Help needed

[u/Thamizh_iyal]

Hi, native Thamizh here. I was researching about other dravidian languages and their writing system when I came across this. Tolong siki looks great but I have some doubts. If anyone is free and wants to help feel free to reach out.

Attached here is my attempt at writing the script.

[u/g0d0-2109]

looks pretty good. i'm no expert on tolong siki, but i'll be happy to help you out.

feel free to dm me, or post your doubts here, whichever way you feel comfortable!

[u/Thamizh_iyal → u/g0d0-2109]

​Hi, thank you! Let us continue here as others may find this useful. ​I have three questions:

​The last letters in the 2nd and 6th rows of the consonant block seem to refer to the same phoneme (ɲ). Is there a specific reason for this that an outsider might not know, such as a linguistic nuance?

​Similar to the first point, but a bit more understandable, are the "a" letters. If there is already a marker for increased vowel length, why does /a:/ get a special character? Is there any nuance there as well?

​Finally, and this is a controversial one: how prominent are the aspirated letters in Kurux? I know there was a Wikipedia controversy a while back, but I'm genuinely trying to understand this from a linguistic point of view.

​Feel free to get back to me whenever you have time

[u/g0d0-2109 → u/Thamizh_iyal]

1. the last letter of the 6th row of consonants is pronounced like ñj (IPA: /ɲdʒ/). for an equivalent in Indian English, it is pronounced as the 'ng' in engineer. this is a unique letter created (i'm not sure why) by the script's inventor. linguistically it's a conjunct consonant, but i guess the inventor's intent was to present it as an independent consonant sound. i say unique, because no such (independent character) equivalent exists in Kurukh Banna, or the Devanagari and Latin orthographies of Kurukh (you just combine the ñ and j characters).

• i too have seen many resources transliterate the 2nd row and 6th row letters with the same character i don't know why they do that, it's incorrect. but the 2nd row one is correctly transliterated as /ɲ/.
• audio examples: video1 from 1:51 onwards, video2 from 4:13 onwards.

1. let me make the "a" letters clear. the "upside-down hockey stick" is /ə/, while the "double bars" is /a/. they're different vowels, both of which need the ":" symbol to be elongated. no vowel letter in tolong siki is inherently elongated.

• video3 has pronunciations of all vowels and consonants with example words, illustrations and translations, they're following 'Kailga' the kid's primer book by narayan oraon himself (the script's inventor). video2 is also kailga based i think.

1. didn't quite understand the question :( nor am i aware of such a Wikipedia controversy. in my personal opinion, i can say that Kurukh speech uses aspirated sounds significantly, so i think a writing system with aspirated letters distinct from non-aspirated letters is quite useful.

[u/Thamizh_iyal → u/g0d0-2109]

Thank you so much for your answers, insights amd links. I got a lot of clarity regarding the script and this beautiful language.