TINIGE' LIYANG

Tinige' Liyang (lit. "cave writing") is a proposed writing system for the Chamorro language. Chamorro is an Austronesian language spoken by about 58,000 people on the island of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Chamorro is classified as threatened, with the number of native speakers in decline with each generation, however there have been a number of efforts to revitalize the language and keep this connection to our history and culture alive. 

Alongside the resurgence of interest in learning the language, an important topic of debate among Chamorros is decolonization. After a number of oppressive occupations from foreign countries, the Chamorro people have been pushing to define for themselves what it means to be Chamorro in the modern era. In particular, finding the parts of our culture that have survived through centuries of colonization and incorporating those values and traditions into our modern lives.

Tinige' Liyang is one such attempt to decolonize our language by giving us a native writing system. However, this task is not as easy as simply going back to a pre-colonial writing system, as ancient Chamorros did not have an indigenous writing system. It was not until colonization by Spain in the late 17th century that Chamorro was first written down with the Latin alphabet. Therefore, if we are to have an indigenous writing system for Chamorro, it will have to be created from scratch. 


INSPIRATION

So how should we go about inventing a writing system for Chamorro? One way is to look at the indigenous writing systems of related languages and try to work from there. I consulted this list of writing systems used by other Austronesian languages (such as  Malay, Cham, Javanese, Tagalog, and Hanunó'o) and found that the vast majority of these languages used some form of abugida writing system. In short, abugidas are defined by each character representing a unit of a consonant+vowel. So the sequence "ma" would be represented by a single letter, as would "ba", "ta", etc. However, it is typically just one vowel that is implied by each character (usually /a/) and other vowels must be marked with diacritics (glyphs added to a letter, such as áccént márks, ümläüts, or in the case of abugidas, the vowels themselves.)

So now that we have the general blueprint for our writing system, the next step is to decide what each character looks like. As I mentioned before, ancient Chamorros did not have an indigenous writing system, but this doesn't necessarily mean we don't have anything to work with when designing our new script. 

It turns out that even though ancient Chamorros weren't writing their language, they did have some rather interesting cave drawings in southern Guam that are still visible today. Pictured below are some petroglyphs from Talo'fo'fo cave: 


As soon as I looked upon these drawings, I knew they would be the perfect inspiration for the characters in our script (hence to name Tinige' Liyang "cave writing.") Just imagine that when you write in Tinige' Liyang, you are literally retracing the drawings that our ancestors made long ago. 

So, now that we have our framework and our designs, let's start learning this new writing system!


HOW TO WRITE

This section is divided into the four components that make up this writing system:

  1. The main characters
    • Main characters
    • Glottal stop
  2. Vowels
    • Vowels
    • Stop diacritic
    • Diphthongs
  3. Consonant clusters
  4. Labialized consonants

MAIN CHARACTERS
As this is an abugida, each character below represents a consonant+vowel unit. The default vowel for each character is 'a' (as in 'cat'), with the exception of the glottal stop ' (/ʔ/) which will always be a stand-alone consonant in this writing system. You can think of these symbols as the base alphabet of the writing system which everything else will build off of.


Notice there is a character called "null." This character is for when you need to write a vowel without any consonant before it because, remember, each character in an abugida is a consonant+vowel pair. You can think of the null character has simply leaving the consonant slot blank.

GLOTTAL STOP
The glottal stop (') in Chamorro is a consonant just like all the others, however it does not have the same phonological properties. Specifically, the glottal stop is almost always at the end of a syllable in Chamorro (the only exception being when it comes before a stressed syllable) and it is never at the beginning of the word. 

You will see in the next section that when a consonant comes at the end of a syllable, we need a special character (the stop diacritic) to mark that it does not have a vowel after it. So, rather than writing the stop diacritic over and over each time we write a glottal stop, it is easier to just make it a rule that the glottal stop exists only as a stand-alone consonant in this writing system (no inherent 'a' vowel). 

For example:

[image pending]


VOWELS
So we have established that the default vowel for each of the above characters is 'a'. But what about when we need to use other vowels? This is where diacritics come in—little marks attached to the letters that modify the vowel. 

The chart below shows the diacritics for all the other vowels. (The dotted circles represent where the letters go):

Here are examples of how the diacritics look in practice:






Again, the null character in the third example allows us to write a vowel without a preceding consonant. To use this null character in an example word, let's take the word isa. We need to be able to write that first i even though there is no consonant before it. Thus, isa would be written like this:






STOP DIACRITIC
Looking back at the vowel chart, you will notice another diacritic labelled "stop." In other abugidas, this is often referred to as a virāma and it simply marks when a consonant is not followed by a vowel. For example, in the word atan, the n at the end is not followed by a vowel, so we use the stop diacritic. Thus, atan would be written like this:


 


(Without the stop diacritic, this would be read as atana.) 


