the script is written from left to right; punctuation comes at the end (and the beginning). There are a couple of little things that need explaining, though.

If you'll look at the letter that looks like an upside-down capital V that looks like this N, you'll notice that it stands for sounds that occur elsewhere. Basically, this letter is a coda nasal that takes on the place of articulation of the sound that follows, à la the Japanese character ん. Unlike Japanese ん, though, Epiq's coda nasal cannot end a word. The only nasal that can end a word is n, and so the letter for n must be used.

Epiq makes use of digraphs in its orthography as well as monographs (?). These sequences of letters represent actual phonemes, though. A basic list is as follows: (1) a + i = e; (2) a + u = o; (3) i + u = ÿ; and (4) u + i = ü. Each of these sequences are spelled with a single orthographic character, though they're all still treated as a sequence of two letters (just like you can spell "aesthetic" as "aesthetic" or "æsthetic", but it'll always be in the dictionary under a). This is what those characters looks like (given in the order [from left to right] in which they were presented):

e o w y

Finally, Epiq has a way of marking its geminates orthographically. Basically, it's a little swoopy thing that goes directly underneath the character. The geminates that are marked this way are: m, n, s, and l. There is one more geminate, ww, but orthographically, it's simply a sequence of l and w. Anyway, here're what the geminate characters look like:

M P S L

Okie doke, that's it for now. Here's the Epiq alphabet, presented in the alphabetical order that Epiq employs. If you'd like to download the font, right-click here for a .sitx version, or left-click here for a .zip file.

Alphabet

*Though the sounds represented by these n's are different, I use the same letter because the sound change is fairly automatic, and doesn't really require a special character.

Numbers

Epiq, like Njaama, has a base ten number system. The digits zero through nine are shown below (in that order):

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

And here's a sample large number. Let's see, something random... How about 438,756:

438-756

The raised dot is used kind of like a comma in English.

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