February 17, 2023 - Writing Part 1 - Names

Last post, I mentioned that people in WU write in characters, so I decided to design a character for Nora’s name. Please hold while I do just that.

*classical instrumental hold music - ding da ling a ling ding da ding da ling a ling a ling*

Okay! Each name character is made up of curved lines - the number of loops is the number of syllables, the number of lines (defined by the number of strokes) is the number of letters, and the number of strokes is the number of vowels (AEIOU and Y if it’s the only vowel in the word). These correlations are based on the name in English because I speak English. Duh.

Some people could argue that there are 5 lines instead of 4 in Nora’s character name, because one side of the loop-de-loop crosses through the tail of the fancy 2, but I’m counting it as one line because crosses don’t count as separations. Characters are written right to left and up to down.

In English, each letter of the alphabet is associated with a particular sound. The language of WU doesn’t have that, so reading is a little harder - if you don’t know the character, then you can’t read it. Mainlanders are born with the ability to read all common characters (so all words excluding names), but Apets are not. They have to learn each character individually, so even reading simple things can be hard if you have no idea what a singular character means. Plus characters aren’t related to each other - like you can’t just guess what a word means because you know words that sound similar. Even verbs have different characters - the character for “(I) wish” doesn’t look like the character for “(she) wishes”. Being illiterate is pretty common among Apets because that scale of education is hard to come by.

But as with everything, there are problems in the character writing “formula” I stated earlier - let’s Jinni (Jinni Cobalt, Jan 2023) as an example. Her name character should have 2 loops (Ji-nni = 2 syllables), 5 lines (J i n n i = 5 letters), and 2 strokes (Jinni = 2 vowels). But I don’t think that’s possible. So there’s another rule: If the difference between the number of lines (in this case 5) and the number of strokes (in this case 2) is more than three, you add strokes to the “formula” so that the difference is 2. In this case, you would add one more stroke, leaving you with 5 lines and 3 strokes, which is easier to do. So the formula is actually 2 loops, 5 lines, 2 + 1 = 3 strokes. 

If anyone wants to design a character for Jinni’s name (or anyone else, including your own), email it to me! I’m curious as to what you come up with. The point of making this all up was mainly because I think it’s cool, but also because I want you, dear reader(s), to explore your own creativity within WU and the world I’ve created here. I would make a character for my name, but one syllable, one letter, and no vowels is a bit hard to work with. But nevermind that. 

I am also enlisting your help to come up with a name for the characters because calling them characters makes me confused (like how in English we call these things (a b c d e etc.) letters) AND a name for the language. I’ve been thinking about this for hours (yes these posts take me that long to write) and I can’t come up with anything decent..

That’s all for the names section of this 2 part writing series - Thank you for reading as I work through designing my own language writing system!

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