The Ferengi writing system, unfortunately, can't be represented in this text file. However, a few things can be said about it. One of the more common writing systems is a linear, left-to-right cursive script. F or each letter, there are 5 forms: Initial, intermediate, final, isolated, and simplified. The initial form is for the beginning of a word, the intermediate form goes between two other letters, the final form goes at the end of a word, the isolated form is neither preceded nor followed by another letter, and the simplified form mostly resembles the isolated form, but it was originally used for other Ferengi writing schemes and is used with computers.
If you examine the history of Roman alphabet (the one we use), you can see that parts of it were borrowed from the Greek alphabet, which was taken from the Pheonicians, who spoke a Semitic language. The Semites were the first to develop a true alphabet (in contrast to a syllabary or pictorial writing sy stem). Their alphabet could be described as a syllabary where each letter represents a specific consonant and ANY vowel. Their alphabet evolved this way because in communication, consonants carried meaning, while vowels only carried gramatical informati on. Each letter was originally a picture of something which started with that letter and the letter was named after that thing (ie. their /d/ is called /dalEt/, which means 'door', and it was originally drawn to resemble a door). As the Semitic languag es evolved and divided, in some cases vowels came to convey more meaning. To account for this, the Semites began to use consonants (glides usually) to represent their corresponding vowels (/j/ was used for /i/, /w/ for /u/, etc.). By the time the Gree ks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, the practice was quite common and necessary, and the Greeks followed suit. The Greeks needed vowels to be written, and there were sounds in the Phoenician alphabet which didn't exist in Greek, so the Greeks used some of those extra consonants to represent their vowels. Over these thousands of years of evolution, the modern Roman alphabet does not resemble the first alphabets at all, while the evolutionary origins are clear. Additionally, the names of the letters (eve n for Semitic languages like Arabic) have changed and simplified.
[If there are any errors in this, please tell me... I wrote it from memory.]
The history of the Ferengi alphabet isn't so clear [or not made up yet], but it is believed to have come from a syllabary whose letters originally looked like what they were named after. Over time, this syllabary was useful for most Ferengi languages and dialects, but the letters were simplified, and the names changed, etc. After a while, though, this beca me inadequate to represent many Ferengi languages when vowels began dropping out and they were left with rather large consonant clusters. Originally, the old spellings of the words were used, but over generations, the letters in consonant clusters beca me viewed as representing either only the consonant or the consonant followed by a schwa, and the most commonly used consonant-vowel letters replaced the others in usage. Since in Ferengi, the vowels are very important, it appears that new letters were s imply contrived to represent the vowels. Most of these are based on less commonly used letters that would have otherwise dropped out of the syllabary due to disuse. Now, the Ferengi alphabet has one symbol per phoneme, and the government and language in stitution maintain consistency between spelling and pronounciation (to a large extent). Due to continued scientific usage, some letters which have recently gone into disuse are still considered to be part of the alphabet and when children are taught the alphabet, they are taught to pronounce those letters, even though they would not otherwise use them in normal speech. In Modern Ferengi, the schwa is very commonly used, but it has no lexical meaning. As a result, it is not written, and has to be learned.