Scar
The Scar syllabary was created by Jon Molnar for use in a novel
he’s writing. In the novel the syllabary is used by a draconic race
called simply “the dragonkin” by outsiders to their culture, their
writing system being called [xɛkɑʃi
roʊdɛsɑzi] (The Scars of Rhodesar”.
Rhodesar, in Shessin (dragonkin) lore, was a great red dragon of
insurmountable intellect who created the Shessin and gave them the
gift of written language, shaping the glyphs with his claws in a great
stone cairn. This cairn bears the sample text below.
Notable features
- Type of writing system: syllabary with 55 glyphs, 49 of which
represent syllables. The remaining six are divided into the three
sets of vertical strokes, which are punctuation, representing the
short and long pauses and the full stop, which delimit sentences,
paragraphs, and documents respectively, and three sets of horizontal
strokes, which are placed before a syllable glyph to change the value
of its consonant. As a result, the Rhodesian (Scar) Syllabary can
represent 140 different syllables (there is no quarternary equivalent
for l, r, or n). - Writing direction: from top to bottom in columns from left to right.
- There is no spacing between words, but there is usually a new line
after a short pause, long pause, or (on the rare occasion that it is
not at the end of the entire document, as in a quotation from the end
of another document) “full stop” character.
A Bit of Linguistic History
Printed texts in the Scar Syllabary are kept in left-to-right books or
on scrolls and are typically printed with a press or written with a brush
in a red ink made from pomegranates.
Initial vowels were originally nonexistant, but over time certain words
that used to begin with “h-” have dropped that initial consonant to leave
just a vowel. Different regions of the Shessin empire deal with this in
different ways, but the standard and most accepted method is by assigning
the quaternary L group to the initial vowels.
Scar syllablary