title
Masetzu Logosyllabary
Artist/Designer
Aleks Hafermaas
Date
2022
type of writing system
Logosyllabary
Based on
Mayan glyphs
Masetzu Logosyllabary is a fictional script inspired by the ancient Mayan writing system of Mesoamerica. This writing system combines the characteristics of syllabaries and logographies, using modular images to represent objects and concepts. The challenges lay in creating distinctive symbols to represent the thousands of consonant-vowel combinations in English, while allowing these symbols to convey broader meanings. These symbols are richly rooted in the physical world, encompassing depictions of human organs, abstract figures, plants, animals, and man-made objects. Masetzu distinguishes itself from the original Mayan script by incorporating “shells” that surround the characters to define the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) and small “tags” to signify when a symbol should be interpreted symbolically rather than phonetically. This project extends the script’s artistic expression into other media, such as ceramic sculptures and abstract art, fostering a dialogue between tradition and modernity.
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Artwork courtesy of Aleks Hafermaas. All rights reserved.
abjad
abugida
acrophony
acrostic
alphabet
alphasyllabary
asemic writing
automatic writing
boustrophedon
character
character set
cipher
code
conscript
cryptography
encode
experimental
grapheme
glyph
hieroglyph
hieroglyphics
imaginarium
language
letter
letterform
linguistic
logosyllabary
logographic
logogram
nat scirpt
neography
optophonetic
phoneme
phonetic
pictograph
quasi
re-worlding
script
syllabary
syllable
symbol
speculative
torus
versimilitude
writing system
