Thaylen Glyphs

Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive (which I read last year) takes place on a planet called Roshar. One of the countries on Roshar is called Thaylenah. Thaylen writing is based on the same letters that are used for making glyphpairs [1], but with some important differences.[2] First, Thaylen is an abjad, which is a writing system that only has consonants. As a result, the spoken language tends to produce large consonant clusters.[3] Second, Thaylen is written vertically. It is implied that Thaylen is a unique language, but in the pictures in The Stormlight Archive books they are used to write transliterated English. Just as I've already done with Rosharan glyphpairs, I decided to write the names of my family members using Thaylen letters.

We'll start with my first name, Matthew. The letters that are available require that I spell my name M-T-J-W, like this:

I've color-coded the image so that you can identify the different letters. Also note that it is permissible to distort the letters to some degree.

Next up is my last name, Crook. The letters that are available require that I spell my last name K-R-K, like this:

I've color-coded the image so that you can identify the different letters. If you put my first name and last name together, this is what you get:

Next up is Leann. In Thaylen, Leann's name would be spelled L-J-N, like this:

I've color-coded the image so that you can identify the different letters. If you put her first name and last name together, this is what you get:

Next up is Lilli, whose name would be spelled L-L-J-N, like this:

I've color-coded the image so that you can identify the different letters.[4] If you put her first name and last name together, this is what you get:

Next up is Lincoln, whose name would be spelled L-N-K-N, like this:

I've color-coded the image so that you can identify the different letters. If you put his first name and last name together, this is what you get:

Last up is Levi, whose name would be spelled L-V-J, like this:

I've color-coded the image so that you can identify the different letters.[5] If you put his first name and last name together, this is what you get:

This is just one of the writing systems used in The Stormlight Archive. In future posts I may revisit our names written in the women's script or in the Thaylen script.

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Notes:

[1] See my post Rosharan Glyphpairs.

[2] See https://coppermind.net/wiki/Thaylen script.

[3] This the case in The Stormlight Archive, but isn't the case in the real world. Semitic languages (like Hebrew and Arabic) are both written as abjads, but they don't have clusters with more than two consonants. Georgian languages and Slavic languages, on the other hand, are written as alphabets (consonants and vowels are given their own letters) have clusters with up to eight consonants!

[4] Thaylen uses the same symbol for m and for n, which is why you see the same symbol appear Matthew, Leann, Lillian, and Lincoln.

[5] Thaylen uses the same symbol for v and for w, which is why you see the same symbol appear in Matthew and Levi.