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 abjad, which evolved into the Old Hagt script which in turn derived the Hagt script.

When Old Hagt was first standardised, the script became more curvilinear and was rotated 90° clockwise for easier writing on 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. The letter zeewan /ts/ was repurposed for the sound /m/, which did not exist phonemically in Classical Taot.

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 hagek alhek ('bitter food') is written as ha ge ka l he k. 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 is marked with a diacritic below the letter and above mut hīkik.

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, by coincidence, look like the letters rit, sī and sun. The numerals from 6 to 20 are derived from some letter in the numeral name that is not already representing a previous numeral. The sat on the numeral for 7 represents the voicing of g and is to distinguish it from skīht. The numerals for 8, 25 and 625 were randomly chosen from available letters.