The Kunu Writing system

I M P O R T A N T !

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.gh dCyo yMyar Ke a aiyM yn vux air o eLp wiya Zz bt yDr

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The Kunu langauge uses a syllabary, an alphabet of 40 letters, where each letter represents a whole syllable. Some syllables are written by adding a special diagonal mark to the symbol. There are two of these diacritical marks, one at the top left corner of the symbol and the second at the left middle part of the symbol. In total, there are 65 syllables in the language. Forty of those syllables can be typed with a single keystroke and the remaining 25 require two keystrokes to type.

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What Do the Words Sound Like?

Imagine that this is a language spoken over a wide geographic area on some distant planet. Naturally there will be many different spoken dialects, just like there are vast differences in the pronunciation of English between Australia and India, as between London and Dallas, Texas. That being the case, there is no one way to describe the pronunciation of English, just as there is no one way to describe the pronunciation of Kunu. As an "International" language, there is wide lattitude in what is considered to be acceptable pronunciation. As a general guideline, the vowels are much as they are in Spanish, and the consonants are pure and uncomplicated as in English or German. The "L" syllables can be pronounced as English "L", English "R", or with a toungue flap. Those sounds are all considered to be equivalent.

The Kunu Syllabary

• Upper Diacritic: y (key: y)
• Middle Diacritic: w ( key: w)
• -N suffix to a syllable: Y (key: Y). Example: mi = yM min = yMY
• Plain vowels: a e i o u (keys: a e i o u)
• F + vowel: F f V v A (keys: F f V v A)
• K + vowel: K k C c g (keys: K k C c g)
• L + vowel: L l R r j (keys: L l R r j)
• N + vowel: N n M m h (keys: N n M m h)
• P + vowel: P p B b q (keys: P p B b q)
• T + vowel: T t D d X (keys: T t D d X)
• S + vowel: S s Z z x (keys: S s Z z x)
• SH + vowel: yS ys yZ yz yx (keys: yS ys yZ yz yx) = S-- + upper diacritic
• D + vowel: yT yt yD yd yX (keys: yT yt yD yd yX) = T-- + upper diacritic
• M + vowel: yN yn yM ym yh (keys: yN yn yM ym yh) = N-- + upper diacritic
• Y + vowel: ya ye yi yo yu (keys: ya ye yi yo yu) = vowel + upper diacritic
• W + vowel: wa we wi wo wu (keys: wa we wi wo wu) = vowel + middle diacritic

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• The keyboard letters E, G, H, I, J, O, Q, U, and W are not used by the syllabary.
• The digits, punctuation, and special characters are assigned to their syllabary versions.
• Unassigned letters have assorted shapes that might be used for other purposes
• All symbols touch the top and bottom of the symbol space.
• All symbols have at least one vertical segment at the left edge and no vertical segments at the right edge. This permits unrestricted joining of syllables.
• Vowels have a single vertical that goes from top to bottom.
• Syllables are twice as wide as vowels and have two verticals. If the first vertical of a consonant is full height then it will have a curving descender to distinguish it from vowels. Because of these restrictions all compound symbols are unambiguous and can be interpreted in only one way.

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• Pipe (generic punctuation mark) | |
• Proper Noun marker (period) . . Placed immediately before the first letter of a proper name.
  For example, .dCyo = To-ki-yo (Tokyo)

The generic punctuation mark, | is used for period (full stop), comma, colon, semicolon, and question mark.

Two-Syllable Kunu Words

There are 16,900 possible two-syllable Kunu words. You can find all 16,900 of them in this 40-page PDF document.

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