copyright © 1997 Dennis Paul Himes


Illustrated Guide to Gladilatian Writing

This is a guide to writing the Gladilatian language as the gladifers do. It assumes knowledge of terminology defined in the Phonology and Morphology sections.

Gladilatian is written as a sequence of glyphs each of which represents a syllable. It is not a true syllabary, however, as each glyph is constructed from subsymbols representing the phonemes in the syllable being represented.

The frame of the glyph represents the base:

U O A E
R L Y

Marks inside this frame represent starts and frontals, arranged from top to bottom:

H W
S F M N Z V X
R L Y

Marks above the frame represent ends:

T K P

Here is the word mset language, which shows how the different elements are combined.

There are also punctuation marks. One is used to mark the start of the text and to indicate in which direction it is written:
top to bottom bottom to top
left to right right to left
These marks start the first line of text. Subsequent lines will go in the same direction as the first, on either side, so the lines on top to bottom text can progess from left to right or from right to left.

A dot is used to separate words, and two dots to separate sentences. The sentence separator is written with the dots in a horizontal line when writing top to bottom or bottom to top and in a vertical line otherwise.

Here are four examples of the sentence Nrau mehyohot memset wewzek. This is an example of Gladilatian writing., which shows how punctuation works.

top to bottom bottom to top
left to right
right to left


You can go to the main Gladilatian page, go to my homepage, or mail me.