Anthony Hilton invented Greli to write Lezuli as part
of a larger world-con project underway since 2011. Greli translates to
"writing system" (lit. "symbol-idea"); in its own context, it isn't a
proper noun, but may be as the name of a conscript. Greli had several
previous incarnations using triangles and Xs for the vowels with a
variety of forms for consonants, but to present crosses and dots have
shown the most advantage.
By design, Greli takes clay as its medium. To that extent, it is influenced
by the concept of cuneiform writing, although no study of historical cuneiforms
informed its development. Similarly, Hilton's notion that one might invent a
language traces to Omniglot.com. For Lezuli in general,
Wikipedia's IPA charts
and recordings and wals.info's data and analyses
were simply indispensible. The gmail address 831ACH would accept questions
on topics related to the above.
Notable features
Greli is somewhat inverse of an abugida, consonants cannot stand alone but use space within vowels (one or two consonants per vowel with a null vowel for consecutive or opening consonants). A vowel might be a complete cross (u) with one dot in its upper-left quadrant and a horizontal pair of dots at its lower-left. This combination of two "dot sets" would indicate the consonant 'V' preceding the vowel: "vu." Another two dot sets on the right side of the cross would indicate what consonants comes after the u. In this way, the less than proficient reader reads the left side of a vowel downwards, then the right side of a vowel downwards, then moves left to the next vowel; presumably the proficient reader recognizes syllables when she simply moves her eyes left across the vowels.
Greli writes eight vowels, Lezuli's seven plus a null vowel for consecutive and opening consonants, represented by crosses of varying completeness. A small crossbar (which need not go on any cross-line in particular) indicates the beginning of a different morpheme within a grapheme. Aloud, the speaker would indicate such agglutinations by changing his spoken tone or emphasis at that crossbar. More cross variations (and an additional crossbar) are possible, but serve as punctuation marks.
Greli's setting has not developed punctuation, but, as a conscript, it includes some.
With five dot sets to combine into pairs, Greli can write twenty-five consonants. Lezuli has twenty-five. Lezuli does not have all the same phonemes as any language the author knows, and so Lezuli is the only language Greli can write. The consonants do not have names apart from their sounds.
To conserve clay, Greli need not use spaces per se. Anything which is clearly illegible and intelligently used is just as good.
Greli's associated number system is balanced ternary, using \, -, and / for -1, 0, and 1. Numbers can be written in Greli as pronounced. Like in English with "-teen," "twenty-" and so forth, Lezuli has a system for reading logographic numerals.
The fictional people, having less expressive faces than do humans but prizing trust in communication, typically preface their utterances with one of certain hand gestures for tones/emotions. In transcription, connecting that emotion to the sentence would be one of the jobs of the punctuation labeled "Connect."
Greli alphabet
The character listed as " Tt:ʈ' " is a digraph but the first letter is never lower case. The apostrophe in the IPA is specifically IPA for an ejective, not anything else an apostrophe may indicate elsewhere.
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