@theFIZZYnator I see you advertizing a splatoon font in your sig, so maybe you'd be interested in what I and
@Ikaheishi have been doing. We've been trying to make a standard character encoding for Inkling Characters so text written in any inkling font will display properly in any other inkling font and won't come out as
mojibake. We've settled on the U+ECxx block in the Private Use Area of the Unicode since it doesn't conflict with any other conlang scripts in the Under-Conscript Unicode Registry, and have generally figured out how to organize the letters for encoding purposes.
Attached's the newest revision of the code chart for Inkling characters, now with the calamari {n} character, and I even made a nice vector graphic to put it in my doc. Since the only way I could get it into word without making a new font was to convert it from its native *.svg to Windows metafile format (*.wmf), my version of Acrobat aliases it differently than it would text when zoomed out. As such, it may look out of place when zoomed out, but once you zoom in it should look clean and crisp like any vector graphic, and in
roughly the same size and style as the surrounding Arowana sans bold. I've also noticed the cross-hatching I use for reserved code points aliases from diagonal hatch lines to vertical and horizontal cross-hatches in my version of Acrobat, but zoom in and you should see that it really is diagonal hash lines.
PiyozR said:
For what I can gather from EclipseMT's notes on the character, country Inklings tend to employ {n} at the end of syllables only. That means they probably wouldn't think of {n} as a variation of {ne}, {na}, {no}. {nai}, etc, which all begin with that consonant sound. I don't know anything about encoding or such things so I'm not sure what help I can be.
@PiyozR I put forward two theories for in-universe histories of the character, to make a good reason for putting it in a specific spot in the code. While in reality it just has to be encoded somewhere arbitrarily so it's clear to fontmakers where to put it, having a reason, even a made up one is nice, esp. in the spirit of the rest of the conlang. Since you had generally been leading the discussion, I reached out to you to see if you had an opinion on the in-universe explanations, not the technical details. I figured you'd have no input on the technical details
. Here's what my in-universe ideas were:
One has an archaic equivalent to {nie} falling out of use entirely because it wasn't used any more, but later being added back in to Calamari because they needed SOME letter to represent the syllable-final {n} that had started showing up in the dialect and they might as well use one that already existed. While deliberate language engineering like that is rare in spoken language, it is more common in written language: the only reason why we have the letters K, Y, and Z in the latin alphabet today is because the Romans wanted to be able to transcribe Greek accurately, even though they didn't differentiate K from C or Y from I in actual speech, and Latin had dropped Z in the early monarchy period because they had no words that used it, but added it back in during the late republic because greek words did.
The other has an archaic {ani} that in schoolhouse morphed to be pronounced {ane} and was thrown out because it was redundant with the other {ane}. In Calamari, however, the two never fully merged, so when {ane} morphed to {an}, {ani} should have morphed to {an} as well, but was treated differently and so ended up being the catch-all letter to denote any n-terminated syllable that wasn't regular enough to get its own unique syllable.
I think I've decided to go with {ani} -> {n} instead of {nie} -> {n} because, as you said, it is always a syllable-final consonant, so it would be weird for it to morph from a beginning-of-the-syllable sound--it could happen naturally if the origin of such syllables was from vowels of the final syllable going silent, but if that were the case there would probably be other consonants that lost their vowels. And anyway, all other Calamari n-terminated syllables already come from the irregular characters, so it has a precedent where {nie} did not. From a visual standpoint, I think it looks more similar to the characters starting with n than to the irregulars, but it's not like it's a perfect match even there, and it acts like an irregular, so putting it with the irregulars makes more sense. That is what I have in this most recent version of the encoding.