DIPHTHONGS
"Diphthong" is the linguistic term for when there are two or more vowels in a row. Chamorro has 3 native diphthongs, ai, ao and oi, and 4 diphthongs which only occur in Spanish loanwords: ia, ie, io and iu. 

In Tinige' Liyang, diphthongs are given their own unique diacritics just like single vowels. This is primarily to preserve syllable boundaries as well as make writing a little easier. The charts below give the diacritics for each diphthong as well as some example words that use them:

[image pending]


CONSONANT CLUSTERS
Next, what do we do when there are multiple consonants in a row? It would be somewhat tedious to write each of the consonants out with a stop diacritic after each one, so what some abugidas do is actually stack the consonants below each other.

Take the following word, triste, which has the consonant cluster tr. Something that may be tricky at first is that st also looks like a consonant cluster at first glance. However, we have to pay attention to syllable boundaries when deciding what is and is not a cluster. 

If we break the word triste up into syllables, it is tris + te. So in this case, the s should be written with a stop diacritic because it is the end of the syllable tris-, and not in a cluster with -te. Thus, the word triste would be written like this:

[image pending]

Note that when we stack consonants, there is still only one vowel and it is understood to come after all of the consonants in the cluster. 

Another example is the word lepblo. If we break this word up into syllables, we get lep + blo, so we should get p with a stop diacritic, followed by bl in a cluster, like so:

[image pending]

One exception to syllable boundaries is when we have repeated consonants (geminate consonants). Repeated consonants are stacked regardless of syllable boundaries. For example, the word kommon:





Or mungnga (sometimes spelled mungga):
  

LABIALIZED CONSONANTS
Finally, there is one last aspect of Chamorro phonology to account for, but it is not something than many native speakers are even aware of when they are speaking. That is labialized consonants, which you can think of as like a /w/ sound that comes after consonants in certain words.

Consider to word guaiya. On the surface, this word looks like it has 4 vowels, uai and a. We could certainly write this as gu + ai + ya, but when we pronounce this word, it doesn't actually sound like /gu.ai.dza/. It actually sound more like /gwai.dza/, with /gw/ acting as one consonant. 

In fact, we can prove that it is one consonant by using the Chamorro infix -in-. If you don't know what that is, don't worry, all you need to know for this example is that in Chamorro, you can insert -in- to a verb to change it into a noun. The rule for inserting -in- is that it must be placed before the first vowel of the word.

So, for example, the word nå'i means "to give" in Chamorro, but if we add -in- before the first vowel, we get ninå'i, and this means "gift", the noun version of "give". Similarly, if we take the word ayuda "to help" and add -in-, we get inayuda "help (n.)" because it comes before the first vowel.

Now let's look back at our word guiaya "to love". If we assume that that first u is a vowel, we would expect that when we insert -in- we would get ginuaiya "love (n.)", but this is not correct. Native speakers instead say guinaiya, inserting -in- after the u. This is because the gu in guaiya actually form one consonant, called a labialized consonant, that sounds like /gw/, so the first vowel of the word is actually a.

There are many other consonants in Chamorro that can be labialized, but if you are panicking trying to figure out how you'll know when a consonant is labialized or not, there is an easy trick: Whenever a Chamorro word has u followed by a vowel, the consonant before the u is labialized. In other words, there is no diphthong in Chamorro that starts with u. 

In Tinige' Liyang, the convention for indicating that a consonant is labialized is by adding a horizontal bar at the bottom of the character. The chart below shows you every consonant in Chamorro that is labialized, how we write them when they are labialized, and some example words.

[image pending]


BONUS: VOWEL HARMONY
This is not really something to be learned but rather just maybe something to take note of, but I have designed the vowel diacritics such that they reflect the process of vowel harmony in Chamorro. If you have not encountered vowel harmony yet in your studies of Chamorro, you can learn about it here, but basically what I have done is ensured that vowels that 'harmonize' with each other use the same symbol, just in different positions. 

For example, the word potta becomes petta when it comes after i:


           potta

 i petta
You can imagine we're just moving the little dot from the bottom to the top when applying vowel harmony. Same goes with guma' vs. i gima':


guma'



i gima'
(Remember that the glottal stop ' is a stand-alone consonant in this writing system, so we do not need to use the stop diacritic.)




EXAMPLE TEXT

Applying everything we have learned, let's see what a full text looks like in Tinige' Liyang! See if you can translate it: