I found this interesting, so I looked into the writing system and found out it was Circular Gallifreyan developed by Loren Sherman. After seeing a bunch of really cool designs, some exceedingly intricate, I had to know how it was made. And I was disappointed. See, the alphabet is basically just coded English letters, randomly assigned shapes. Or rather as randomly as the English alphabet laid down on a grid.
Which is fine for when I was a kid or someone who wants a cool design based on a phrase that is relatively easy to make. What I'm surprised is that he even made a Java program that does the translation for you if you aren't artistically inclined.
But I figure Gallifreyan should be more sophisticated. I liked the possible artistry, but shouldn't there be more elegance to a Time Lord's writing system? So I set out to redesign the alphabet by organising similar sounds with similar shapes. My first attempt basically just took the Sherman Circular Gallifreyan system and rearranged things a bit and added more vowels.
But this really wasn't good enough for me. It felt unwieldy. So I decided to remove the straight lines from the consonant circles and made the base form of the vowels the lines. The current system is as follows:
I still need to make it look 'pretty', but there it is. I might do some major or minor revisions in the future as I figure out how to deal with extra sounds from other Earth languages.
The biggest problem with this system is that you can't just take one letter and use the Gallifreyan equivalent. Pronunciation is needed. This might make it less accessible than Circular Gallifreyan, but for the linguist nerd in me, that's okay. Below are some of the things I've done with it so far:
This blog will be more about figuring out rules and styles for my system as well as pictures, though if you want just pics, feel free to follow my Tumblr where I'll also post:
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