Full pyramid of the Kolibri script
Kolibri (from Carib, meaning “hummingbird”) was a fractal script used by the Master of the Pyramid and his underlings. It was based on a triangle, or pyramid, of stylized hummingbirds: around a central hummingbird a maximum of three smaller hummingbirds is arranged at 0°, 120° and 240°, around each of which a maximum of three even smaller hummingbirds is arranged ditto. Here is the full pyramid of the script:
Full pyramid of the Kolibri script
The pyramid is divided into three smaller pyramidia (singular pyramidion) around the central hummingbird. Each central hummingbird of a pyramid and pyramidion represented a syllable whereof the value was determined by four things: the color of the hummingbird’s body; the color of its throat; the direction its beak pointed, whether left or right; and the position of its wings, whether raised, lowered, or at middle height (the final three hummingbirds of a pyramidion are discussed below). As consonants, the colors red, green, blue, yellow and purple represented labials, dentals, palatals, velars, and pharyngeals; as vowels, they represented the high front, the mid front, the low front or back, the mid back, and the high back. Pointing right, a hummingbird represented a voiceless consonant or aspirated vowel; pointing left, a voiced consonant or unaspirated vowel. With wings at middle height, it represented plosives; wings raised, it represented nasals; wings lowered, fricatives and semi-vowels.
Here are illustrations of these rules (the colors are sampled from the hummingbirds on plate #99 of Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur):
Vowels of the Kolibri script
ti te ta to tu
To read a pyramid of Kolibri, one began with the syllable of the central hummingbird, then preceded to the syllables of the central hummingbird of the pyramidia clockwise from the top. The final three hummingbirds of each pyramidion represented, clockwise from the top, a consonant and two vowels. Here is an example:
Sample reading
The green left-pointing central hummingbird with a yellow throat is read do; the green red-throated hummingbird above it is read ti, the purple hummingbird above that is read as the consonant h, and the final hummingbird of the first pyramidion as the vowel o. The second pyramidion is read hho-c-hi and the third is read ke-o-ha-e. The full pyramid is therefore read: do-ti-ho-hho-chi-keo-ha-e, meaning “fish swim [in the] silvery moonlight”.
Here are further pyramids:
A pyramid should load below at random if the link is clicked (in some browsers it may be necessary to scroll back down to this position to see the pyramid — if so, to see further random pyramids reload with “F5” or the browser’s REFRESH button, unless the page is resized, in which case the link will have to be clicked again).