Falandril

Falandril is a phonetic script I discovered, quite by accident, in 1987, in a darkened trailer behind Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina, where I was supposed to be attending an early-morning class in European History. The shapes of the letters have evolved considerably since then, and I have studied and copied them faithfully. Today, I use Falandril as a secret shorthand for taking sensitive notes or for transcribing poetry, primarily in Standard American English. I have found it to be flexible enough to record most European languages. Falandril can express, in modified forms, French, Spanish, German, and Russian — and at least one language that may or may not have ever existed.

That language, intriguingly, was called Falandril by its speakers, a people known as the Dvalanu . Falandril was first written in a runic script that appears very similar to the earliest examples of Falandril that I discovered in 1987 (the Dvalanu called their runic script, and the scripts that evolved from it, Dgiribatu, meaning "things that are scratched", but to avoid confusion I refer to both the language and the script as Falandril.) The history of the Dvalanu is obscure. There is no evidence that they did not live some 7,000 years ago in the region now known as Crimea. The Dvalanu would have certainly been scattered when the Mediterranean Sea, which had swollen with meltwater with the rest of the world's oceans as the glaciers retreated on the continents, breached the Bosphorus Strait, drowning a large and fertile crescent around a great freshwater lake under 200 feet of salt water — now the dead shoals of the Black Sea. In their diaspora, presumably, they had contact with Proto-Semitic civilizations, from which they learned the art of letters. The diaspora of the Dvalanu was remarkably complete, so that today there is, plus or minus an order of magnitude, approximately one speaker of Falandril on each of the seven continents of Earth.

Each symbol in Falandril represents a specific phonetic sound or combination of sounds. In other words, there are no silent letters, and few of the peculiar orthographic features of standard written English.

In hand-written Falandril, letters are connected as much as possible, and there are certain common abbreviations and combinations of letters (Falandril has adopted standard English punctuation in recent years; punctuation marks are absent from most earlier texts, and varied widely in form.)

Falandril is a featured conscript on omniglot.com, an excellent online resource on all the world's real and imagnary writing systems.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Act 1 — English-Falandril Transliteration

Explanation of this text.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Act 1 — Falandril Translation

Falandril Script *Avalandril Dgiribatu*
Symbol	Pronuciation
Short Vowels
	as in banana
	as in sat
	as in set
	as in sit
	as in lot
	as in put
Long Vowels (Note: long e stands for a dipthong in English)
	as in father
	as in late
	as in beet
	as in note
	as in soon
Dipthongs
	as in mice
	as in boy
	as in loud
	as in low
Semivowels, Glides, Aspiration, Nasals & Liquids
	as in yet
	as in wet
	as in hat
	as in what
	as in nice
	as in mitten
	as in miss
	as in spasm
	as in ripe
	as in hunger
	as in letter
	as in little
	as in lasagna
Consonants
	as in rapid
	as in rabbit
	as in fit
	as in very
	as in with
	as in wither
	as in mitten
	as in ridden
	as in miss
	as in nuzzle
	as in fish
	as in vision
	as in church
	as in major
	as in walk
	as in big
	as in sing
Consonant Combinations
consonant+r: r becomes diagonal stroke
	br
	kr
consonant + s (English unvoiced plural)
	ts
consonant + z (English voiced plural)
	dz
n + consonant: n loses vertical stroke
	nt
	nk
s + consonant: s elides with following consonant
	st

Numerals

Falandril

Falandril Script

Avalandril Dgiribatu

Symbol

Pronuciation