The main logic of the letters is the vowels and the consonants with the same family will share a same radical (a radical is a part of a charracter).
here are the different families of vowels and consonants:
(here we don't use IPA here)
| families | letters |
Vowels | A family | a,æ |
| EI family | e, i, y, ė, ë |
| OU family | o, u, w, ü |
| Complex | å, æ: |
| Misc | Ɂ |
Consonant | Lip | m, b, p, f, v |
| Teeth | s, c, z |
| Jaw | x, q, j |
| Tougue | n, l, d, t, tz |
| Back | ŋ, g, k, h |
| Misc | r |
you might be thinking what does the following vowel sounds like, here we are going to use some examples:
letter | examples from English / Chinese | example in Astralica |
æ (vowel) | apple | æ - pel |
ė (vowel) | 思, 此, 紫 | sė, cė, zė |
ë (vowel) | 诗, 赤, 枝 | xë, që, jë |
ü (vowel) | 鱼 | ü |
å (vowel) | saw, all | så, ål |
æ: (vowel) | rabbit | ræ - bæt |
tz (consonant) | 月(tzuki) | tzu - ki |
ŋ (consonant) | sing | siŋ |
if you are not a native Chinese speaker, most likely you are going to confuse between i, ė, ë.
Here are some ways to understand them more:
> to pronounce "ė", try starting with "e", which is something like "uuuh...", while saying it, close your teeth until your lower teeth touch the upper teeth. that sound is "ė".
> to pronounce "ë", start with ė, while saying it, pull your jaw backward, when doing this, both sides of your lower jaw should touch both sides of the upper jaw.
> one example from KungFu Panda, Po will address his master as "Master Shifu", in terms of Chinese, it is spelled correctly, but pronounced in a very English way, instead of "Shifu", Jack Black would pronounce that as "Sheefu", which is not accurate in terms of Chinese pronunciation.
> to distinguish between "i" and "æ:", if I were to say "ræ - bit" in Astralica, in English it would sound like "ræ - beet"
Astralica was started back at 2020, along the time,
many different scripts has been made and discarded,
during the process, new letters are added
but here (this post) are the final types of scripts.
one amazing feature here is the letters can be arranged in such a way, a pattern exists.
just for reference, here are all the letters we are going to have here:
you may notice that some letters written here are slightly different from the ones we mentioned earlier, so here's a table to tell you what is what:
What is in the picture | What it represent as what we have mentioned |
ei | ė |
eih | ë |
"a" and "o" smushed together | å |
"æ" with a dot on top | æ: |
1) Ancient Script
The first and the most original form of the Astralica Letters, nowadays used for Caligraphy and art.
2) Formal Script
If the Ancient script is somehow equivalent to the Greek letters or Runes, the the Formal Script is somehow equivalent to TimesNewRoman, this is used for Formal Letters or reports or declarations.
3) Casual Script
If you were to look at both Ancient script and Formal script, you can see there are way too many strokes, such that it will take a long time to write the whole sentence. That's why the casual script is the simplified version of the letters, it is meant to be simple, cute, but still elegant at the same time.
you might notice that some letters can be written in both ways, the one on the left is the slight previous version and the one on the right should be the newest version of the Casual Script.
there are 2 ways to arrange the letters in Astralica,
one of them is the Block Script, which is used mostly when Ancient script is used,
another way to arrange the letters is the String Script, which is extremely simple for beginners because it is the way we normally write, which is from left to right, from up to down.
The block script is inspired by Chinese,
notice that Chinese characters often can be separated into 2 parts,
usually the part on the left is called the radical,
which is used to give you the main idea of what the character has something to do with,
the other part will give you a hint on how will it sound like.
take "跑" for example,
it can be broken down into 2 parts,
the left one which is "足", which has the meaning of "leg",
for the right part "包", which is pronounced as "bau",
so from this, we know that this word has something to do with leg and it somehow sounds alike with "bau",
infact, this character is pronounced as "pau" which means "run".
Astralica Block Script has almost the same concept here,
each block is one syllable,
the left part which is the radical part of the syllable is the vowel,
that is going to be the main characteristic of the block,
to modify the vowel, we use consonants,
we have the consonant come before the vowel, which is the start consonant,
and the consonant come after the vowel, which is the end consonant.
below is a diagram to show how they are arranged in a block, and we have the english world "lemon" as our example.
so we have two directions to write in Astralica: the String Script and the Block Script:
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