Hagt script



The Hagt script is a Hagt writing system, one component of the Hagt writing system, along with the Hagt logography.

Hagt orthography uses 13 basic letters: 9 consonant letters 4 vowel letters. There are also 5 diacritics used to represent short vowels, voicing and gemination. Hagt texts are written without spaces between words (scriptio continua) from left to right in alternating directions, a system called boustrophedon.

History
The Hagt script is part of the Koolpallalian scripts of Noco. It is descendant from the Taot script, which evolved into the Old Hagt script which in turn derived the Hagt script.

When Old Hagt was first standardised, the Taot script became more curvilinear due to the availability of papyrus. It was adopted without great change, except for the repurposing of the letter zeewan /ts/ for the sound /m/, which was not present in Classical Taot.

The script was rotated in order to be more easily written in long strips of papyrus. This caused various letters to be modified, and, for the ease of reading, various diacritics were created from smaller versions of letters or regular shapes.

Letters
The letters, diacritics and numbers are written using boustrophedon, with alternating left-to-right and right-to-left lines. Letter shapes, diacritics and numerals are mirrored depending on the writing direction. Rit and iu are flipped upside-down in right-to-left text.

The following table shows letters written left-to-right.

Diacritics
Hagt marks short vowels as diacritics above and below the letter. The final consonant of a word connects to the starting vowel of the following word. For example, the phrase mut an is written as mu ta n, not *mu t a n. If a syllable begins with a vowel sound, the letter mut an acts as a silent placeholder.

The letters b, d, g, z and rr are spelled with the corresponding unvoiced letters (p, t, k, s and r) and the circle diacritic, sat, above them.

Gemination are marked with a diacritic below the geminated letter.

Numerals
The Hagt numerals are a base-25 system with a sub-base of 5.

The numerals for 1 to 5 were derived from the Koolpallalian hieroglyphs and, coincidentally, look like the letters rit, sī and sun. The numerals from 6 to 20 are derived from some letter in the word that is not already representing a previous numeral. The sat on the numeral for 7 is for the voicing of g and to distinguish it from skīht. The numerals for 8 and 25 were randomly chosen from available letters.