Gaeran Common

[Archmage]

So tonight I've been working on something and threw together the rough workings for a Common alphabet, system of numerals, and punctuation symbols.



Most notable about this? I turned it into a downloadable font for the PC.

A sample of what it looks like in action:



Some linguistic BS: The symbol for $ is intended to be a half-assed combination of the D and G letters, a bastardization and shortcut by hasty merchants for the "DG" or Doman gil. Likewise, the @ symbol is a combination of the A and T letters, another mercantile shortcut for writing things like "6 chickens @ 35 gil ea." The & symbol I derived from the letters for E and T in a fabulous bit of linguistic nonsense (the & sign was theoretically originally a shortcut for the Latin "et," for "and"). While et was probably never the word for and in Common, per se, it's a decent character unless there's a better idea, as it's unmistakeable and quick to write.

All of the letters are intended to be carveable into stone, which is why there are no curves. Initially, I included more "dots" in some of the characters, like the D, G, S, and X. However, Ashley and I decided that lazy carvers/writers would probably eventually stop using them anyway, so I dropped them since their initial purpose was to make the letters look more different from English.

An interesting note is that this means speakers of English might have relatively little trouble learning the written alphabet, because it looks vaguely like English writing, but I think it's fair to assume that since the language itself is different, this is just the alphabet--obviously, the grammar and vocabulary would not be the same.

Edit:



Hakaril's arcane rune, not that it's technically part of the alphabet--it's just derived from the letters for HS, and he uses it as a signature instead of writing his name as a general rule. Included just for fun.

[Besyanteo]

That is more fun that it strictly should be.

[Kai]

Chat is ten thousand times more awesome now.

[Capntastic]

I dig it!

[pd Rydia]

That is incredibly awesome.

[Jak Snide]

That is incredibly awesome.

[Idran1701]

Agreeing on the awesome, but I also have a question: Is this something Hakaril came up with himself, making a personal signature rune in that initialing fashion, or is this something that can be assumed to be a general habit?

[Kai]

Anytime writing is a huge hassle (like, for example, when you're carving) it's easier to combine runes into compound-sigil type things. It happened a lot with the Futhark, if I recall.

My guess would be that it's not uncommon at all to have a signature of this nature.

[Idran1701]

Why all the mention of carving, by the way? Something historical that I'm unaware of?

[Mechanisto]

Why all the mention of carving, by the way? Something historical that I'm unaware of?

That alphabet has no curves. Chiseling usualy goes in straight lines, for convenience.

Would you write without curves using calligraphy?

[Spleen]

Idran brings up a good point. Why did the Common alphabet to retain a runic shape? Was the switch to paper over stone so recent that none of the letters have had any time to adopt a more curved shape? I thought that was a natural side effect.

EDIT: Am I the only one who notices that Hakaril's paragraph about a group of adventurers defeating a vile villain ends with a non sequitur "Zesty!"?

[Kai]

Alphabets don't always naturally "develop" curves. Some letters in the Futhark did, but for the most part even though it wasn't always carved in stone or clay, that alphabet maintained its angular nature simply because those were the letters people recognized and used.

Edit: Also, guys. Penmanship. Does the "a" I write by hand look exactly like the Times New Roman "a" I recognize immediately? No. In just the same manner some people may have personal variations on these letters. It's just that their technical and proper form hearkens back to their use in carvings and there's generally little incentive to change that drastically.

Edit again: Phoenician and Biblical Hebrew are also about as angular as you can get if you're writing in calligraphy. Curves are more of a pain in calligraphy than you might think, and a lot of languages have alphabets based on straight lines, with at best a little tick at the end to make the line "curved." For the most part though.... it isn't uncommon at all to see angular letters.

[Mechanisto]

If wizards and enchanters rely heavily on runes for magical incantations and inscriptions, there might well be a common "runic" language for magic users. And if mages are in vogue, then high-society might see a mage-based language to be a symbol of cultural rank, just as extremely flowing, beautiful calligraphy might have filled the libraries of kings and lords in our medieval world. it might have been adopted by high society, and then gradually become commonplace as it trickled down through to the merchants, craftsmen, and commoners.

"I'm so important in this town, I'm literate in Mage!"

*pause*

"Who are you, anyways? And why are you in my mansion!? GUARDS!!!"

[Archmage]

EDIT: Am I the only one who notices that Hakaril's paragraph about a group of adventurers defeating a vile villain ends with a non sequitur "Zesty!"?

I wanted an excuse to use a word starting with Z, and the content of the message didn't matter!

[Mechanisto]

Zurely you zhould have dezcribed zomething zany about ztealing zebras from zoos to zew the zurface of a zquadron of zebra-hide zepplins.

[pd Rydia]

Am I the only one who notices that Hakaril's paragraph about a group of adventurers defeating a vile villain ends with a non sequitur "Zesty!"?

Nope.

Couple questions. How does one make a font, and is it possible to update this font so that the lowercase letters match the uppercase (or perhaps are slightly smaller versions of the uppercase?)

