**Writing Characterie**
# Character Shapes
Now that we understand the core principle of writing with Characterie, we should learn how to shape the characters we will write.
## Writing Particles
The first thing to know is how to write particles. Each of these are their own one-off characters which must be learned individually. A full table of all of them are in the [dictionary](dictionary.html). For the purpose of demonstration, we copy a few fundamental particles, and will refer only to these particles in this chapter.
      
      
These are almost completely arbitrary, and simply need to be memorized. In some cases like *be* and *thou*, the particle is represented by single letters of the alphabet representing that word (*b* and *t*), however others are actively misleading like *I*, which is represented by the letter *r*, and *we* which is the letter *p*.
## Writing characterical words
Characterical words are significantly more structured. Characterical words are formed by three steps:
1. Pick a head for the character from the list of possible heads:
2. Pick a foot for the character from the list of possible feet:
3. Rotate the character to one of the four possible orientations:
Below, you can see all possible characterical words, aside from the rotations.
The heads of the characters are associated with the letters of the English language.
        
        
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**A note on *x* and *z*.**
The original formulation left off the letters *x* and *z*, which I have included mapped to *c* and *s* respectively.
**Which alphabetic order?**
As a historical shorthand from the 16th century, it is referring to alphabetical order *as it was written in Early Modern English*, so think of authors like Shakespeare when you look to understand the vocabulary or spelling of the words in this shorthand system. This means you find, for example, the word *entertain* listed under *i* since it was spelled *intertein* at the time the system was written.
## A Tiny Vocabulary
The full vocabulary is contained in the [dictionary](./dictionary.html), but here is a small vocabulary of characterical words that we will use for all examples in this chapter.
     
     
     
     
     
     
I've picked this vocabulary so that it covers every letter, every foot type, and all but one angle that you will encounter in Characterie (the final angle is very uncommon).
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**The Vocabulary**
This vocabulary very much is representative of the writing needs of a 16th century English clergyman, thus things like Christianity get special place in the vocabulary over other religions, and similarly language is used in a strongly gendered way. This is unavoidable if you want to be able to use this historical system. A modern author would likely choose a different vocabulary.
## Additions to characterical words
To express the full range of the english language, we need to go beyond simply the characterical words itself. Indeed, we need to be able to express various word modifications like adding endings like "-er" and "-ing", and additionally to denote synonyms. These are all expressed by adding various dots and letters around the core character. For instance, the following are random valid words built off of our tiny vocabulary above.
We will return to this later to provide the rules for all these augmentations, right now, you only need to know that they exist.
# Writing Order
Words in Characterie are written top-to-bottom, and left-to-right. Whenever there is a pause in speech due to a period, comma, semi-colon, *etc.*, a simple dot is written.
You should feel very free to wrap lines after a few words depending on the space you are writing. Think of Characterie as a way to rapidly take near-verbatim notes on small pages, or in the margins of a book, so the lines can be wrapped very flexibly.
Additionally, Characterie is designed to be able to be written extremely small, with a single character taking up only the space a letter would normally take like:
For the purposes of learning, we write larger in this document, but know that is is made to have this capability.
# Special Character Types
While the sections above cover almost all text you will write, there are a couple of special cases.
## Writing Proper Nouns
When writing proper nouns you should always write it as you would any other English word whenever you can. This means names like "Field", "River", "Hope", "Joy", and so on, should be written the same as the usual word itself. However, the majority of names are not already words, but instead exist only as a name. Thus, we need a way to write any string of letters so that you can transcribe any possible english word.
We already have the alphabet that we use for writing heads of any characterical word, so we could always simply write a sequence of those, however we can do slightly better. If you take the letters of the alphabet and rotate them upside-down, we can attach any pair of them to form a single character with the first letter being on top, and the second letter on the bottom.
To mark a word as a proper noun, we place a single dot to the left of the first character. Optionally, you may also save space by writing all the letters on a single line. For example, *Timothy* would be written as:
If you choose to write the name over multiple lines, please be mindful of the fact that some letter pairs are also words in their own right, like *cb* is also the word *can*. Thus, it may be unclear where a name ends, and the sentence again begins. Writing only enough letters so that the name may be recognized, say the first three, may be preferable.
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**Historical Alternatives**
The proposal above differs slightly from the original system, which did not give the guidance to write on a single line. This creates long, sprawling, and ambiguous text, which it is quite clear that contemporary authors found as unusable as I did.
For example, Jane Seger chose to instead attach the first three letters of the name together in a stack like:
She even went further and would write uncommon words this way when needed, for instance the word *characters* ([Segar 1589]("https://characterie.neocities.org/references.md#16thcentury/thedivinepropheciesofthetensibylls(1589)"), p.12). This is a very attractive method, and I recommend it to practicioners who are flexible with the system.
Timothy Bright himself seems to have struggled to decide how to write proper nouns, as his letter ([Bright 1586]("https://characterie.neocities.org/references.md#16thcentury/epistletotitus(1586)")) that he sent to Queen Elizabeth used an alternate method which seems likely similar to modern alphabetic shorthands. However, this example differs significantly enough from the final published system to render these pages fully illegible.
What this means in practice is actually quite staggering: I only know of three contemporary texts in Characterie, and each of them represent proper nouns differently!
Sufficed to say, proper nouns are one of the weaknesses, and contemporary authors created their own ways of dealing with them. I tried to find the smallest change to his system that makes it practical, but my recommendation does differ to what you will likely find in historical texts.
## Writing Numbers
The final type of character you might need to write are digits and numbers. These again reuse much the same components as before. Using the same heads from the alphabet, but dangling a straight body downwards, we can get characters that are only otherwise being used for pairs of characters like *aa*, *ba*, *ca* and so on. These will be our digits.
    
