Orokin Calligraphy and Spelling Style

Here's something I wrote some while ago while I was practicing writing Tennobet with a calligraphy pen. Be aware that there are a few typos in there, so please don't get mad.

When you start to read it, "In the beginning..." you might think you know where this is going, but in fact, this bit of text actually comes from a certain game that is not Warframe. I'll leave it to you to discover where.

What I want to write about a bit more in this post are my choices of spelling English words in the phonetic script that is Tennobet.

Dropped h

It has been officially declared that words ending in a vowel may be suffixed with a h, like "tomato" t-o-m-aye-t-o-h. However this is not required, and in fact is absent in the spelling of "Tenno" t-e-n-o. How should we decide whether or not to include a h?

Since there is no known hard rules, my preference has been to drop the h from very often-used words; "Tenno" might also be considered one. In the above text, you'll notice that I don't use h's for words "the," "to" and "into". Since these words are going to be used very often, it's natural to be able to write them parsimoniously.

You might be asking, "Why then don't you drop the h in 'a'?" My answer is that the lone vowel would just look naked, otherwise. The underlying reasoning from my guess is that a vowel must have a consonant to rest on; as you know, the consonants are those full, long strokes while the vowels are those little tokens that sit up in the valleys formed between them. A hanging vowel due to a dropped h at least still has the previous consonant to hold on to, but not the word "a." Of course, it's easy to argue why one would drop the h from one word but not another because there is no clear line anyone can draw about this, but I guess it's fine as long as one is consistent.

Although we could be collecting spelling examples from the game itself and declare them set in stone, from the many inconsistencies and weird spellings I've seen so far in the Tenno hubs, I wouldn't consider this to be a reliable foundation to depend on yet.

Letterless schwas

I've written before about the lack of schwa sounds in Tennobet -- the unostentatious, neutral vowel. My decision concerning this issue was to simple omit it altogether from the spelling. More controversially, now that I read it, I even did this for the word "overrun".

To be sure, the "e" in "overrun" is usually a schwa sound. We don't say "oh veh run", and mostly only non-rhotic speakers would consistently pronounce it "oh vuh run." What was I to do? I chose not to use a vowel at all. Now it became "ovrun," yet even this still can be confusing. Did I make the right choice? Or is there really no right choice? I'd like to hear others' views on this.

Typos?

You may notice I made a spelling error in the middle of writing at one point. Since I didn't have any correction fluid at the time, I had to cross it out. But then, I realised this may not be optimal in Tennobet. Tennobet letters are characterised by their strongly oblique lines that slide close to horizontal -- actually more horizontal than I was able to consciously enforce in this sample.

Using a simple horizontal strikethrough, I found previously, was actually hard to make out. Since it flows into the text, I also found it hard to see where the strike begins and ends. I also tried to double strike it, but it ended up looking pretty ugly and messy.

This time, you can see I used vertical strikes through the typo. It actually looks sort of pretty, and makes it clear what is being rescinded. This might end up being the standard way I cross out words in Tennobet.