This is the original repository for content related to the language, Essiah.
The repo contains a few documents that explain the basics and give some examples, but I'll try and explain a little about the ideas behind the language here. The basic principle was to make a simplified, improved, and phonetic English.
The alphabet does not use the exact characters from English, but it is heavily inspired by the English alphabet, and it was purposefully designed to be easy to learn for someone who already knows English. The alphabet is largely produced by rotating base characters to form groupings of characters.
Each highlighted group of letters is produced by rotating the first character in the sequence by either 120, 90, or 45 degrees. In this way, the alphabet can partially be generated rather than memorized entirely by brute force. In every case where the Essiah letter strongly resembled an English letter, I chose that letter to represent a corresponding sound in English. So, roughly speaking, if it looks like an English letter, then it pretty much sounds like that letter in Essiah. Therefore, the character that looks like the letter, o, is always pronounced as it is in "hot" or "vote". These are considered its "short" and "long" forms in Essiah.
The long forms of the vowels are written by doubling the vowel in the word, or by using one of the many diphthongs available. This can be seen in the name of the language itself:
The first "backwards slash" character is the letter that corresponds to the English e, it sounds like the e from "bet". The second e is doubled, and therefore is read long, as in the word "feet". Using the font, you can access the special doubled characters by using the capitalized version of the single letter (Essiah has no capitalization, so nothing is lost). These special, condensed versions only exist for the a, e, and i characters, which all derive from a single line that can easily be doubled. To make a "long o" or a "long u", the letters are simply written twice, except for in the diphthongs.
The distinction between past, present, and future tense is handled by prefixing or suffixing the o letter to the base form of a verb. Most of the potential tenses in English are possible with the use of markers which indicate whether an action was "continuous" or "completed", these concepts are also associated with the terms "progressive" and "perfect" in English grammar. The repo documents demonstrate the different markers and how they are used with the time tense system to produce all of the English tenses like Past Progressive Perfect.
There are no separate characters for numbers. The numerals 0-9 are mapped directly onto the first ten letters of the alphabet, and then the named powers of ten from English are mapped onto the remaining letters in ascending order (i.e. ten, hundred, thousand, million). Things were arranged so that 0 and 1 retained their usual form in Essiah, so the alphabet begins with the two characters that closely resemble the English numerals 0 and 1. Unless the context makes it clear, numbers should be written after an "inverted caret", which is accessed by the keystroke that creates a semi-colon in English (Essiah has no semi-colons). This is placed right before the number to distinguish it from a word, since the numbers also act as letters. Obviously, there are many cases where numbers are written in something like a spreadsheet where the inverted caret symbol can be omitted.
Even further, not only are the numbers mapped on to the characters of the alphabet, their names are also derived, in a systematic way, from the names of these letters in Essiah. The name is simply built from the basic sounds of the corresponding letters. This is explained with examples in the repo documents.
Finally, I'll give one example sentence in Essiah:
In this example, you can see the "inverted caret" (which currently has no name in Essiah). When a number is used within a sentence like this, the symbol is used to avoid confusion. You can also see an example of the special rule for verbs that begin or end with a short vowel. The verb "to stand", which is the first word of the example sentence, begins with a vowel, so instead of adding the usual 'o' character to the beginning to indicate past tense, the 'a' vowel is doubled and made long.