Tydotsuy writing

The letters do not look like letters in the Latin alphabet. If they do to you, then the font isn't working; try the version with images instead.

The alphabet

Vowels

Consonants

Writing rules

• Many letters are connected to each other. However, m, n, ph, th, p, t, b, and d cannot be connected to the previous letter. A few letters have different forms depending on whether they can be connected to the next letter or not. The lower line in the i is only used for connecting it to letters before and after; if it's the only full letter in a word, or the only full letter before a stop, that line isn't used.
• w and h are written below and above (respectively) the rest of the word, like diacritics; however, they go in between letters. If a vowel is both preceded by and followed by an h, the two h's combine into a single diacritic: YH
• Each word starts with J if it contains unrounded vowels or O if it contains rounded vowels. These symbols act both as word separators and indicators of vowel roundedness. If these can be connected to the next letter, they instead have the forms j o.
• Tydotsuy is written with one sentence per line. For the purpose of writing, any verb that takes two clause arguments is considered to start a new sentence.
• Every other line is written backwards. The letters shown here are for writing left-to-right.
• If a word contains þ or sh, the letter S is used for them, but the first instance of the letter gets a diacritic: Sc for þ, SC for sh.
• Syllable-final stops are written as spaces.
• The diacritic xk (from Lwaitel's letter for /k/) can be used over alveolar consonants for foreign and foreign-derived words that contain velar consonants: nk = /ŋ/, dk = /ɡ/, tk = /k/, Tk = /kʰ/, and Sk = /x/.
• There's a variant of the script known as "careful writing", which is used the first time a person's name is mentioned, the defining instance of a term, and for emphasis. This variant is not connected, uses slightly different letter forms, and uses a vertical line (x) to indicate a syllable-final stop.

Example

owa jlaxuif janwil jLixiaS OtidaxsusiZ

owa jlaxuif janwil jLixiaS OtidaxsusiZ

Wo la'eif anwíl lhi'jas Tydótsusyu.

This is the first sentence from "Wo". The second example uses careful writing.

Try it

Type some text using the romanization used above, to see what it looks like in the Tydotsuy script. (If you can't type þ or ·, use c and - instead.) (FIXME if you type in something invalid, there are no guarantees about what you see.)

Careful writing