| Course Description |
Why is Turkish spelling easy while English looks chaotic? Why do Japanese, Hebrew, and Armenian carve
language up so differently on the page? And why are game developers and conlang fans obsessed with scripts?
This course is a hands-on tour of how writing systems work. We treat orthography as grammar: principled
mappings from sounds and morphemes to visible forms. You will learn the core toolkit (units of writing,
allography, script typology, depth and transparency, morphographemics), test it on real languages, and run
design-studio labs that evaluate or improve actual orthographies. Labs welcome creative builds: prototype an ingame
script or a conlang orthography, justify its rules, and test its usability. Light formal modeling keeps things
precise without heavy math. By the end you will be able to analyze a script, argue for design choices, and ship a
small reform or a polished worldbuilding system. Although writing systems have traditionally been sidelined in
theoretical linguistics, learning how scripts encode phonology and morphology sharpens core theory and supports
real applications, including teaching children to read and write, designing accessible orthographies, and building
effective NLP architectures. Open to undergraduates of all levels; Intro to Linguistics is a prerequisite.
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