A toolbox for bringing new writing systems to life in the digital world.
Perhaps you have heard the term ‘conlang’ — a reference to a language that has been artificially created; a constructed language. In a similar vein, a ‘conscript’ can refer to a writing system created in a deliberate effort to develop a novel writing system.
Most the languages in the world have grown and evolved organically over time. And by time, we mean a lot of time. The History of English begins its tale in roughly 4500 BC with with Proto Indo European. Even what can reasonably be termed ‘modern English’ has been with us for nearly 500 years and undergone significant change.
Likewise most of the writing systems in use today have been with us for a very long time. In fact the vast majority of writing systems in the world existed before the digital era. Bringing these writing systems into modern computing has been a documentary process: taking existing (and generally well understood) alphabets, combining the characters with rules for their use (i.e scripts, and even orthographies), and codifying them in a digital set of instructions that computer software can use.
Enter Unicode from stage left.
The goal of The Unicode Consortium is pretty simple:
Everyone in the world should be able to use their own language on phones and computers.
This is an admirable goal, and much progress has been made. In order to achieve this end they have been documenting every script with attested usage and codifying digital rules that computers can use to write, save, store, and display those scripts.
But what about writing systems without attested usage? What about languages without any writing systems at all?
By far the most common solution to date has been to adapt an existing writing system for use on the target language. There are many pros and cons to this approach; and the merits are often hotly contested. Most notoriously, the Latin alphabet has been adapted for use in hundreds of languages. The Arabic script is also used for many more languages than Arabic; Cyrillic is used by more than just Russian, Devanagari is used to write more than a dozen languages, and so on. In many cases these scripts may make sense. Also in many cases they don’t make any sense at all. Trying to force a script on a language that doesn’t fit it can even be a good way to suppress and even kill a language!
A few spoken languages have been deliberately constructed, usually much more recently. Esperanto is undoubtedly the most well known constructed language. A similar situation exists for writing systems. Sometimes a language needs its own script, and some are lucky enough to have people that come along and make one.
Creating a new writing system for an existing spoken language is an enormous undertaking. Complicating the linguistic, social, political, and other factors is the simple fact that most modern technology has not yet even truly caught up to existing writing systems. It is woefully under equipped to serve people in the task of developing new writing systems.
Make it possible to develop and use new writing system on digital devices giving their creators the best shot we can at success. Not all invented scripts will thrive — in various cases they may unnecessary, poorly conceived, or society just might not be ready for them. But the availability of tools to create, experiment with, and use such invented scripts should not be the limiting factor. And for those writing systems that do prove themselves, the transition to Unicode ratification and mainstream digital tooling should be as painless as possible.