Please download and install the Bin Tahr Font for proper viewing.

Also I'm lazy and don't want to debug my CSS for other browsers so...
get Firefox.

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Characters and Phonetics

The Bin Tahr alphabet is entirely based on pronunciation and phonetics. Each character consists of three parts: the first consonant(s), the vowel and the ending consonant. Characters are written and read from top to bottom, with the vowel sandwiched between the consonants.

As you can see, the dots (.) are mostly vowels and modifiers of consonants to make sounds like “k'd” and “dz”. The only vowel without a dot in it is thee loose É vowel, pronounced as “eh”. Also, something to take note of is that the only vowel with a line are the “E” derived characters.

The consonants can be either written in the upper third of a character of the lower third of the character. A full word is read from top to bottom, pronouncing each symbol as it is reached, just like any other language, in the order as it appears.

Words can be written either vertically or horizontally and be as equally as readable, and still maintain sentence structure. However, some words (mostly pronouns) can be rotated to save space when writing horizontally, but remain the same when writing vertically.

Since there are a maximum of three letters to a word, the strong majority of words in Bin Tahr are only one syllable. Some words that are more complex in nature are written as two separate words, but understood as one single concept. Take the Bin Tahr word “hate” for example zohmehk’d, is two syllables, but is the actually the reverse phonetic spelling of the Bin Tahr word for “love with understanding” kdeem ahdz and as you can see is rather similar to its counterpart “hate” when written side by side.

Being that there are no upper or lower cases in Bin Tahr, the font itself is created so that upper case letters will be placed at the top of a word, and the lower cased letters will be placed at the bottom of a word. All vowels (upper and lower cased) will be placed in the middle. To switch between pronunciation of vowels, simple switch the case of the vowel.