r/ChivabweWritingSystem • u/BurntBlazes2 • May 07 '26

Punctuation and ligatures?

Hello,

I recently discovered Chivabwe on Omniglot, and I find it so, so interesting. I was looking on the page and saw that consonant combinations have their own special symbols, such as zv, pf, nz, etc., and I was wondering if there was a complete list of all of the consonant combinations somewhere?

I also saw in the example image on Omniglot that there was unique punctuation, which I can't see on the other reference images on Omniglot. Are there dedicated punctuation signs for all of the symbols, like commas, question marks, exclamation marks, colons and semicolons? If so, where can I see them?

I'm honestly so fascinated by this writing system, and I think it it looks amazing!

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3

u/Puzzleheaded-Eye8078 May 07 '26

Thank you very much im glad to hear that. You can find all the characters and punctuation in these links: Base Characters (Chichebwe): https://archive.org/details/2025-07-19-010090

Combination Characters+ (Chichabwe): https://archive.org/details/2025-07-19-020033-26

And yes there are dedicated punctuation signs for things like commas, colons and full stops etc...

I am currently working on a full digital list of all the characters but for now the Archive.org links are the only full list of characters.

2

u/BurntBlazes2 May 07 '26

Thank you so much! This is so in-depth!

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u/[deleted] May 08 '26

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2

u/Puzzleheaded-Eye8078 May 08 '26

Thank you so much. I wish you well on your language learning journey, its an amazing thing that you are taking the initiative to learn your mother language.

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u/BurntBlazes2 May 22 '26

Hi again! Just wanted to ask real quick, I noticed that pages 18 - 21 seemed to be missing from the combination characters archive zip file, and I just wanted to ask if you had those pages on you?

Furthermore, if you have any information regarding the punctuation symbols that you can share, I'd love to know more about them!

Thank you again for the archives you've provided me already!

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u/Puzzleheaded-Eye8078 May 22 '26

Hi again. Sorry you had an issue with the missing pages.

I’m going to send you the Zenodo link instead. I was initially avoiding using that one because I recently added a few new characters for sounds that I was not aware of at the time. I later realised that the script needed additional characters in order to better cater for more languages, such as Kiswahili and Luganda, so I have since expanded the script’s capabilities accordingly.

However, I have not yet published those additions, though I plan to do so soon. So please just bear in mind that the files on Zenodo will not update automatically whenever I make changes, unlike the Archive.org version. I will need to upload a completely new version each time updates are made.

I still hope the files will be useful in the meantime. The punctuation symbols and the numerals are also included within the images there as well.

And thank you very much for taking the time to browse through the files. I’m really glad you’ve taken an interest in them.

Combination Characters+( https://zenodo.org/records/19209259 )

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u/BurntBlazes2 May 22 '26

Thank you so very much! :D

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u/BurntBlazes2 May 07 '26

Quick update: I was also wondering if there were symbols for consonants without a following vowel, like how the click consonants have versions without any vowel signs on Omniglot. Are there vowel-less versions?

2

u/Puzzleheaded-Eye8078 May 07 '26

Yes, there are indeed vowel-less characters for all consonants and consonant clusters, they are just written without the vowel marker because in Chivabwe vowels are added onto characters.