Chapter grammar — every chapter follows the same skeleton
- The Brief
- The Constraints
- The Decisions
- The Adoption Curve
- The Verdict
The grammar makes chapters comparable: each inventor faced a stated problem, worked under linguistic and political constraints, made specific formal decisions, and met an adoption curve no design can fully control. The Verdict weighs what the design itself contributed.
01훈민정음The King's AlphabetSejong the Great · Hangul · Korea, 1443–1446 — the best-documented act of script design in history, with a hostile peer review that survives. Published 02ᏣThe SilversmithSequoyah · Cherokee · 1821 — a man who could not read English borrowed its letterforms and assigned them entirely new sounds. Form without phonetics. Published 03ԱThe Monk's CommissionMesrop Mashtots · Armenian · 405 — a state commissions an alphabet to hold a church, a language, and a nation together. It worked for sixteen centuries. Published 04𐌰The Bishop's BibleWulfila · Gothic · 4th c. — a script created for a single translation project, and what happens to a writing system when its one book loses its readers. Published 05ⰀThe Saint's CipherCyril · Glagolitic · 863 — the designer whose script died while his name survived, attached to a replacement he never drew. Published 06ꕙThe Dream of BukeleMomolu Duwalu Bukele · Vai · c. 1833 — a syllabary reportedly received in a dream, and West Africa's two centuries of independent script creation. Published 07ᐁThe Missionary's RotationJames Evans · Cree syllabics · 1841 — rotate a letter, change its vowel: a featural abugida from the fur-trade frontier, adopted and owned by the communities it was made for. Published 08ߒ“I Say”Solomana Kanté · N'Ko · 1949 — an alphabet designed as a rebuttal, to prove Manding languages could carry modern literacy. The name means the argument. Published 09ދThe Numeral CipherThaana · Maldives · c. 1700 — the registry's strangest brief: an alphabet built from numerals, possibly to keep texts from outside eyes. Published 10𞤀The Brothers' NotebookIbrahima & Abdoulaye Barry · Adlam · 1989 — two teenagers design a script for Fulani; within one generation it is in Unicode, in Noto, and on phones. Published 11𐒰The Elder's BoardHerman Mongrain Lookout · Osage · 2006 — the youngest script in the registry, designed because Latin letters misrepresented the language it was asked to carry. Published 12ꆈThe PatternClosing comparative chapter — what twelve inventors share: the brief, the borrowed forms, the resistance, the schoolroom. Includes design by committee: the 1974 Yi standardisation. Published
Toward the book
This series is declared complete at twelve chapters. On completion it moves to Naisu Press as a volume in the institute's imprint — same chapter grammar, same specimens, print-first typesetting via the Paged.js pipeline. Chapters published here remain open access; the book is the collected, revised edition.