Mirad Grammar/Alphabet

The Alphabet

Mirad uses the Roman alphabet as in Modern English. There is an upper case (majuscules or capital letters) and a lower case (miniscules or small letters). The upper case letters are used for capitalization exactly as in English. Mirad, at least for non-foreign words, uses no diacritic marks such as the brève, the grave accent, or the dieresis. The order of the alphabet is the same as in English. The letters, though, are pronounced as shown in the chart. Note that there is a pattern:: The vowel of each Mirad letter name changes to the single vowel letter before it. For example, the vowel in the name for letter f changes to e following the letter e in the alphabetic sequence. The Mirad letter name for j is ji because it is just beyond the vowel letter i in the alphabetic sequence. Uppercase letters have a Mirad letter name beginning in ag, a prefix meaning big.

Alphabet A-N

Lowercase	a	b	c	d		e	f	g	h		i	j	k	l	m	n
Mirad Letter Name	a	ba	ca	da		e	fe	ge	he		i	ji	ki	li	mi	ni
Uppercase	A	B	C	D		E	F	G	H		I	J	K	L	M	N
Mirad Letter Name	aga	agba	agca	agda		age	agfe	agge	aghe		agi	agji	agki	agli	agmi	agni

Alphabet O-Z

Lowercase	o	p	q	r	s	t		u	v	w	x	y	z
Mirad Letter Name	o	po	ko	ro	so	to		u	vu	wu	xu	yu	zu
Uppercase	O	P	Q	R	S	T		U	V	W	X	Y	Z
Mirad Letter Name	ago	agpo	agko	agro	agso	agto		agu	agvu	agwu	agxu	agyu	agzu

The letters c and q are used only to represent words and names imported into Mirad from other languages, or for words in which letters of the alphabet are used to spell out chemical terms, metric units, country names, languages, and other terms based on existing world standards like ISO.

Letter Names

Spelling a word aloud means uttering the word's Mirad letter names in succession left to right. If the letter is a upper case, then the letter name is preceded by ag-....big, eg.:

• anxwa is spelled aloud as a-ni-xu-wu-a
• Mirad is spelled aloud as agmi-i-ro-a-da

Note that age for E and agge for G need to be carefully distinguised. Age is pronounced A-ge, while agge is pronounced Ag-ge.

Capitalization

Capitalization in Mirad is handled mostly as in English:

• The first word of a new sentence is capitalized.
• All proper nouns are capitalized, including names of people, organizations, books, languages, countries, etc.
• Acronyms are capitalized, eg. DXV....FBI.
• If a verb or adjective is based on a proper noun, the proper noun part of the word gets capitalized, eg. Deudxer....to Germanify or loNazixer....to de-Nazify, or Irolim-ulza....Kelly (= Ireland) green.
• The planets are capitalized.
• The word god is capitalized if referring to a religion's one, true god, otherwise not.

As exceptions, though:

• The days of the week, the months of the year, and the seasons are not capitalized.

Punctuation

Punctuation is handled as in English, with the following exception:

• A colon (:) is used in direct quotations, as opposed to the comma (,) used in English, eg.:

He said, "Let there be light."....It da: "Van esu man."

Here is a chart showing punctuation marks and symbols along with their names in Mirad:

Punctuation Marks and Symbols

ENGLISH	SYMBOL	MIRAD
MARKS
period	.	dyanujnod (or simply: nod)
comma	,	grunsiyn
colon	:	ennodsiyn
semi-colon	;	nodgrunsiyn
question mark	?	didsiyn
exclamation point	!	yoksiyn
single quote	'	aona gedsiyn
double quote	"	eona gedsiyn
hyphen	-	naydsiyn
dash	--	eona nadsiyn
underscore	_	oybnadsiyn
wave dash	~	pyaon nadsiyn
forward slash	/	zaya kinad
backward slash	\	zoya kinad
double slash	//	eona kinad
apostrophe	'	oysunsiyn
left parenthesis right parenthesis	( )	zua uzkusiyn zia uzkusiyn
left square bracket right square bracket	[ ]	zua izkusiyn zia izkusiyn
left curly bracket right curly bracket	{ }	zua uzginkusiyn zia uzginkusiyn
ellipsis	...	innodsiyn
SYMBOLS
ampersand	&	aysiun
at sign	@	besiun
percent sign	%	asoynsiun
hash tag	#	nyedsiun
asterisk	*	marsiun

Note: Most of these marks and symbols are on a standard English-language keyboard. Mathematical symbols are not listed here. See the Mathematical Expressions section of Numbers.

Text Direction

Text in Mirad is written from left to right with spaces between words.