I'll keep that in mind when I go back to work on the font again--thanks for the advice! Fonts are not really my strong suit.
Tirina Punctuation
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How punctuation functions in Tirina. Also diacritics. And capitalization. And other stuff.
This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 16 Dec 2014, 22:18.
[comments] tnatirinapunctuationcapitalizationdiacriticssmileys
1. Sanmra Calendar
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2. Sanmra Government
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1. Imeoli (Opposites)
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2. Tirina Dialects
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3. Tirina Font Design
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7. Tirina Pronouns
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8. Tirina Punctuation
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Tirina punctuation is a little unusual for English speakers. First, and probably most importantly, none of the standard punctuation marks are anything like their English equivalents. And second, sentence punctuation comes at the beginning of a sentence, not at the end.There are four standard punctuation marks in Tirina (and one diacritic, which we'll throw in here for lack of a better place to talk about it). These are the kerunli (period), the pılanli (question mark), the ayardanli (comma), and the pilwali (quotation marks).
The kerunli (derived from kerun, sentence) and the pılanli (from pılan, question) are the only two standard forms of sentence punctuation. As you can probably guess, the pılanli is used for questions and the kerunli is used for everything else--even what in English would be exclamatory sentences. The kerunli takes the form of a vertical line at the beginning of the sentence.
Behold, I have an example:
The font is somewhat stylized, but the kerunli is the line highlighted in purple; the word following it is prala (hello).
The pılanli is a small half-circle facing away from the sentence. It can look something like a backwards c (or an open o <ɔ>), just raised. Another example:
The text in this one reads frosa? (what?)
There is probably a different, real name for this sort of thing, but I mean the ayardanli and the pilwali (the comma and question marks, remember). It's convenient to think of the ayardanli (from ayardan, pause) as roughly equivalent to a comma, but the two are actually quite distinct. The ayardanli is used to separate sentence adverbs from a sentence (which commas often do in English as well; for example, "Unfortunately, I was hungry again"), as well as sometimes used for emphasis. It takes the form of a long dash or em dash.
This reads ife der'ail--analenahi (Yesterday, I spoke.). Notice not only the ayardanli, but also the kerunli at the beginning of the sentence. (you can also see the sneak peek of the diacritic we'll be talking about later!)
Then there is the pilwali (from pilwa, talk), used to set off direct quotes. It began life as something much like the Egyptian cartouche--a long oval surrounding the text. Over time, again much like the cartouche, it simplified to simply curved lines at the beginning and end of text, looking a great deal like long parentheses.
Again, the overall sentence is headed by a kerunli, with the pilwali surrounding the direct quote. The text reads: analenahi ha lid (prala) (She said, "Hello."). There is no punctuation mark inside the kerunli, but there actually could be--it's just frequently dropped with the assumption that unless it's explicitly marked, it's not a question.
Or, rather, diacritic. Tirina has one diacritic marker. This is used to mark the glottal stop, which is interpreted as more of a variant on a vowel than a consonant. It takes the form of a small half circle, much like the pılanli. There's two ways of using it, though. If the glottal stop occurs in the middle of a word, the marker is placed over the vowel after it, looking like an inverted breve. If the glottal stop falls at the end of a word, it's rotated 90 degrees and placed at the end of the word, looking pretty much just like pılanli, just centered on the line instead of high.
Here you can see both variants. The first word is der'ail (day), which we saw in two sentences earlier already, and the second is kuwı' (game).
Tirina does not have capital variants of its alphabet. For emphasis and for names, red ink can be used to set them off, but it's not required.
Now we get to the fun stuff.
We've been talking about the standard punctuation marks, but you know how kids these days are, always making up new punctuation marks and using smileys and so on. There's two nonstandard punctuation marks that are relatively common among young Tirina speakers, and have caught on with some older Tirina speakers as well. These are an exclamation point and an ellipsis. (there are no official Tirina names for either mark. The exclamation point is variously called "daparnli" (yelling mark), "atoli" (BIG mark), "ridiakili" (excitement mark), etc., for example.)