[KingOfDoma]

It's an amazing coincidence that these two topics came up at the times they did.

[Idran1701]

I think Mech misread me. I wasn't asking "It is carving, but why straight lines?", but rather "Why is carving such high importance for the appearance of this language?". Because honestly, I can't think of that many modern alphabets that fall under Kai's "based on straight letters" comment. Alphabets would naturally develop curves, I'd imagine, because curves are faster than straight lines. Straight lines require a start and stop at the angle points, so as people work with them, those angles would soften into curves naturally due to laziness.

Not that I'm complaining, mind, since this is really neat. I'm not saying "it shouldn't be this way", I'm saying "Okay, it's this way, let's come up with a cool explanation for it".

[Seethe]

The explanation that would seem most likely to me would either be Spleen's suggestion that paper has only been recently invented or that the majority of writing with Common is done by mages and scholars. Or at least that mages and scholars have the final say on what is officially recognized as proper writing.

The reason I say this is that if people of non-academic professions such as merchants or farmers were to gain much influence over the written language, I'd expect laziness or desire for faster writing (more the latter, really) to cause a curving of the letters. If more scholarly individuals maintained control over the system, though, they would be more likely to be more meticulous about things.

And now that I've said that, I've had another thought. Maybe there could be two styles of writing in Common. The one in this thread could be the one commonly used and expected in scholarly works, while a more curvy style could be more commonly found in more mundane articles where more speed and less attention to detail and artistry is called for.

[Capntastic]

I see it sort of being like the opposite of cursive; the more straight and angly, the more refined and fancy. But your dock workers will write their lewd graffiti in curly swirly letters.

Furthermore, printing presses would be able to handle them just as easy either way.

[PriamNevhausten]

For a reference to a modern angular alphabet, see the Asian alphabets of katakana (Japanese, used for foreign words mostly), and kanji (Chinese/Japanese).

Also, with regards towards the tendency towards curves, that is in part true: curves do tend to just happen as people, quite literally, cut corners. It's a part of linguistic evolution on par with the way "knight" is now pronounced "nIt" instead of "knIght" like it used to be pronounced. Cursive evolved this way, as a way to maximize the effectiveness of a single stroke with the pen--and it has retained a hold, I would guess, because it's "prettier" than printing. To wit: Calligraphy. This explains, also, why cursive is used at all when it definitely does not help with the clarity of the writing.

If you want to see what's done when people take quick writing very seriously, look at shorthand methods. Or, I've seen stroke-order guides for "print"-style letters for HAM operators who need to transcribe CW (Continuous wave; i.e. Morse code) transmissions at speeds upwards of 50 wpm by pen and paper. They use print and not cursive because there's a very distinct difference between •-•• (L) and • (E), and you don't want to get them confused on paper when you don't have time to mentally compile the letters into words in between transcription. And nobody has time to write in all capital letters in cursive, which would be shit ugly anyway.

The point is, there are times for definition and there are times for curvature. I would guess most written languages that have a significant amount of literate writers have ways to accomodate for both goals, though I readily admit this opinion is unresearched.

[Archmage]

Kai mentioned handwriting issues; I think that as long as they were recognizable, people might start taking shortcuts in certain cases if a curve were an easier way to achieve a character than straight strokes. But that wouldn't necessarily change the technically correct way to write a character, not unless everyone started doing it a certain way and it caught on over a long period of time.

Paper and parchment (which is easier to make, depending on your raw materials available) are both readily available in most of Gaera, but that doesn't mean you can go to the corner store and buy a pack of three-hundred sheets college-ruled looseleaf for a buck. Not to say that everyone is still writing on stone or clay tablets, but even when you're using a chalk and slate, for example, it's easier to make straight lines than it is to make curves in a lot of cases. I imagine that both the straight and non-standard "cursive" forms of Common would be prevalent, depending on what you were reading, who wrote it, and where it was written.

Another thing worth noting is that if mages are going to use written Common to communicate that it is vital that everything is clear, legible, and standardized so that arcane failures don't occur due to misreadings or miswritings. Accurate curves are harder to write repeatedly; even if you can figure out what the person meant, straight lines are easier to reproduce neatly. My handwriting really isn't very good anyway, but I know that if you asked me to draw a set of twenty left parenthesis and I had to make them all look exactly the same that I would probably fail. However, I'm pretty confident that I could draw a set of nearly-identical backslashes, because I don't have to worry about precisely duplicating an arc--which is a lot harder to do freehand without some kind of tool.

Edit: Even if mages didn't use standard Common to communicate arcane spells, the prior notes would probably still apply.

[Seethe]

Maybe we need to consider just how widespread and standardized Common actually is. It is my perception that it is even more widespread than English on Earth, as it seems like the number of people on Gaera who don't speak it are in the minority.

For it to be that widespread, it would have to be used for more than just communication between mages. There would probably have to be a fairly sizeable merchant class that can afford to travel around quite a bit.

