Prepare yourself for the (hopefully) short journey ahead. When you finish, you'll be able to scribble like a pro.
NOTE:You can skip around sections if you want, you don't have to read everything if you don't want to.
I'll mark the critical sections in red down the line.
Scribblish is a language I made in my free time over the past 2-3 months. The goal is to make a language that lets you take notes much faster than before. In short, it's a language based on pictures representing words. I like to call each little picture a scribble, just for fun. I tried to make the words as simple to write out as possible for maximum time saving benefits, too. You also don't have to follow these rules if you don't want to. I figured that this whole scribblish thing would be just a set of characters that you can use to make notetaking easier. The grammar rules here are optional if you're not planning on sharing notes or anything like that. Even then, you can just show whoever you're sharing your notes with the way that you use your scribblish.
Well, I got tired of having to catch up when I fall behind writing notes in class. I was also tired of all the pen strokes you have to do to write words when you have to write fast. For me, that usually just led to chicken scratch for handwriting, and I could barely read my notes anymore. Now, you may be thinking, why don't I just fix my handwriting? The answer is simple. I felt lazy. Why not just write out a few pictures instead of whole words? Why write lot word when few word do trick?
Introductions aside, it's time to start learning the basics!
I tried to make scribblish as simple as possible to use. A lot of the most common words that I used in my notes have their own symbol, and each symbol was made to have at most 5 or so strokes, with most being less than that.
The way I use scribblish most is just directly substituting english words for scribblish words. I found that this not only cuts down on stroke time, it also doesn't make you have to think too hard about the grammar. This language isn't complete yet, either, but it can definitely take you far with the characters it has. As a result, a part of scribblish will be in english, unless you think of a way to describe
Grammar here in the land of scribbles is pretty straightforward. Like English, the form
Subject
-Verb
-Object
is used (Ex. I went to the store.)The only thing that is a bit more complicated is adjectives and forming verbs. Generally, the most important detail/general focus of the verb/noun/adjective goes first. Then the 2nd most important, 3rd most important, etc..
Let's do some grammar examples.
| English word/phrase/sentence | Scribblish word/phrase/sentence | Explanation |
| big red table | ² ¹ \A\ÑÄÃ ³ | This translates literally to, "[adjective/noun group marker] table [size marker] low [size marker] red [adjective/noun group marker]." You may have noticed that the size marker has been used to describe color. The size marker is meant more for general looks, not just size. There are markers for length, width, and height that would be used in place of this general size marker. You also definitely noticed the curly bracket-looking things around the whole phrase. They're not necessary, but sometimes when you're using a heavily detailed word, you might want to include them to increase readability. |
| Fast and tall person | o \CZC | This translates literally to " Person [size marker] high [speed marker] high ."As you can see again, we mixed multiple adjective statements to make a single noun. The first character is a modified version of the character 'I' which you will see in the section below, it means 'you' or 'person.' Adjectives are interchangable in order, if a level of importance isn't clear. If I were talking about how the fast and tall man runs toward me, I might want to put the speed adjective first. |
| Big book | gãápá \C | Literally translates to " thing (marker in this case) word paper (connected to) paper [size marker] high ."The main subject of this phrase is the book. A book is made of paper and words. The dot connects the two scribbles on either side together, in this case 'paper' connected to 'paper' is papers. This dot marker will be actually talked about in the next tutorial. For now, I just want you to see that the first noun, in green, is the word book, and the magenta scribbles modify the word book. |
I feel like I kinda just info-dumped a bunch of stuff to you. Let's actually get to writing our first sentences.
One of the most important scribbles you can learn is the scribble for 'is' or 'to be.' It is a 2-part scribble, a beginning marker and an ending marker. They look like this:
Congratulations, you can now describe yourself! If you wrote this down, you successfully said, "I am scribblish."
I hope that wasn't too bad. As you may notice, the first part of 'is' kind of points to the subject, 'I,' and inside the 'is-brackets' is what you say "I" is.