M.J. Whitehead

Spellwright is an excellent hard fantasy book about the boy who was prophecised to save magical language… being magically “crippled” by dyslexia, or as the book calls it, “cacography”. (Blake Charlton recoins several words that usually end in -phone or -phony or -phonic for this book, and it works well) It’s definitely worth buying, and for now that’s the extent of the review.

What I want to talk about, however, is the interesting concept the book brings up, which is “eugraphic” languages. Taken from euphonic, a eugraphic language is one that is pleasant to the reader or writer, and one of the things this book left my wondering is what types of written language would be most eugraphic to people with dyslexia more severe than mine. (I have a tendancy to muddle letters once or twice a sentence, but I correct as I type, and it’s not a huge disability for me in any way)

Initially I wondered at the possibility of a latin alphabet where each combination of letters was a word- so “an” and “na” would be considered the same. But this struck me as too difficult to recognise easily for less severely dyslexic people, and frankly, far too redundant, so I started considering logographic language.

Many asian languages use logograms to some extent, (with the notable exception of Korean, which uses a relatively modern alphabet so incredibly phonetic it would be nightmarishly cacographic for people with severe dyslexia) and they are essentially pictures and icons that represent a visual concept abstractly in much the same way that words like “poof!” represent sounds. From that starting point, I’ve come up with a “grammar” for my own runewriting system in the Worldcrystals series that would likely be considered quite eugraphic to any person with dyslexia. The idea is simple:

Each rune is based off a horizontal line, either crossing it, deforming it, or interrupting it. If you’re writing left-to-right, (the script can be written in any direction) two-rune words would be on either side of a vertical line. Three-rune words would form a (normally equilateral) triangle, four-rune words a square, and so on. Likely you would have fifty to a hundred runes in order to reduce the complexity of shapes needed down to nothing more than say, six sides. And by putting each “letter” of a word on a side of a uniform shape, we can easily express the concept that the order doesn’t matter, while still providing a recognisable whole with multiple valid “spellings”, where the sides are combined in a different order.

Prepositions and post-positions would be handled as directional two-rune words. For instance, the word “then” would point to the right if you used it as in English, or you could flip it around and it would suddenly mean “earlier”. Likewise, the word for “because” could be flipped around to become something a bit like the verb “causes”.

Another advantage of using geometric logograms is that you can extend binary conjunctions and disjunctions to trinary or quaternary ones. For instance, I outlined a vertical line with a rectangle to mean and- but you could just as easily use a triangle-within-a-triangle, branching the other words or clauses off in three directions, to express a sentence saying “x and y and z”. If you really wanted, in such a logographic language you could write a run-on sentence that’s twisted into a ring!

There are such wonderful ideas in Spellwright, it was quite nice to just let one of them grab me and delve into eugraphy and how it could effect things in my own work. I’m looking forward immensely to Spellbound’s release in New Zealand, and seeing if quaternary thoughts, or eugraphy, or language prime have any interesting places to go in the rest of the trilogy!