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Standard Battal Alphabet

The Standard Battal Alphabet, or SBA is Battal's first phonetic alphabet. Stories say that Brother Dranor created it early in his life in order to advoid having to learn a pictographic alphabet. The SBA became the preferred alphabet for scholars as well as for a number of languages in the twelve realms and other languages in ages to come. However most of the citzens of Battal either use a pictographic alphabet (see The Wang-Tongue) or are illiterate peasants.

The SBA has 27 pronounced letters and three unpronunced ones. When combined to form words the letters connect to form a continous script. The first unprounced letter serves to disambigue confusing letter combinations in larger words, the second is used to make certain words look more important, the purpose of the third is unknown to the fan community at this time. The 27 pronounced letters make the following sounds and are depicted in the same order below with the unprounonced letters at the end:

eh, a, i, u, o, ou

b, p, d, t, g, k

w, v, z, r, s, more different s

f, h, ch, sh, th, ts

l, m, n

Examples of common words:

lulz	farsh

Truly, this is .

Looking Deeper

Inexperienced users of the langauge (most notably, tavern sign crafters) often forget to use the first unpronounced letter (called the dib) and so end up creating script which is difficult to read, or at least to read accurately. Of course in a form of nerdly humor among literate scholars, there is a whole category of alphabetic ambigrams which intentionally exclude the dib in order to allow for two readings. Typically there is a phrase in which one word excludes the dib, although sometimes just the word tells the joke on its own. Usually the standard reading is something rather innocuous, and then the alternate reading is either a clever alteration or play on the meaning, or a rather ribbald pun. (if anybody has one of these, can they upload it?)

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