The Salvian hieroglyphs for Visauru and Salvi.
Thousands of years ago the Navippan tribes (Classical Salvian navihpās "perennial wanderers, path-walkers") who first came to the Salvian peninsula learned to trace patterns from the phoenixes, creating simple but potent spells for themselves. They could not trace them through the air, as the firebirds did, but instead carved the symbols out of the ground. In the semi-arid scrubland of the Colonnade and the North, it was often sufficient to leave depressions in the earth, but in the cenote-filled rainforests of the West and South (and the monsoon gales of the East), something more permanent was required. And so came the tumaris, the white-stone roads acting as conduits between stone pillars onto which the geoglyph symbols (salvis) were carved.
And from those symbols arose the written language of the Salvians: every glyph representing a root word, with additional lines for derivations. Sometimes the rebus principle applied, but after three thousand years and with numerous new methods of writing made available (birch bark from Quiram, tapir vellum, papyrus from Hercua, the fabric of reality) the glyphs slowly began to change. Concentric style involved drawing the symbols in a spiderweb pattern; block capitals preferred pictograms carved in jade, or painted on pottery.
These two symbols are the name-glyphs of Visauru and Salvi, in Neoconcentric style (dating back to the 29th Century). These are usually drawn in the air, then imprinted onto an object–paper, stone, metal, flesh, it really doesn't matter. They can also been drawn using calligraphy brushes, although it's usually helpful to superimpose the circles before that (there's a very helpful spell for that, and believe me when I say that the Tanatapa family still makes a mint off it).
Writing in Salvian
The writing system can be best explained this way. Let us say you have the root word "run". In Classical Salvian, this would be represented by a single, relatively simple glyph, maybe two or three curved lines or circles. "Runner" would be represented as RUN-ER, with the appropriate suffix marked on the right-hand side of the glyph. Prefixed words like "re-run" follow the same pattern, RE-RUN represented by a mark on the left-hand side of the glyph. (Often these are simplified versions of other glyphs.) "Ran" would be RUNˆA, the infix represented above the root.
Writing direction in the modern day is left-to-right, up-to-down, or else up-to-down, right-to-left. Earlier texts often were written in Mayan style, left-to-right then up-to-down in two columns at a time.
