Stālāg (Terbian)

The Stālāg script

This is a table showing the letters of the Stālāg alphabet, with their usual transliteration below. The order is not significant.

a

e

i

o

u

å

ĕ

ŏ

ā

ē

ī

ō

ū

p	t	k	kw	b	d	g	gw	m	n

s	h	hw	hj	hy	z	w	j	y	l	r

The font

I have created a draft TrueType font so as to write directly in the Stālāg script when I want to. The font encodes all the basic glyphs directly, usually in the position of the Latin letter that transliterates it, in lowercase. The labialized consonants are encoded as the uppercase versions of their non-labialized counterparts; for example, uppercase K gives the character for kw.

Palatalized letters are not basic characters; they can be composed using the palatalization diacritic, , which is encoded as uppercase J and as the semicolon ; (the latter places the diacritic in the lower half of the character). The labiopalatalized consonants are formed using this diacritic on the labialized ones.

The characters for h and hw are encoded as h and H, as expected, but hj is c and hy is C.

Finally, the vowels are encoded as å or â (for å), ë (for ĕ) and ö (for ŏ). The long vowels are encoded as vowels with accute accents (á é í ó ú for ā ē ī ō ū). The reason for not using the same characters as those employed in transliteration is that (with the exception of å) they don't appear in ASCII or ANSI, and they can't be entered directly in most Western keyboards (including mine). On the other hand, the encodings I chose are part of the ISO-8859-1 encoding set (a.k.a. Latin-1); they appear in all fonts (not only in Unicode fonts), and they can be accessed and typed in all keyboards.

You can download the Stālāg Calligraphic font and test it. It comes with absolutely no warranties and no instructions other than the above. It should work in Windows (at least it does in Win98 and WinXP) and in any program that supports TrueType fonts. Be sure to set a large font size, since Stālāg Calligraphic is not very readable at less than 16 points (at least in my system).