Lexitechnia

One of the hazards of working with a language that you don’t work with often is that you tend to forget things.  In many cases, this is generally not a problem so long as you have time to look things up, but with one of your own constructed languages it may not be so easy.   I was doing some work on Drake for the first time in a while and came across a font file I made for it, several years ago.  I had no information about the alphabet outside of the font and one small Shoebox dictionary that used it.

On the bright side, I was able to figure out the phonetic values of almost all the characters from the dictionary file.   The two I am not entirely sure of as yet are the character mapped to “Å¡” and the character mapped to “Å “.  Also, I have one character mapped to “Z”, and it’s the same character as “z” but with a diacritic; however, in the original dictionary it has the same value as “z'”—and only appears in a word from whose root all other derivations have ‘z’.

But the phonetic values of the letters aren’t important at the moment.  I was working on putting this up on FrathWiki so I won’t have to hunt for where the answers are in the future, and realized I had no idea what the alphabetical order is.

Here I’ll pause to show you the script I’m talking about.

The first row is the script, the second row the “transliteration” — or at least the character the letter is mapped to — and the third is the recovered phonetic value.  Yes, it’s technically an abjad.

I probably won’t be able to discover alphabetical order until I can figure out the source of each letter.  I know the alphabet as a whole comes from the same family of old Semitic scripts as Phoenician and Greek did;  letters with diacritics come immediately after the base letter in the alphabetical order, but outside of that, the order should be the standard aleph-beth-gimel.

Anyway, some of the letters are easy to recognize, whether from their shape, or because the phonetic value is unambiguous:  ’ is aleph, l is lamed, m is mem, n is nun, etc.  Some others, less so.  (I’m not sure how I mapped the ’emphatic’ and non-emphatic consonants to Drake characters. And where is ayin?)  Anyone want to take a stab at identifying these letters?