# Bajorai Ashalla Hand · Version 1.0

A working, reference-inspired orthography for the Bajoran Civic-Cultural Archive. The archive supplies the syllabic structure, curved stroke architecture, pronounced apostrophe, and civic/sacred layout traditions. The two supplied phonogram charts inspire the letterforms. The particular glyph assignments, extensions and digital encoding are newly designed for this edition.

## The system

One block normally writes one onset plus one vowel unit. Related sounds share recognisable curved radicals; the small mark on the right identifies the vowel. This makes the script learnable instead of requiring a different unrelated drawing for every syllable.

- **20 core onset rows:** Ø, k, s, t, r, m, p, b, d, sh, y, j, l, h, n, g, f, v, z, w. Ø means no initial consonant.
- **Eight vowel units:** a, e, i, o, u, ei, ai, au. These are romanization values, not a new claim about Bajorai pronunciation.
- **Eight extension rows:** ch, th, kh, zh, ng, c, q, x. These provide a practical way to retain names and loanword spellings.
- **224 base syllabic glyphs**, plus 140 long-vowel forms, 27 bare/final consonants, nine punctuation signs and ten numerals: **410 encoded characters**.

## Reading and writing

1. Modern civic writing runs left to right, in horizontal lines. The sacred display runs top to bottom, with columns proceeding right to left. Glyphs remain upright in both layouts.
2. Read the main radical, then its vowel mark. Independent vowels use the Ø radical with the same vowel marks.
3. The **small hollow diamond at lower right** marks a consonant with no following vowel. This handles final consonants and clusters without inserting an unwritten vowel. Thus *Vedek* is ve–de–k; the final k has the diamond.
4. A **short lower-right length bar** marks a doubled vowel: aa, ee, ii, oo or uu. *Tah’reel* keeps its long ee.
5. The apostrophe is a separate **glottal hook**, preserving the phonetic break in B’hala, Per’Bajora and Pah’Korai. It is never silently removed.
6. A short horizontal separator preserves a hyphen. Spaces divide words; line breaks divide lines. A comma, full stop, colon, semicolon, question mark and exclamation mark each have a script sign.
7. Stress is normally read from context, following the archive’s penultimate-stress guidance. An optional ˈ mark may be typed before a deliberately stressed unit. The tool does not guess stress.
8. There is no upper/lower-case distinction. Romanization is read back in lowercase; straight and curly apostrophes normalise to a straight apostrophe. Other unsupported characters are preserved visibly rather than discarded.

## Vowel marks

| Unit | Right-hand modifier |
| --- | --- |
| a | Open crescent |
| e | One horizontal bar |
| i | One vertical stroke |
| o | Closed ring |
| u | Upright cup |
| ei | Two horizontal bars |
| ai | Rising diagonal |
| au | Two vertical strokes |

Modifiers encode spelling units. Vowel sequences beyond ei, ai and au are written as successive vowel blocks. This gives conservative, reversible spellings without deciding uncertain pronunciations.

## Worked spellings

| Romanized form | Written units |
| --- | --- |
| Bajorai | ba · jo · rai |
| Per’Bajora | pe · r · ’ · ba · jo · ra |
| B’hala | b · ’ · ha · la |
| Pah’Korai | pa · h · ’ · ko · rai |
| Tah’reel | ta · h · ’ · ree · l |
| Vedek | ve · de · k |
| D’Jarra | d · ’ · ja · r · ra |

Romanization does not translate a sentence or change its grammar. The writing workbench preserves the words supplied by the writer.

## Using the font

Install **Bajorai-Ashalla-Hand.ttf** using your system’s normal font controls, select *Bajorai Ashalla Hand* in a word processor, and enable standard ligatures. Type romanized text: the font’s OpenType rules combine vowel pairs, consonant digraphs and onset–vowel units automatically. Latin capitals and lowercase use the same script forms. Numerals and supported punctuation also render in the script.

Some programs disable ligatures or implement shaping incompletely. The website’s **Copy script characters** option provides a reliable alternative: it copies already-encoded private-use characters. Paste those characters into a document and apply the font. The **Read script characters** panel converts them back to normalized romanization. SVG exports contain actual vector outlines and need no installed font.

## Digital specification

The font uses Unicode Private Use Area characters beginning at U+E000. These assignments belong to this font and are not a universal Bajoran Unicode standard. See **Bajorai-character-map.csv** for the complete mapping, and **bajorai-script.json** for the vector paths and encoding data.

The browser engine uses longest-match onset parsing, followed by a doubled pure vowel, then the longest available vowel unit. No consonant receives an implicit vowel. Text can be round-tripped through script characters back to its normalized romanization.

## Files

- `Bajorai-Ashalla-Hand.ttf`: desktop font with OpenType ligatures.
- `Bajorai-Ashalla-Hand.woff`: web font.
- `Bajorai-Ashalla-Hand-Chart.svg`: complete scalable chart, including extension rows and final consonants.
- `Bajorai-character-map.csv`: romanization and private-use mapping.
- `bajorai-script.json`: complete glyph outlines and metadata.
- `engine.js`: standalone transliteration and SVG export engine.

Original glyph artwork created for this collection. The visual inspiration charts and archive’s linguistic description remain the reference material behind this edition.