Mandrakard

Mandrakard Alphabet Mandrakard alphabet

This conscript was created in August 2005 by Arno Luyendijk when
working at his customer service job in a moment of rash inspiration
and worked out at home in one evening.

Arno is art historian by education and a great lover of medieval
manuscripts and fantasy novels and films, and is also a graphic
artist/painter for whom ancient scripts always are an important inspiration.
You can see his artwork at his website www.lindamanya.com.
The main inspiration sources for this script were the Applebeech
script
, the Ogham script,
Anglo-Saxon Runes and
Tolkien’s conscripts for Lord of the Rings.

It was created after finishing an earlier conscript, Adunaroth,
and for sheer fun to create a secret and comical-shaped alphabetical script,
based on the man-like shape of the mandrake root, a plant surrounded
by legend and myth for attributed magical properties, which continues
to fascinate the creator.

The name of the script is a phonetic derivation from the word “Mandrake-herd”.

Notable features

  • Type of writing system: alphabet
  • Direction of writing: The letters are meant to write upwards from bottom
    left to top right, ever across a straight vertical line (for ease this can
    be altered in a horizontal direction, from left to right, like the Ogham alphabet).
  • Each letter has three shapes: initial, medial and final, depending on
    the position in a word.
  • In their upward-direction, the scripts looks like an abstraction of the
    human-like shape of the mandrake root, especially due to the “root”- and
    “branch”-like shaped initial and final letter shapes.
  • The numerals and punctuation signs have no initial or final shapes.
  • All letters, numerals and punctuation signs are meant to be written in one
    continuous line from bottom to top, only to be disconnected when the top of
    the writing surface is reached, from which the writer starts again at the bottom.
  • Used to write: English, Dutch, and other languages using the Latin alphabet

The Mandrakard alphabet

Letters

The Mandrakard alphabet

Numerals

Mandrakard numerals

Numbers are constructed by simpy showing the digits in their sequential followup,
in the following manner: 1.567.093

Mandrakard number example

Punctuation

Mandrakard punctuation

Sample text in the Mandrakard alphabet

Sample text in the Mandrakard alphabet

Translation

Who are you, that you are walking across the graves of giants?
(from: The Way of Wyrd, by Brian Bates)


If you have any questions about the Mandrakard script, you can contact Arno at:
sendanor@hotmail.com

Lindamanya – Arno Luyendijk’s website (in Dutch and English)
http://www.lindamanya.com

  • Post category:Languages
  • Reading time:4 mins read