The Maidžen Klaiš

by Andreas Johansson

Introduction
The Maidžen Klaiš where created in the early days of the Federation of Planets to serve two purposes; i) to be the script for the Federation's administrative language, Classical Klaiš, and ii) to be an "auxiliary" script for all the other languages of the Federation, most of which were provided with an official orthography in the Maidžen Klaiš. It eventually replaced most local scripts, and today all the major languages in the region once controlled by the Federation are written in it. In order to achieve the second goal, they were provided with the means to indicate many more sounds than found in Classical Klaiš; if the possibilities of the diacritics system is exploited in full, it should be possible to create a workable orthography for almost any language with them, and they can be used as a universal phonetic script with little change. All this assuming that the users have no objections against piles of diacritics ...

It may be characterized as a featural alphabetical script. "Alphabetical", because each character indicates a single vowel or consonant, and "featural", because similar sounds are indicated by signs that have systematic graphical similarities. For instance, all (oral) stops feature an vertical line to the left, and all velar consonants feature a low horizontal line.

The name "Maidžen Klaiš" is the Tairezaž term, from maidž "sign, character", plural maidžen, and Klaiš. In Steienž, for instance, they are called the Moidžen Xaleš (a frozen expression violating the language's adjective-noun syntax). In Classical Klaiš they were officially called Antšwàvjunin Maidženu "Federal Signs". Only Tairezan terminology will be given in this article.

The Maidžen
The script employs 29 basic characters, or maidžen. They are traditionally presented in the following array:

**Transliteration:**
i	e	a	o	u
p	t	k			?
b	d	g
f	θ	x	s	š	h
v	ð	γ	z	ž	h
m	n	ń
	l		r

According to the "official" values of the signs, ? indicates a glottal stop, h a voiced glottal fricative, ń a velar nasal, š a voicelss postalveolar fricative and ž its voiced counterpart; the rest essentially the IPA values of their transliterations. In practice, the values vary somewhat between languages.

For the purposes of alphabetical ordering, the letters are numbered left-to-right, top-to-bottom. The b letter is thus number 10. Outside school textbooks, the letters are frequently simply listed in this order, rather than displayed in the space-consuming array above. The names of the letters are simply their sounds, in the case of consonants followed by /e/. Signs that are not used in a given language are refered to by unsystematical descriptions of the type "fricative k" for x (which is not found in Tairezaž), or by number (15 for x).

The Maidžolen
Besides the basic characters, the script features a large number of diacritics, known as maidžolen (plural of maidžol, an old dimunitive of maidž, hence "small signs"). Not all will be listed here, but a selection of the more common and interesting. Diacritics are always placed above the letter they modify; when multiple ones occur on the same letter, the may be stacked either vertically or horizontally. Many are simply a small version of some maidž whose sound is somehow similar the diacritic's effect, i dins and u dins being good examples. These two are also good examples of diacritics that have different meanings on different letters.

Name: Example: Transliteration: Description:

kangeθ
"length" á kk Indicates length; used both on vowels and consonants.

nozg
"weight" à Indicates stress; normally only used on vowels.

i dins
"little i" - t^j Marks palatalization on consonants. Theoretically removes rounding from vowels, but unrounded back vowels do not occur in any language normally written with the Maidžen Klaiš, wherefore no reason has been seen to come up with a transliteration for it.

u dins
"little u" y k^w Marks labialization on consonants. Adds rounding to vowels.

terkel
"switcher" j l Turns vowels into semivowels. Makes consonants syllabic.

Name:	Example:	Transliteration:	Description:
kangeθ "length"		á kk	Indicates length; used both on vowels and consonants.
nozg "weight"		à	Indicates stress; normally only used on vowels.
i dins "little i"		- t^j	Marks palatalization on consonants. Theoretically removes rounding from vowels, but unrounded back vowels do not occur in any language normally written with the Maidžen Klaiš, wherefore no reason has been seen to come up with a transliteration for it.
u dins "little u"		y k^w	Marks labialization on consonants. Adds rounding to vowels.
terkel "switcher"		j l	Turns vowels into semivowels. Makes consonants syllabic.

Of these, Tairezaž only uses kangeθ, and only on e a o. Steienž uses kangeθ (but only on consonants!), and terkel on i to indicate /j/. Altaii famously uses u dins on i to indicate /y/. Vaikin, ancestor of Altaii, used i dins on dental consonants to indicate its palatal series, but these sounds have become postalveolar in Altaii.

Other diacritics include a centralizer, a nasalizer and a host of tone signs. Some are really only used for phonetically precise descriptions by professional linguists.

The Ardnaidžen
The script also includes a set of interpunctuation marks, known as ardnaidžen "help signs". The most important ones are ksred "pause", which marks the end of a sentence, and ksredol "little pause", which functions as a comma. See the example below, where they are transliterated as full stop and comma, respectively. Eg:

ze, anév. "yes, now."

Spaces are used between words not separated by any interpunctuation mark. Also classed as an ardnaidž is the hyphen-like tetskezel (stress on the second syllable), or "placetaker". It is used to mark where a sound has been elided, much like how the apostrophe is used in English, wherefore it is transliterated as a such. Eg:

e' zave "the bread."

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