Ewellic alphabet

Origin

The Ewellic alphabet was invented in 1980 by Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net). It was originally intended as a means of secret writing. The shape of Ewellic letters was inspired by the Runic and Cirth scripts, but shows greater (though still imperfect) regularity of form. The name "Ewellic" was first applied to the script in 1998.

As a phonemic alphabet intended primarily for English, Ewellic represents the general sound of English words, representing a middle ground between the irregularity of standard English spelling and the phonetic precision of IPA.

No artificial languages or imaginary worlds are associated with the Ewellic alphabet.

Notable features

Written from left to right in horizontal lines.
Words of more than one syllable require an acute accent (ˊ) over the vowel of the stressed syllable.
The "schwa" letter is intended for very limited use, unlike the frequent use of the schwa (ǝ) in dictionaries. As a special case, unstressed "a" and "the" are written with the schwa.
Because Ewellic is a phonemic alphabet, and because English pronunciation varies, spelling is less rigid than in the Latin-script orthography.
Support for hexadecimal digits was added in 2002. Hexadecimal numbers are indicated by preceding a string of digits with a grave accent (ˋ).
Ewellic is listed in theConScript Unicode Registry and supported in theCode2000 font by James Kass.

Used to write

English. Originally it was intended to support other languages, particularly Spanish and German, but at present there are no Ewellic letters for some of the sounds used in these languages.

Consonants

All consonants have a single vertical stroke and no horizontal (perpendicular) stroke.
Ewellic consonants

Vowels

All vowels have two vertical strokes. Ewellic vowels

Ligatures

The sounds OY and ER (as in oyster) are represented by special ligated forms, as shown below. Other ligatures may be formed between letters that share a natural connection point. The sample text on this page does not use ligatures due to font limitations.

Ewellic ligatures

Digits

Digits have a single vertical stroke. Digits 0 through 9 have one horizontal (perpendicular) stroke, while digits 10 through 15 (for hexadecimal use only) have two horizontal strokes.
Ewellic digits

Sample text

Sample text in the Ewellic alphabet

Transliteration

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.(Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1)

Links

General description of Ewellic, with links to more sample texts:
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ewellic.html
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ewellic-charts.html

ConScript Unicode Registry proposal:
http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/ewellic.html

Other writing systems invented by visitors to this site