Avestan for English

Avestan for English is an alternative way to write English with the Avestan script invented by David Bailey. He devised the system after noting the similarities between the Avestan language and English, particularly the rich consonant and vowel inventory, which lends itself well to representing the many varieties of spoken English.

Notable features

Type of writing system: phonemic alphabet
Direction of writing: right to left in horizontal lines
Used to write: most varieties of English, including General American, Received Pronunciation, Australian English, Canadian English
Some letters have variant forms and there is a large inventory of ligatures

Avestan for English

Notes

Many vowels of the Avestan language do not exactly mirror those of English, especially when taking multiple dialects into account. Therefore, a few tweaks were necessary to better accommodate the sounds of English. Generally speaking, Avestan's short-length vowels ([a, ɑ, ə, e, i, u]) were used to represent English short vowels (/æ, ɒ, ə, ɛ, ɪ, ʊ/, respectively), while Avestan's long vowels ([aː, ɑː, eː, oː, iː, uː]) represent English long vowels (/äː, ɑː, eɪ, oː, iː, uː/, respectively). The exceptions to this are Avestan vowels [əː, o] used for English /ʌ, ɔː/.
The consonants /n, m, l/ can be used to represent word-final syllabic /ən~n̩, əm~m̩, əl~l̩/
Aside from representing the English rhotic consonant, Avestan letter r is also used to form rhotic vowel diphthongs (e.g., /ɚ/, /ɑ˞/, /ɔ˞/)
Regarding the special letters: the letters for /æn~ɑn/ and /ən~ʌn/ are taken from Avestan nasal vowels an and aen; the letter representing /in~im/ is taken from Avestan letter ṇ, originally a prenasal consonant. The special letters are optional and can be used to represent English nasal prefixes (an-, on-, in-, etc.)
The full stop sign is partly an invention for English use; in Avestan it represented paragraph demarcation

Sample text

Sample text in the Avestan for English

Translation

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)

Information about Avestan

Avestan fonts

The font used in the charts above is Avestan2 © Ian James, which can be purchased for A$5.00
http://skyknowledge.com/new-avestan.htm

The Google Noto project has a freeware Unicode Avestan font
https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-avst

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