[feltelures]

Hello, everyone! tinsnip has encouraged me to share a project I’ve been working on this month, so, well, here it is: a version of written Cardassian that corresponds to the linguistic rules of the Cardassian language built by tinsnip (and by me, a bit), using the Cardassian font as a base.

Not to make this too long, but as a bit of background, there have been three versions of the Cardassian language that people have put together that I’m aware of: tinsnip’s (which uses Timothy Miller’s version as a base), Greig Isles’, and Esther Schrager’s Simplified Varagasi (more on that in a later post). However, there’s been only one attempt that I know of to put together a written language to match the spoken one—Greig Isles’. (There’s a Cardassian font, but it basically is a letter-to-letter matchup with Latin script […mostly] and has nothing to do with the Cardassian language.) Unfortunately, while it looks as though he put a huge amount of work into building the written Cardassian language, its rules make it essentially useless for the version tinsnip has created.

So, this is where I stepped in—with full permission, of course. I wanted to take the preexisting characters of the Cardassian font and make them correspond to the linguistic rules of tinsnip’s Cardassian language so that any word could be written as well as spoken.

I had a few goals that I tried to keep in mind as I worked:

1) I wanted to maintain Greig Isles’ Cardassian numbering system. This meant that any parts of the Cardassian font where characters had been flipped and mirrored to make the numbers had to be changed.

2) I wanted there to be logic behind the characters I chose to represent each sound, and behind the relationship between the written Cardassian language and its romanization. So while I often left alone anything that didn’t overlap with a number, if I did have to change it, I tried to make similar sounds visually similar as well. (For example, since uppercase X is basically 0 mirrored and flipped and there’s no character assigned to lowercase x in the font, I made it visually similar to k…as far as I could, anyway.)

3) I wanted the language to be accessible (from the point of view of an English-speaker, which is where all my expertise lies). While of course Cardassian is an alien language and thus is likely to be very different from anything spoken on Earth, I wanted the language to be usable by fans without too much trouble. Speaking personally, I’m already trying to learn hundreds of kanji. I don’t need to devote hours to learning how to write in space lizard language. :|

For a few more notes and a usage guide, check below the Read More. I would highly recommend having the pronunciation guide from tinsnip’s language file open as you read along—unless, of course, you’re already familiar with Cardassian pronunciation rules.

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