The Ancient Alphabet

[jadesfire]

After my fic/picture posts yesterday, a few people asked me about the alphabet I wrote in. Below the cut is:

- A scan of the alphabet I developed, based on the "Ancient" font.
- A paragraph of explanation
- The same paragraph written in 'Ancient' because it looks cool
(or click the links to see them in my Scrapbook)





The picture shows both upper and lower case. The upper case letters are based on the font used at the end of cesperanza's Written by the Victors, which is a form that it's actually possible to write. The lower case letters are basically curved versions of the upper case ones.

The original letters, as designed for the show (eg here) are too blocky to write, and it's obvious that look rather than function was the primary intention. Also, although alphabets do have a limited amount of duplication (eg 'O' and '0'), making 'f' and 'u' the same symbol is a little confusing. I've added a little bar to the back of 'u' to make them distinctive. The numbers were certainly not meant for anyone doing maths by hand!

There are various messages written on things around the set, and I've spent way too long trying to read them!

The same paragraph, written with the Ancient alphabet:

Comments

[miss-zedem.livejournal.com]

Oh I should imagine so - the scribes would have naturally started to join the minims (unattached down strokes) together after a while. The join between one letter and the next is called the ligature, but I'm not sure what the overall term for joined up writing is, or if there even is one (I probably missed that class, or fell asleep ;)). Certain letters lend themselves to ligatures, while others don't - think about writing present day English, and how certain letters then to get left unattached. It'd be the same for writers using Ancient.

Also, the point you make about some letters being similar - in practice, this isn't so unusual, and is why we have so much trouble with medieval texts now. Certain letters can look very alike, which is why scribes brought in marks and accents, to show what word was intended. In order to decide how much of a problem this was for the users of the language, you need to decide what percentage of the population were funtionally literate - ie able to read and write with some degree of competence. If it's a largely spoken language, with writing only being used for record keeping, and by the scientific/intellectual elite, it wouldn't matter if there was some ideographic confusion because everyone would know what they meant from the context of the word, without being too bothered by its actual structure.

*blinks*

I may be in the running for a place in that hall myself... *hangs head*

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

*blinks back* Woah. Um. I think I learnt more there than in 3 palaeography classes during my MA. Most of them I spent looking at the pictures of mss going 'ooh, pretty!' *hangs head also*

Since I think I'm probably the only one to be 'functionally literate' in this format, it's probably not going to be too big a problem...