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An artificial or constructed script (also conscript or neography) is a term for new writing systems specifically devised by specific known individuals, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture like a natural script. They are often designed for use with conlangs, although several of them also are used in linguistic experimentation or other more pragmatic purposes. The most well-known conscripts are J. R. R. Tolkien's elaborate Tengwar and Cirth, but many others exist, such as the Klingon script and N'Ko.
Some like Han'Gul, Cherokee, N'Ko, the Fraser Alphabet, and the Pollard script were invented to allow certain spoken natural languages that did not already have writing systems to be written.
Several neographies have been created for purely aesthetic reasons or to accompany conlangs; others were invented with more practical goals in mind. Some, such as the Shavian alphabet, Alphabet 26, and the Deseret alphabet, were devised as English spelling reforms. Others, including Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech and John Malone's Unifon were developed for pedagogical use. Blissymbols were developed as a written international auxiliary language. Shorthand systems may be considered conscripts.
By their very nature conscripts are not normally encoded in Unicode, but this has not deterred people from proposing them. A proposal for Klingon was turned down, but both Tengwar and Cirth are still under consideration. One conscript which did make it into Unicode is the Shavian alphabet, named after George Bernard Shaw.
A project exists to coordinate the encoding of many conscripts in specific places in the Unicode Private Use Areas (E000-F8FF and 000F0000-0010FFFF), known as the ConScript Unicode Registry.
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