The exclamation point is... pretty much an exclamation point, just longer (to match the kerunli) and at the beginning of the sentence where sentence punctuation properly belongs.
This reads "!prala" (hello!).
The ellipsis is solely used for trailing off... and is indicated with two vertical dots--a colon, in other words. Unfortunately I don't have an image for this yet (it's so new, I haven't added it to this font yet!).
Smileys have also caught on among young Sanmra. They're used pretty much the same way as they are for everybody else, but there's a few specific ones that are common among them.
): indicates sadness, and is more common than :(
-,- is shifty eyes or sarcasm, it's separate from -.-
*_* basically means "wat", which you could probably guess already
There's one final aspect of punctuation to discuss--how do you type all these crazy punctuation marks on a human keyboard, using human fonts, anyway?
The words themselves are relatively easy; much like Arabic chat/textspeak, people use various romanization schemes to transliterate Tirina words into Latin characters. But punctuation gets interesting.
For the kerunil/period, a forward slash, pipe, or double pipe is frequently used. Example: |prala, /prala, ||prala (hello.)
For the pılanli/question mark, either the English question mark or the closing angle bracket > is used. Example: ?frosa, >frosa (what?)
For the ayardanli/comma, a hyphen, dash, em dash, or double hyphen is used. Example: ife der'ail-analenahi, ife der'ail--analenahi (and the dash/em dash are too much trouble to type :P)
For the pilwali/quotation marks, parentheses are generally used, although in some cases, double angle brackets are used instead (or guillemets, if the Sanmra in question uses an appropriate non-English keyboard). Example: analenahi ha lid (prala), analenahi ha lid <<prala>>, analenahi ha lid «prala» (she said, "hello")
The exclamation point is... just an exclamation point. Example: !prala (hello!)
The ellipsis is either three periods preceding the sentence (as generally in English) or a colon preceding the sentence. Example: ...prala, :prala (hello...)
"Capitalization" still generally uses red text if they can get it (e.g. on a forum), but in places where that's not possible (e.g. Reddit), bold is used instead. If neither is available (e.g. a barebones chatroom), *asterisks* are used. Example: saya, saya, *saya* (the female name Saya) ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article
Comments
Yeah, it's a combination of issues. The narrow r is on the right edge of the character box instead of centered, and the f appears to be taking up part of a second box (but the box is still rendered with its surrounding whitespace), and it's on the left edge.
Aw, thanks! I didn't draw from any specific script, actually. It's the result of a lot of attempts at creating a script I liked over the years, most of which I forgot immediately after creating them. But I ended up with four glyphs that I actually remembered (spelling out a name in Tirina) and ended up using them as a base for creating the others--trying to pick out repeated elements, coming up with "rules" about letter shapes, and so on. (for example, I decided there would be no unattached bits, and no circles) I even did the whole "draw it out using the original medium" thing (ink and a brush, here represented by thick watercolors and the cheapest nastiest little paintbrush known to mankind) and then write them several times trying to simplify them.
Even after that, the alphabet went through a couple of cycles of shifting the letters around until this one actually stuck. The font I used above was my attempt to create a "calligraphy" style and again I made heavy use of repeated elements to try to give it a cohesive look.
The font still needs a fair bit of work--the "f" character at the beginning of "frosa" drives me bonkers every time I see it, the kerning is awful--but it works well enough for the limited amount I use it. I have a semi-usable pixel font of it, but someday I'll make a nice sans serif version. :)
Even after that, the alphabet went through a couple of cycles of shifting the letters around until this one actually stuck. The font I used above was my attempt to create a "calligraphy" style and again I made heavy use of repeated elements to try to give it a cohesive look.
The font still needs a fair bit of work--the "f" character at the beginning of "frosa" drives me bonkers every time I see it, the kerning is awful--but it works well enough for the limited amount I use it. I have a semi-usable pixel font of it, but someday I'll make a nice sans serif version. :)
