Orthography

Najan uses a perfectly phonemic featural alphabet, which is written left-to-right, top-to-bottom in scriptio continua (meaning with no punctuation marks, not even spaces between words).

The table below lists each Najan letter, labeled with its name and corresponding phoneme.

Note the alphabet’s featural elements:

• Voiced consonants resemble their voiceless counterparts but with inverted positioning of crossbars and apertures.
• Velar consonants and front vowels have an upper-left ascender. Labial consonants and back vowels have a lower-right descender. Alveolar (or nearby) consonants and central vowels have neither ascenders nor descenders.
• Consonant shape indicates manner of articulation. Plosives, nasals, approximants, and taps form self-similar sets, ignoring ascenders and descenders. Likewise, the fricatives form three sets, based on place of articulation:
  • Postalveolar
  • Velar/alveolar (whose points of articulation exactly match their corresponding plosives)
  • Dental/labiodental
• The glyphs for /i/ and /u/ closely resemble those of the corresponding glides, /j/ and /w/.
• Mid-central vowels resemble nearby peripheral vowels.

Ligatures

An affricate within a word is represented as a ligature. For example, the letters k (/k/) and h (/h/) combine to form kh when they occur in onset position. (Although the /kx/ cluster is always affricated, ligatures may never cross word boundaries.) Notice that the kh ligature only has one ascender (indicating a velar consonant) since affricates are always homorganic and there is therefore no risk of misinterpreting kh as a ligature of k and s.

Unicode Transliteration

This site renders Najan text using a custom font applied to a transliteration of the Najan alphabet into Unicode. This transliteration uses lowercase English letters to represent the first twenty-six Najan letters. For the remaining six letters, it uses the IPA symbol corresponding to the letter’s phoneme. (The transliteration system could have used the IPA symbol for every letter, but this would have left many English letters unused, making Najan more difficult than necessarily to type on a QWERTY keyboard.)

The transliteration system is relevant when inputting Najan text or when rendering it where the font is unavailable. The mouseover bubble for each Najan word on this site includes the word’s transliteration in angle brackets.