Lozenge T.

Asaxi orthography and punctuation standard

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Asaxi Orthography and Punctuation Standard

This page is the normative writing standard for Asaxi text in the vault, Vocab Forge, Anki exports, and other generated material.

Letter Case

Asaxi common vocabulary and grammatical material are written in lower case. Sentence beginnings, quoted speech, headings written in Asaxi, example sentences, and isolated common words do not receive automatic capitalization.

The following lexical categories are written in full capitals:

  • proper nouns and proper names, including personal names;
  • place names;
  • borrowed terms.

This is whole-token capitalization rather than English-style title case. Every letter with a case distinction is capitalized, while diacritics and the phonemic glottal-stop apostrophe are preserved. For example, a personal name is written JOHN, not John, and the borrowed term mimi is written MIMI. Productive Asaxi material attached within the same orthographic word follows the word’s capital treatment. Mixed-case Asaxi words are therefore non-standard.

The English proper name Asaxi keeps its capital letter when it occurs in English prose. As a proper name in Asaxi text, it is written ASAXI.

Upper-case interlinear gloss abbreviations such as TOP, PST, and SOV belong to the metalanguage, not to Asaxi orthography, and remain upper case.

Quotation Marks

Asaxi follows Polish quotation-mark typography:

  • primary quotation: „…”;
  • quotation nested inside a quotation: ‚…’.

The guillemet forms formerly used in some notes are not part of the Asaxi standard.

The straight apostrophe ' is not a quotation mark in Asaxi. It represents the phonemic glottal stop /ʔ/ and must not be converted to a curly apostrophe.

Example:

  • Asaxi: no pă „wo pỏpỏ ma, ‚nă xiŕa’ tte.”
  • English: They said, “I am speaking, ‘do not leave.’”
  • Polish: Powiedzieli: „Mówię: ‚nie odchodź’”.

The Asaxi, English, and Polish sentences above are plain text. Only their language labels are bold. Instructional example content and its translations must never be bold or italic. Editorial styling in a literary work is not an example-record style and may be retained.

Example Records

Every dictionary example is stored as one language-separated record:

asaxi: ă wo aiŕů.
translation_en: I grieve.
translation_pl: Cierpię.

The canonical Markdown rendering is:

#### Example 1
 
- **Asaxi:** ă wo aiŕů.
- **English:** I grieve.
- **Polish:** Cierpię.

Additional examples repeat the #### Example N group. A sense may have more than one example, but no field may contain two languages.

Font

The current alphabet font is a single real Medium weight:

Name fieldValue
Full nameAsaxi Merriweather 24pt Medium
PostScript nameAsaxiMerriweather24pt-Medium
Style groupAsaxi Merriweather 24pt Med
Typographic familyAsaxi Merriweather 24pt
Typographic subfamilyMedium
Available weightMedium only

The vault embeds the font as:

anki-assets/fonts/Asaxi-alphabet-Merriweather24pt-Medium.ttf

Its SHA-256 checksum is:

D021B123A7C739CA2C8607AC4CF5A95FBE33ED2D48172B5090BFA25851B27868

Obsidian loads it through the enabled fonts.css snippet. Use the asaxi-text class or lang="art-x-asaxi" only on Asaxi text. Font synthesis is disabled so applications do not invent unavailable bold or italic faces.

The Quartz site embeds the same font bytes at quartz/static/fonts/Asaxi-alphabet-Merriweather24pt-Medium.ttf. quartz/styles/custom.scss applies the face to asaxi-script-alpha, asaxi-text, lang="art-x-asaxi", and the lexicon browser’s Asaxi headwords. English and Polish site prose retains the theme typography.

Editor Behavior

Vocab Forge:

  • lowercases ordinary native Asaxi vocabulary and grammatical material;
  • preserves or enforces full capitals for entries explicitly classified as proper nouns, proper names, place names, or borrowed terms;
  • does not guess a lexical case category from capitalization alone during legacy migration;
  • preserves case in English, Polish, IPA, and explanatory prose;
  • keeps Asaxi, English, and Polish examples in separate controls;
  • converts legacy quotation marks to the approved Asaxi forms;
  • keeps the glottal-stop apostrophe unchanged;
  • renders example sentence content without bold or italic markup.

The generated dictionaries/asaxi.txt word list supports spell-check tools. Vocab Forge Asaxi controls additionally disable browser spell-check because their language is known exactly.

Rebuild the dictionary after vocabulary changes:

py -3.14 build_asaxi_dictionary.py
py -3.14 build_asaxi_dictionary.py --check

The vault’s cspell.json loads this list for compatible editors. Obsidian’s built-in spell-check uses %APPDATA%\obsidian\Custom Dictionary.txt; merge the generated spellings into that file while Obsidian is closed, preserving its existing entries and making a backup first.

References

Backlinks