Creating a New Alphabet

When I was a kid, my friends and I used to pass notes in class. Sometimes, to prevent the teachers from reading the notes, we used a a simple letter substitution cipher. A=Z, B=Y...you know, that sort of thing. We apparently thought that our teachers would never be able to decipher this fiendishly clever puzzle.

Most of you outgrew this of course. But not me. I loved, and still love, the idea of being able to write down my thoughts in a meeting without anyone else in the meeting being able to read what I was writing. For several years, I used to routinely take notes using the Cyrillic alphabet. Man, I wrote some pungent meeting notes, on occasion, too. Sadly, this ended when a Russian-speaking Polish woman joined our meetings. In looking for a replacement, I ran across an English script called Quickscript. I wrote about thatat the time, and made what I thought were some improvements on it.

I didn't stop there, however. First, I wasn't really satisfied with my first iteration of the script. Second, I've had this idea about a science-fiction story involving an alien race called the Danaans (duh-NAY-ans), and I went from noodling around with Quickscript to adapting some of its principles to create an entirely new alphabet for my aliens. In doing so, I wanted to expand on the principles I was using to improve Quickscript.

• The letters should be easy to write, with a single stroke of the pen, if possible. Though, as it turned out, it wasn't. Creating a new alphabet is hard.
• I wanted the language to be phonetic, and for letters that are used for similar phonemes to be similarly shaped, yet distinct. For example, the phonemes produced by the letters B, P, and M are very similar, and pronounced with very similar use of the lips.
• The alphabet would need to be grouped by phoneme, meaning that the order of the letters would be radically different.
• The alphabet needed a numerical system that made sense, and was as easy to use as Arabic numerals.
• More vowels. In English, we use the same letter to make different sounds. For instance, what is the correct way to pronounce the letter A? It depends on the word, e.g. hate, hall, and ham. That makes no sense. A truly phonetic alphabet needs a letter for each phoneme. That gives us a forty-letter alphabet. A bit more than Cyrillic, but not as bad as, say, Chinese.
• The alphabet had to be fully usable in English.

I messed around with it off and on for a while, but, eventually, I came up with my definitive Danaan alphabet.

I think I finally managed to create an alphabet that incorporates all of the principles I wanted to build into it that and makes logical sense. Best of all, I can take notes in meetings using it, and not even a pesky speaker of Slavic languages knows what I'm writing, when I jot down

I told you my meeting notes could be pungent.

Oh, and guess what? I created a TrueType font for this language, using the letters you can see in my alphabet chart, above. You can download it here, as a zipped TrueType font file.