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After the last person who spoke Ngeswte, there was the last person who wrote it.
You didn't learn to write Ngeswte from your grandmother, who never wrote it herself (but, as you would later discover, neither did anyone else). You started when you were small, recording the mysterious words of the songs your grandmother sang to you, in the letters you learned at school. They were the letters of the country your parents and grandmother had fled to, not those of the country in which the lands of the Ngeswte people lie.
When your grandmother died, you wanted to record as much Ngeswte as you remembered. The everyday letters of school no longer seemed right. Too ordinary, too thin, too hollow. You wanted to record your grandmother, who she was, the feeling of the songs.
So you created new letters. And when those turned out too ornate to be practical, you invented new ones again. And when those seemed too blocky, new ones again. And so on.
When you were fifteen, you had a satisfying set of characters, enough to write the half-remembered Ngeswte words, and some more letters for good measure.
You never spoke it, of course, and these extra letters reflected your language; the language of the country where your parents raised you. These were letters you couldn’t imagine doing without.
You didn’t know enough Ngeswte to write more than those few words.
But you liked the look of your own writing system, the new Ngeswte script, so you used it for your own language too. Secret messages to yourself.
This was enough to content you for some time.
Eventually you wanted to choose a new name, a gender-neutral one. You tried looking into traditional Ngeswte names, to see how they were gendered, if there were ungendered Ngeswte names.
In the process, you learned that Ngeswte had never been written, so you were the first to write it, you created the first Ngeswte script.
There was that linguist who studied minoritised languages of the region and recorded some samples. But that’s transcription, it doesn’t really count as writing.
You didn't know any of the linguist's sample words, but you wrote all of them in your script anyway. Ngeswte words in Ngeswte script. All the grammar examples, even the numbers 1-10 got calligraphed.
Your research yielded nothing on Ngeswte names.
The Ngeswte left few words behind for you to record. They left you no name.
Every extant piece of Ngeswte writing is unsigned. No more recent writings are known. The future of the Ngeswte script is uncertain.
You didn't learn to write Ngeswte from your grandmother, who never wrote it herself (but, as you would later discover, neither did anyone else). You started when you were small, recording the mysterious words of the songs your grandmother sang to you, in the letters you learned at school. They were the letters of the country your parents and grandmother had fled to, not those of the country in which the lands of the Ngeswte people lie.
When your grandmother died, you wanted to record as much Ngeswte as you remembered. The everyday letters of school no longer seemed right. Too ordinary, too thin, too hollow. You wanted to record your grandmother, who she was, the feeling of the songs.
So you created new letters. And when those turned out too ornate to be practical, you invented new ones again. And when those seemed too blocky, new ones again. And so on.
When you were fifteen, you had a satisfying set of characters, enough to write the half-remembered Ngeswte words, and some more letters for good measure.
You never spoke it, of course, and these extra letters reflected your language; the language of the country where your parents raised you. These were letters you couldn’t imagine doing without.
You didn’t know enough Ngeswte to write more than those few words.
But you liked the look of your own writing system, the new Ngeswte script, so you used it for your own language too. Secret messages to yourself.
This was enough to content you for some time.
Eventually you wanted to choose a new name, a gender-neutral one. You tried looking into traditional Ngeswte names, to see how they were gendered, if there were ungendered Ngeswte names.
In the process, you learned that Ngeswte had never been written, so you were the first to write it, you created the first Ngeswte script.
There was that linguist who studied minoritised languages of the region and recorded some samples. But that’s transcription, it doesn’t really count as writing.
You didn't know any of the linguist's sample words, but you wrote all of them in your script anyway. Ngeswte words in Ngeswte script. All the grammar examples, even the numbers 1-10 got calligraphed.
Your research yielded nothing on Ngeswte names.
The Ngeswte left few words behind for you to record. They left you no name.
Every extant piece of Ngeswte writing is unsigned. No more recent writings are known. The future of the Ngeswte script is uncertain.
