Flownetic is a phonetic script created by Xay Voong in 2012. The philosophy is simple, intuitive, distinguishable, practical. The flow and structure of the symbols imitate the flow and structure of your mouth, throat, tongue, teeth, and lips as you utter each sound. Unlike other featural or phonetic writing systems, the letters are easily distinguishable from each other and simple to write. This makes it easy and fun to read and write these letters.
The problem with most other featural alphabets is that they focus on the similarities between classes of sounds and articulations, rather than the distinct features that make them different. Thus their characters all tend to look alike and cumbersome. Furthermore, vowels tend to get second-class treatment. Too often vowels are represented by nothing more tiny diacritics (or worse, missing altogether). Even in alphabets with true vowels, they usually contain no more than a handful; yet the IPA charts no less than 30 distinct vowels sounds. Even though, in linguistics, vowels are usually called the nucleus of a syllable or word, you couldn't tell from many writing systems of their importance to language. Vowels are just as interesting as consonants, if not more, and deserve more attention.
The Flownetic script addresses these shortcomings by representing only the prominent oral features and their motions for each sound. To remain simple to read and practical to write, letters consist of mainly simple lines, curves, and dots. These elements form intuitive graphemes (letters) by following these rough guidelines. Straight lines represent unrounded vowels, the throat, jaw, teeth, and closed lips. Curves represent rounded vowels and placement and curling of the tongue. The dots are neutral or breathy sounds, or modify common vowels. Moreover, much emphasis is put on the vowels and their distinctive feel as they are released from the vocal organs.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They
are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another
in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
Constructed scripts for: Ainu | Arabic | Chinese languages | Dutch | English | Hawaiian | Hungarian | Japanese | Korean | Lingala | Malay & Indonesian | Persian | Tagalog / Filipino | Russian | Sanskrit | Spanish | Taino | Turkish | Vietnamese | Welsh | Other natural languages | Colour-based scripts | Tactile scripts | Phonetic/universal scripts | Constructed scripts for constructed languages | Adaptations of existing alphabets | Fictional alphabets | Magical alphabets | A-Z index | How to submit a constructed script
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