For the language to be as standardized as it is, given how widespread it is, I would expect its developement to have been somewhat deliberate. It may not have been originally developed accidentally like most languages, but created for the specific purpose of facilitating communication between people of different nations.

That being the case, it wouldn't be impossible for an angular form and a curved form of the written language to have been developed as equally correct. The angular form could have been developed for when standardization is a must or when writing is being done in stone or on slate, and the curved form could have been developed for when writing is being done on paper or parchment and speed is called for over ease of recognition.

And unlike on Earth, Gaera's nations are probably more motivated to trade for resources than fight over them because they need to keep their armies free to deal with demons, international crime syndicates, and teenagers with giant swords and mysterious village-destroying powers.

[Kai]

Actually, it doesn't have to be any more "common" than English is on Earth. At least, not much more widespread.

I think you're thinking in terms of Igala, and that's not entirely representative of all of Gaera. Common isn't widely spoken in Prandia, or in many regions of Ka'thalar. Even on Igala, you have Valth, where almost no Common is spoken.

So, yeah. On Igala it's about as common as English might be in Europe, but not all of Gaera is Igala.

[Seethe]

In that case, Igala still hasn't reached the level of 21st century Europe, nor does it have the Catholic Church to spread Common around like Latin in the European Medieval and Renaissance Periods. In fact, a lot of Igala still apparently remains untamed wilderness with pockets of civilization littered about. It still stands that the most likely way in my mind for one language to become so widespread even just on Igala would be as a result of a deliberate effort.

[pd Rydia]

It doesn't need to be spoken by the majority to be the most commonly spoken language, either.

That is, the majority of Igala is 50% of the population plus one...but if everyone speaks a different language except for ten people who speak Common, then the most commonly spoken language is still Common.

Speaking of Common, of the 25 established Igalan nations (Avon, Barius, Baron, Cotiego, Curatori Faiyar, Doma, The Dwarven Holds, Evringshal, The Far North, Forfeit Isle, Gre'par'th, Gwa'aag, Inustan, Kalshana, Nekonia, New Kilian, Riva, Solasia, Tan'yama, Tarania, Theice, Therney, Unostychia, Valth, The Woodlands), Baron, Doma, Kalshana, Nekonia, and Riva are the five nations established with Common being either the national language or the primarily spoken language. In Nekonia the official language is High Nekonian, but few actually speak the language and all official documents are also produced in Common; in Kalshana the official language is Common. In both Nekonia and Kalshana some communities exist where the respective "native" or non-Common language is spoken.

The peoples of Barius, Dwarven Holds, Inustan, Theice, and Valth each speak their respective languages. The usagijin of the Woodlands do so as well, although multilingualism is very common; Common, High Nekonian, High Elvin and Inustani are the most commonly studied languages.

As for the other 14 nations:

The people of Evringshal, the Far North, Tarania, and Therney likely speak Common.

Avons probably speak demonic. Tan'yama might speak High Elvin, Common or both. Solasia would have a mixture of languages, at the least Draconic, Griffonic, and Dwarvish, if not also Common. New Kilian might have a mutation of Nekonian or a Nekonian-influenced dialect of Common, being a country whose people originated from nekojin migrants in pre-Nekonian days. Cotiego might speak Common and/or demonic and/or a mutation of Inustani, as its werewolves came from pre-Inustan lands.

There's no information on Unostychia. I'm guessing that the people of Curatori Faiyar, Gre'par'th, and Gwa'aag speak Common.

--

edit: as for how it spread?

Baronians established Doma. Domans established Riva. The three nations have maintained ties over time. Domans and Nekonians have traded for eons of your years, as well Nekonians have been migratory in their distant past. Kalshana borders Nekonia. Baron maintains diplomatic and economic importance in Igala's west, Doma, Nekonia, and Kalshana do so in Igala's east.

Igala doesn't really have all that much wilderness. That which is inhabitable is, by and large, inhabited. That which would not be inhabitable is inhabited, thanks to A Wizard Did It (21st century England didn't have that!). The largest space of theoretically uninhabited land is between Baron, Avon, and Gwa'aag in the southwest.

[Besyanteo]

The Avons also spoke Common, last I was there, but Demonic was a primary language. :o

[pd Rydia]

I learn useful new things from Bes!

[Seethe]

So that's how it happened. Of course, Doma was colonized a pretty long time ago. It would allow plenty of time for some fairly severe local variations to arise, I would think. Especially with all the interaction with speakers of other languages.

[pd Rydia]

Okay.

[Spleen]

The peoples of Barius...speak {Barian}

If I remember Storm's Surge correctly, that's wrong. From what I recall, Shini told us that the average Barian on the street speaks Common. I remember wondering to myself if I should give Boris access to the Barian language, but eventually deciding against it (he instead knows etymology as it applies to Barian, like I know for Latin).

[FF Fanatic 80]

I blame Brian for this. =(

See if you can guess who is who!

... and yes I realize it won't be that hard =(

[pd Rydia]

starting with the first and moving counterclockwise: Shiela Hyral, Daniel Hyral, Stephan Hyral (?), and Midoku Tornas