    
As with names, you can combine them into a single line if they fit, otherwise you must split the digits over multiple lines. Unlike with proper nouns, these digits are never valid characterical words, and so can never be confused with a word. They could be confused with proper nouns where every other letter is *a*, however the lack of a leading dot ensures you can always differentiate them. As an example, this is how you write the number 2023.
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**Historical Divergences**
The proposal is again slightly different from the original system, which did not give the guidance to write on a single line. This is again to avoid numbers sprawling all over the document.
Additionally, the original system was extremely vague in how it defined numbers. The full text from the manual defining how to write numbers is:
Nombers are written by the heads of the compound characters, with a ſtreight bodie hanging, and take increaſe by place, as cyphers in arithmetike.
The last phrase, "and take increaſe by place, as cyphers in arithmetike" simply refers to the fact that you should write them like digits in traditional numbers ("cyphers" being a word for "digit", and "take increaſe by place" referring to what we now refer to as "place values"). It at no place tells you *which head* refers to *which digit* or gives any example.
Compounding this difficulty, is the fact that I know of no contemporary text which contains any numbers! That one sentence is all that we have to base the description of numbers on.
I've taken a very reasonable guess as to how the heads would associate to digits, but it is not the only reasonable way to do it.
**Solution.**
In this case, we just write out the digits into the numbers.
 
Depending on context, these may be too wide, and may freely be split over lines.
 
**Solution.**
These are spelled by writing out the letters one by one. Recall that not every letter exists, so names like *Jessica* are written *Iessica*, *Steve* like *Stewe*, *Davidson* like *Dawidson*, and *Xavier* like *Cawier*.
  
  
This is acceptable, but Jessica and Davidson are quite long. Feel free to abbreviate these as needed.
 
Even though I only mentioned it in a note, and even though it can only hint at the name, Jane Seager's method can be so beautiful that I want to show it too.
  
  
Also note that if a name was something like "Melody" which is also an english word, it should be written as if it was the word itself, however we do not know enough to do that now.
- "I love glass."
- "We rule the field."
- "The gospel of Paul"
- "Enjoy the labor of love!"
- "We enjoy nothing in the mine."
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**Solution.**
These sentences may be written as follows.
 
 
Remember you may wrap lines at your pleasure, so this, or anything else, is fine too.
 
 
