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Maquise
2017-02-17, 01:49 PM
For the purpose of potential prop creation, and for the sake of world-building, I was thinking about what the various forms of written languages in the worlds of DnD would look like. I can't seem to find at the moment where the written forms of each language overlaps (I seem to recall that some languages share the same alphabet, but don't remember where I saw it, and don't have time to dig at the moment.)

Common would most likely be English, or whatever language the table is fluent in.

Elvish: JRR Tolkien did a lot of work in the field of Elvish languages (I still can't get over the fact that he managed to create at least ten languages, and that's just for elves). Don't see a reason not to use Tengwar, it's recognizable enough that players will see it as Elvish.

Dwarven: These are commonly depicted as Nordic Runes, at least in my experience

Draconic: The Elder Scrolls had the interesting idea to make Draconic writing look like it was scratched with claws, which I think makes sense and will probably stick to.

Celestial: This one took some doing for me, as it was what originally got me thinking about this. What would Celestial writing look like? I did some research, and found the Celestial alphabet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Alphabet)developed by the 15th Century renaissance man Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.

Aklo (Illithid): For Illithids, Aboleths, and other such creatures, I'd imagine that their writing is pictographic, not phonetic. They communicate principally through telepathy, and they'd probably make their language ridiculously complicated so that lesser minds could not comprehend it. It'd likely be very squiggly.


Any other ideas or comments?

Kol Korran
2017-02-17, 02:07 PM
Some comments:
1. I think the 5E book has some sample script for the various languages... I also think some of the 2E books had some? Not sure...

2. I live in Israel, and speak Hebrew. The names of the letters of the angelic Alphabet are of Hebrew letters (Aleph, Bet, Gimal and so on), and though they aren't exact, they are quite similar to Hebrew letters.

3. It's important to note that different languages do quite a lot of things differently than English. Some examples:
- Hebrew don't have letters for vowels... The signs for vowels are added above, below or so, and are called "movements". Most children learn this type of writing till they learn the words, after which we write in "missing script", which is just the constants, with no movements/ vowels. Most languages of the region (Arabaic and a few others) follow similar patterns.
- Hebrew also has two sets of letters, but unlike English it's not for capital letters and non-capital, but rather for printed/ formal words, and for handwriting.
- We also write from right to left. I've known some languages in the old world wrote from top to bottom.
- I've learned a bit of Kiswahili and Tigrinya, which work quite differently. In Tigrinya for example, you have about 40 constants (Many of them with no similar one in English), and each of them can be written in about 7 ways, depending on the vowel you attach to it. Some follow the same pattern, some do not. So you have 200+ actual letters.
- Some languages made specific scripts for "high language" and "common language", and also some phrases, words and grammar.

4. It might be cool to think of scripts that requite certain condition to be read/ used- Only with low light/ dark vision, only if a specific matter is washed over it or more... There are a few such examples in fantasy writing, but it could easily be expanded.

Good luck! :smallsmile:

Knaight
2017-02-17, 02:11 PM
Some comments:
1. I think the 5E book has some sample script for the various languages... I also think some of the 2E books had some? Not sure...

They do. They're all 26 letter alphabets mapped directly onto the english alphabet and are basically fonts, and it's hilarious in how lazy it is.

Malimar
2017-02-17, 02:36 PM
The introduction to 3.5's Libris Mortis implied that Celestial is basically just Latin (specifically, it mentions that title of the book is Celestial for "From the Books of the Dead", and the title happens to also be correct Latin for "From the Books of the Dead"). Downside: Using the Latin alphabet for Celestial could be boring.

Lords of Madness (IIRC) described Qualith, the written language of the Illithids, which is a raised or embossed script, like Braille, and is read using the face-tentacles, not the eyes. Notably, any text in Qualith has four parallel lines of text, one for each tentacle, read simultaneously. I imagine it looking something like musical notation.

As mentioned already, 5e's Player's Handbook offers some alphabets that are just 1-for-1 letter swaps. I could have sworn that some of 3.5's Races of books also offered some alphabets, but no, it would seem I was misremembering, they appear to offer vocabulary without the alphabets.

Efrate
2017-02-17, 06:12 PM
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting has a few.

Dethek is the archaic orc alphabet and is a runic language, some regional languages use it still.
Esperuar is modern language for several regions.
Thorass is old common and is also several regional languages alphabets. pg. 86

I know there is a full dwarven somewhere in 3.0/3.5, and elvan and draconic too I am sure, but no idea where. I did a cryptogram riddle way back when in dwarven for a game I ran so I know it exists.

Âmesang
2017-02-17, 07:01 PM
I could have sworn that the alphabets described in the 5th Ed. Player's Handbook were the same as for 4th Ed. (though the Draconic alphabet was in the Draconomicon and there was also an Abyssal alphabet).

Once I tried to decide on an alphabet to represent Ancient Suloise, based on the description that "transliteration into modern tongues or alphabets is difficult, and dangerous when used in spellcasting, for the significance of certain inflections has been lost over the centuries." Eventually I decided on simply using the Draconic alphabet because they appeared to hold a similar function, they have a (bad) history with dragons, and because none of the groups I've ever played with were very big on anything more than dungeoncrawling with very light roleplaying so I doubt they'd be for anything more than a "font swap."

Still, I kept an image displaying the name "Ancient Suloise" in a number of alphabets in Abyssal, Dwarvish, Draconic, Elvish, and even Standard Galactic from Commander Keen:

https://www.schadenfreudestudios.com/temp/ancient_suloise.png

dps
2017-02-17, 10:51 PM
Might want to try a system of writing that looks more like musical notation than the more well-known alphabets. Might be appropriate for Celestial, but maybe for other languages, too.

daniel_ream
2017-02-17, 11:20 PM
Draconic: The Elder Scrolls had the interesting idea to make Draconic writing look like it was scratched with claws, which I think makes sense and will probably stick to.

Because of the tools and media (triangular reeds and wet clay) most Ancient Near Eastern cuneiform looks like this. You can find free fonts online if you want to make something for your PCs to read. You do run the risk of blowing the immersion if anyone knows what cuneiform looks like, but it does still carry the semantics of ancient farway atavistic lands. And it is the home land of the myth of Ta-Yahm-At, after all...

GungHo
2017-02-20, 10:30 AM
I cheat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems).

I usually put Draconic in Klingon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_alphabets). I also liked the Witcher's use of Glagoltic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script) and I've used that, Gothic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_alphabet), and some Indian scripts for some things.

In the Tolkein tradition, though, it's just letter swapping via fonts on the computer. I'm not going to make up an actual written language.

SaintRidley
2017-02-20, 10:43 AM
Further note in Illithid Qualith - it requires telepathy to read at all, and if you aren't making contact with all four lines simultaneously you won't get the whole picture.

Beleriphon
2017-02-20, 10:56 AM
Elvish: JRR Tolkien did a lot of work in the field of Elvish languages (I still can't get over the fact that he managed to create at least ten languages, and that's just for elves). Don't see a reason not to use Tengwar, it's recognizable enough that players will see it as Elvish.

There is a D&D font for elvish, its just a replacement font though.


Dwarven: These are commonly depicted as Nordic Runes, at least in my experience

There's a dethek font out there, which is the name of the alphabet that dwarves using forgotten realms.


Draconic: The Elder Scrolls had the interesting idea to make Draconic writing look like it was scratched with claws, which I think makes sense and will probably stick to.

I always liked the way draconic looks in Skyrim.

Some options that look fantasy like:
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=705