Note: all glyphs that are shown on this page should be rotated 90° clockwise to be read correctly

History

Aʻoonirobi's script is written on large thick leaves of a native species of plant found in the Aʻoonirob swampland superficially similar to J. magnifica, but even larger. The parallel venation of the plant's leaves is also quite dark in appearance and therefore the Aʻoonirobi script is written along these 'lines', top to bottom then left to right. This particular plant is referred to in Aʻoonirobi as qaavdiňõõňĩṙqĩd, or 'the prophet's leaves', while it's particular leaf when removed from the plant to be used as a writing medium is called a vĩĩň.

Aʻoonirobi, both in speech and in writing is decided according to the swamp shamans, to whom the knowledge and any updates are conferred by the ṙoqom, or Sacred Elders. The Ṙoqom are huge non-bipedal frogs that the Aʻoonirob worship as deities. Because of this, Aʻoonirobi is written phonetically and much older texts must be deciphered by Shamans and the Ṙoqom, though Aʻoonirobi has little to no outside language contact, making it's language change more gradual than typical.

Writing is usually used for religious purposes as Aʻoonirob literacy is somewhat low and even those that can read and write tend more for an oral tradition, since the act of writing itself is seen as a sacred action that was bestowed to them by their gods. However in larger villages within the great swampland, non-religious texts can be seen in signage or business accounting. It is traditionally written by using one's fingers dipped in ink to draw or stamp the letters. Some Aʻoonirob use specially cut branches and brushes to speed up the process, but those methods are seen as disrespectful to some more religious Aʻoonirobs.

Basics

Aʻoonirobi is an 'alphasyllabary' without an inherent vowel. Consonants are primary and obligatory, even in words without any, while vowels are diacritics that make a consonant into a CV syllable pair. Vowel-Consonant pairs and nasal vowel marking are indicated through separate characters either before or after the glyph to be modified, respectively.

Glyphs in Aʻoonirobi have initial, medial, and final forms, though some forms aren't in use because of Aʻoonirobi's phonotactics. Initial glyphs start a word while final glyphs end one. For example, the syllable /bi/ is written as ቀ initially, or ቄ medially, or ቈ word finally. The base shape tends to stay mostly the same, while the vowel markings often shift around to accommodate.

A word containing entirely vowels like ⟨uu⟩ would be written as R፫ ⟨juu⟩ with the CV reversal glyph before the ⟨juu⟩ glyph to indicate that it should be read as ⟨uuj⟩. Since coda /j/ isn't permitted, it's understood to simply be read as /ɯː/.

Vowels

All vowels are composed using three distinct components: the finger, the hook, and the dot. Fingers are used for high vowels while hooks are used for low vowels. A single instance of either indicates a front vowel while a doubling indicates a back vowel. The dot specifies that it is a long vowel. These three components can be seen in the chart below.

Nasality is indicated by a separate glyph written after the vowel. Because of Aʻoonirobi's forward propagating nasal harmony, this separate glyph is only used after the first instance of a nasal vowel in a word to save space, unless the harmony is blocked and then reappears again in the same word.

Consonants

In the Aʻoonirobi script, consonants are obligatory and are inflected with vowel diacritics to make syllables. All consonants have a plain non-vowel medial and final form that is used, except J /j/ since it can never be the coda of a syllable (though an unmodified J can be seen in education materials or in children's writing practices). A small subset of the consonants can also have a plain non-vowel initial form since Aʻoonirobi allows initial consonant consonant clusters of any labial followed by a non-bilabial trill. These plain glyphs can be seen in the chart below.

¹ /v/ is always [β] in this case