ASAPHR

A personal research project started in 2026. After Latin alphabets and classic typefaces, the urge to go one step further: no longer drawing letters, but inventing the whole writing system, the one that decides what a letter is, and the language that comes with it.

What makes a script a script? A medium, a reading direction, a phonology, a grammar, a stroke. ASAPHR takes each of these and turns it against the grain, to see what still holds once habits are removed.

Looking first: runes, invented scripts, the ones conceived by linguists before typographers. Then drawing by hand, for a long time, until the signs answered one another. The language was written alongside the signs, in a codex that fixes everything from medium to punctuation. Glyphs only came afterwards, to set down a system that already existed on paper.

The medium is a disc. Every statement is born at the edge of its central hole, the semantic zero, and unfolds outwards along sixteen spokes, one every 22.5°. You read the branch at twelve o'clock, from the centre to the edge, then turn the disc clockwise to bring the next one up.

The language rests on sixty master syllables, fifteen per quadrant: matter, motion, state, relation. Each glyph sits in a 3 × 5 grid, in a monoline stroke; the top row stays empty, except for numbers, which wear a hat. A word's role depends only on its position along the spoke: no accents, no inflections.

At the end of each spoke, a seal closes the sentence and says two things at once: where the information comes from (square for witnessed, diamond for inferred, circle for reported) and what to do with it (closed to assert, split to doubt, arrowed to command).

The centre as origin. Centrifugal reading changes everything: the page no longer has a top or a bottom, and a text becomes a figure.

Position rather than accent. The grammar is entirely spatial: who acts, on what, is read from the place on the spoke.

Saying how you know. The seal makes the source of every statement visible at a glance. A script that won't let you lie about your source.

Hand first. The signs come from the gesture, not the grid; the grid only arrives to make them consistent.

A disc for short texts; for long ones, a strip cut along a spoke and wound into a helix, each turn keeping the radial reading. On screen, scrolling turns the disc, one branch after another. Reading ASAPHR becomes a handling as much as a reading.

The codex is written and the system is set; the glyphs are being finished. Next come the disc object-book, and a font to type ASAPHR on a keyboard.