Mandrakard alphabet

This conscript was created in August 2005 by Arno Luyendijk when working at his customer service job in a moment of rash inspiration and worked out at home in one evening.

Arno is art historian by education and a great lover of medieval manuscripts and fantasy novels and films, and is also a graphic artist/painter for whom ancient scripts always are an important inspiration. You can see his artwork at his website www.lindamanya.com. The main inspiration sources for this script were the Applebeech script, the Ogham script, Anglo-Saxon Runes and Tolkien's conscripts for Lord of the Rings.

It was created after finishing an earlier conscript, Adunaroth, and for sheer fun to create a secret and comical-shaped alphabetical script, based on the man-like shape of the mandrake root, a plant surrounded by legend and myth for attributed magical properties, which continues to fascinate the creator.

The name of the script is a phonetic derivation from the word "Mandrake-herd".

Notable features

Type of writing system: alphabet
Direction of writing: The letters are meant to write upwards from bottom left to top right, ever across a straight vertical line (for ease this can be altered in a horizontal direction, from left to right, like the Ogham alphabet).
Each letter has three shapes: initial, medial and final, depending on the position in a word.
In their upward-direction, the scripts looks like an abstraction of the human-like shape of the mandrake root, especially due to the "root"- and "branch"-like shaped initial and final letter shapes.
The numerals and punctuation signs have no initial or final shapes.
All letters, numerals and punctuation signs are meant to be written in one continuous line from bottom to top, only to be disconnected when the top of the writing surface is reached, from which the writer starts again at the bottom.
Used to write: English, Dutch, and other languages using the Latin alphabet

The Mandrakard alphabet

Letters

The Mandrakard alphabet

Numerals

Mandrakard numerals

Numbers are constructed by simpy showing the digits in their sequential followup, in the following manner: 1.567.093

Punctuation

Mandrakard punctuation

Sample text in the Mandrakard alphabet

Translation

Who are you, that you are walking across the graves of giants?
(from: The Way of Wyrd, by Brian Bates)

If you have any questions about the Mandrakard script, you can contact Arno at: sendanor@hotmail.com

Lindamanya - Arno Luyendijk's website (in Dutch and English)
http://www.lindamanya.com

Also by Arno Luyendijk

Adunaroth

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