Future Alphabet

I said I would be posting more art. That still stands, but I took longer than I'd like with this piece. I'm still happy with it. 

This is the writing system of most of humanity between the 21st and 31st centuries. It was created by the first Martian colonists in 2056, and as their descendants colonized the Sol System, it became standard throughout human space. Due to it's origins on Mars, the script became known as "Old High Martian".

Martian is designed to be as straightforward and logical as possible. For instance, each character makes one and only one sound. There are no redundant characters (like C and X), and no letter is ever silent. Letters don't join together to make completely different sounds (as in Th, Ph, Gh, Oo, Ch, Sh, etc), nor do they ever join together to make the same sound (the T's in 'latter'). One sound for every one letter. 

The way the letters look isn't random. Well, mostly not. The grid on the right shows how each letter is similar to one another. The columns describe the place in the mouth where a sound gets produced: There's Labial (the lips), Alveolar (the weird ridge behind your teeth), Palatal (the roof of your mouth), Velar (the back of the tongue), and Glottal (the back of the throat). The rows describe the manner by which a sound gets articulated: Stops (the airflow is stopped), Fricatives (the airflow gets obstructed), Nasal Stops (the airflow is stopped in the mouth, but diverted through the nasal cavity), and Approximants (the airflow smoothly passes through). Each place and manner has an associated shape that gets incorporated into each corresponding letter. Also represented is voicing. Many letters, such as P and B, are made the same way except for voicing: In B, the vocal chords vibrate, while in P they don't. Thus, B is voiced and P is voiceless. As a side note, the vowels are all pronounced like those in Spanish: They are said as Ah, Eh, Ee, Oh, and Oo, respectively. 

This was fun for me to draw. Ever since I was little, I've made "alphabets" before, but this is my first serious attempt at one. The idea of doing this has been in my head since January, and since then I've been experimenting and researching the hell out of phonetics, which has now culminated in this writing script. Enjoy!

And, feel free to ask questions if this requires further explanation.