Sorang Sompeng is a script devised in recent times for the
Sora language of central
Indian tribes. Until its invention, there had been a battle between
Christian missionaries desiring to promote their
Latin script and Indians living in border regions who hoped for the adoption of
Oriya or
Telugu. Tribal leaders, wishing to take neither side and thus commit themselves to an
ideology by adopting a script, instead sought to devise their own. A man named
Mangei Gomango received a religious vision in 1936 from which he passed on Sorang Sompeng's 24 letters. Each is named after a god or goddess of the
Hindu religious sect that Gomango later founded.
Like most native scripts of India, Sorang Sompeng is an abugida where alphabetic letters have a single inherent vowel that can be replaced by the presence of another vowel character. In this case of Sorang Sompeng, this is a schwa. Despite divine intervention, the script itself is not actually representative of the phonemes of the Sora language. At least a few sounds are not paired with letters. Some of these are formed through diagraphs, such as a retroflexive 'r' represented with the combination 'rd', but others such as the glottal stop that form an important part of Sora words are not represented. Another issue that hinders efficiency is that Sorang Sompeng has no good way of representing consonant clusters. Multiple cosonant letters are written in a row to express consonant clusters, but one cannot know whether they represent an actual consonant cluster or just a series of syllables interjected with schwa vowels except by context.
The shape of Sorang Sompeng is extremely curvy, with complex characters that very frequently use initial or final loops. For those who don't subscribe to the divine inspiration interpretation of origins, it is thought that much of the abugida's structure may have been derived from cursive Latin writing. Telugu's shape might also have been an influence (Gomango was fluent in both).
Daniels, Peter T., Bright, William. The World's Writing Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.