Khulls script

Scripts of Khulls are described here. The Khulls language had many scripts over time as its phonology changed, and at times, more than one script was in use. Further complicating the situation was the tendency to write foreign words in their native scripts, whose letterforms resembled those of Khulls enough to lead to homographs. However, most loanwords into Khulls were naturalized if they came into common use, and came to be written with the ordinary Khulls script.

Alphabet

Due to its complex phonology, Khulls was written primarily with an alphabet rather than a syllabary.

Arrangement of consnonants and vowels

Khulls inherited the Gold tradition of writing the consonants and vowels as separate alphabets. In the early years of Khulls, the two alphabets could be presented in either order, but eventually, consonants were placed first. This led to a change in the addition of new letters to the alphabet: previously, new letters had always been added to the end of the alphabet, but once the consonants secured their place at the front, new consonants were generally added to the beginning. This is why the Khulls alphabet looks so different at first glance from those to which it is very closely related.

Vowel letter order

The vowels are presented as a square, with rows being

a i o u e

and columns being the tones, which have the order

a ă à ā á â a͆

However, the last two tones were usually not distinguished, and towards the later years, ā and á often weren't either.

Syllabary letter order

First starts with the "flower" \ | /, which is /p ṗ b/ in the main dialect but /k ḳ ġ/ in some northern ones.

Consonant-syllable "impregnable" first table letter order is ʕ, l, g, x, ŋ, k, ḳ. This is the same as Andanese with /ʕ g ḳ/ replacing the three vowels. These correspond to Pabappa ∅, r, ∅, s, m, p, p. However, Pabappa reverses the order and so its alphabet begins instead with /p m s b/. (The confusion of /b/ with /r/ is due to Poswa influence.)

Sylabary source and structure

Unstr ă syllabary, str ă alph. alph counts tons as part of vowel, so needs 30 vowler signs (5 vowels, 6 tones if including both phars). 32 consos, though the ten syllabic consos get unique signs so the total numbtoer of sumbols for just consos & vowels is 72. Syllabary works by impregnating these sumbols with further markings that are taken from the Andanese *& Thaa syllabaries. Thus most conosnants isngs have holes (not the syllabics, not the "low" consonants either) into which vowel signs are written. /d/, /ġ/, and /ṭ/ are not in the standard script but can be derived from letters that are.

IM not sure I like this, actually. It might seem ludicrious to do a syllabary for a lang with 32 consos, 5 vowels, 6 tones, and 20 final consos, but i think it can work because they will only encode three of the final consos: /l n s/. The rest are either syllabic consos or ones that were originally separate syllables. And these three only occur on three of the tones (others do occur but rael;y).so its really just 6 open-sulab tones and 9 closed-silab tones.