Vogu is written in an alphabetic script of 39 characters. A true alphabet, Vogu has one symbol for each sound in the phonemic inventory. For those characters in the above table which have two transliterations, the digraph to the left of the slash is the "informal" rendering used in most general-purpose works, and the single letter to the right of the slash is the official rendering of the Vogu Language Institute, used mostly in textbooks and scholarly works.
Spelling is reflective of pronounciation, so when sound changes occur upon the addition of affixes, the spelling changes, as well. Vogu is read from left to right, from top to bottom. Words are separated by spaces.
Other symbols are also used. The full stop functions like our period to indicate the end of a sentence. The hiatus functions like the comma, to indicate where pauses for emphasis would fall in a spoken utterance. The hiatus is used to set off participle and relative clauses, to separate subordinate adverbial phrases from the main sentence, after nat- in nat-, buhn phrases and before di in discourse.
The quote marks are used in pairs to set off titles of pictures, books, etc. and the names of vehicles or buildings. The following quote is used with the dash in marking quotations: the dash is used to tie the quote to the main clause (as a printed equivalent to the particle di), and the following quote takes the place of the full stop (printed quotations always follow the main verb of reporting).
Vogu letters are capitalized by addition of a dash drawn over the letter.
The only use of capitalization is to mark personal names and the letters
of an acronym, and every letter
in the name or acronym receives the capitalization symbol:
Powag 'Falcon'.
The elipsis is used to indicate the absence of something expected. It is used mainly in grammar books and dictionaries to mark affixes (much as we use the dash to indicate unattached prefixes and suffixes). It is also used after the last letter of an abbreviation, to mark it as such.
Unfortunately, when the Migration began, the Ranamemi scribes either chose not to accompany the Kadane, or were left behind by chieftains hard pressed to maintain a luxury like literacy in their straitened circumstances. Thus, literacy was lost, and there occured a break in the historical record.
The Kadane again discovered literacy during their sojourn among the Dunnek. This time, however, they did not write in Dunnek, but adapted the Dunnek orthography to their own language.
Ironically, the Dunnek had learned their script from the Ranamemi, as well. However, Ranamemi is a language with many open (CV) syllables, and the Ranamemi orthography is a pure syllabary, in which each CV pair is represented by a single, unique, character. This system poorly suited Dunnek, with its many consonant clusters, and some unknown innovator hit on the idea of divorcing the consonant and vowel components of the characters, to create a true alphabet. The Dunnek system was better suited to Vogu, whose phonemic structure is closer to Dunnek than to Ranamemi. The Kadane modified some letters to closer approximate the sounds of Vogu, and dropped some unneeded characters. With only minor modifications, this same orthography is still in use today.
© 1997, Terrence Donnelly