Ramblings and Ravings

Introduction

Authors of fiction, especially those of the science fiction and fantasy genres, create immense worlds within their stories. They use a wide assortment of tools to build rich histories, deep cultures, and lore that extends far beyond the written words of their texts. One such tool that these authors frequently employ is the creation of fictional languages. Whether by modifying existing, real-world languages or by creating their own systems from scratch, designing a language allows an author to craft a deep font of mythos and culture from which readers can draw to their hearts’ content. Here I will be analyzing several devices employed by the creators of three such languages: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Tengwar Elvish, Doctor Who’s Circular Gallifreyan, and The Elder Scrolls’ Daedric. Finally, I will provide recommendations for authors attempting to craft a language of their own.

Please note that I will not be analyzing the translations of these languages, only the physical appearance and rules for writing the script.

A Brief History

Before delving too far into analyzing each of these languages, I wish to provide some background information and context for them. Oftentimes knowing how a script originated and how it is used can be key in determining its efficacy as a language.

**J.R.R. Tolkien's Tengwar Elvish**

Tengwar’s first published appearance was in 1937 in Tolkien’s The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription. Several of Tolkien’s other scripts from the 1910s and 20s, such as Sarati and Valmaric, anticipated features of Tengwar, indicating that the language had precursors and is the result of several stages of evolution before the final version appeared in The Lord of the Rings in 1955. Most prominently, the One Ring of Sauron bears an inscription in the Black Speech of Mordor. Tengwar has several modes, representing different dialects of Elvish. Here I will focus on two of these modes: the Quenya, or High-Elven, and the Sindarin, or Gray Elven.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

Doctor Who's Circular Gallifreyan

The BBC television serial Doctor Who documents the adventures of a time traveler known only as The Doctor, the last living Time Lord of Gallifrey and sole survivor of the Last Great Time War. The Time Lords were, as the name implies, the custodians of the flow of time. Their language is as nonlinear as the nature of time, and consists of nested and interlocking circles. The screenshot below depicts a message on the console of the Doctor’s TARDIS. While the actual translations of the language are not known, over the last decade or so the show’s immense fanbase has compiled the available information about Circular Gallifreyan to make an unofficial, yet widely accepted, system for transliterating English.

From Episode 3.11 Utopia

The Elder Scrolls' Daedric Alphabet

The Daedric alphabet first appeared in the 1997 video game An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, where it was used to write English words. In the game, the celestial academy of Battlespire was overrun by Daedra, a capricious class of divine beings. The script next appeared in the 2002 game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, where it was no longer exclusively used by the Daedra, but also by the Dark Elves of the titular Morrowind region. Further Elder Scrolls games continue to use the Daedric script, and in all instances it has been strongly affiliated with magicka. Items engraved with Daedric sigils confer effects onto the player, such as the ‘Gray Cowl of Nocturnal,’ whose inscription reads ‘Shadow Hide (Y)ou’. Predictably, the wearer gets a large Stealth bonus, as shadows are the domain of the Daedric Prince Nocturnal.

Shadow Hide (Y)ou

Criteria for Analysis

The primary criteria I will be using to analyze these scripts will consist of: usage of diacritical marks, complexity of characters, and overall conveyance. Firstly, diacritical marks exist in a great number of real-world language systems, and are used extensively to alter the reading of a character or group of characters. The simplest Latinate diacritics include the accents acute (á), grave (à), and circumflex (â) accents, as well as diaeresis (ä), breve (ă), and macron (ā),each of which slightly changes the pronunciation of the letter. For fictional language systems, diacritical marks can lend a great deal of complexity and depth, and yet provide a way to make reading easier by allowing for explicit pronunciation guides.

Secondly, complexity of characters can be a good indicator of how accessible a language is. For example, the Chinese character for a type of noodle called Biángbiáng consists of 58 individual strokes and is one of the most complex characters in contemporary usage. This is an extreme example in a real-world language, yet it shows there are reasonable limits we must place in order to make a script easily to read and write. Another facet of character complexity is similarity of glyphs. If multiple glyphs have a similar root shape, such as our letters ‘d’, ‘p’, ‘b’, and ‘q’, which are simply inversions of each other, then a reader may find a script easier to learn and write, as there are fewer distinct glyphs to use. On the other hand, it is possible that similar glyphs will be confused, so a bit of discretion is required in saying whether or not similarity is good for a given script.

Biáng character in Song font

Lastly, any language system must make its words understandable; otherwise it serves very little purpose. Conveyance is the manner in which a script delivers its meaning. Conveyance can include anything from direction of writing, shape of the characters, and even the general ‘feel’ of a script. For instance, the Korean Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great in 1444 for the purpose of making the Korean language accessible to everyone, not just the aristocracy who could read the Chinese hanja that were used beforehand. As a result, the script is incredibly accessible, and has been described as “the most perfect phonetic system devised” because the shape of consonants denote the general shape of the reader’s mouth when pronouncing them, and vowels are vertical or horizontal lines to easily distinguish them from consonants. The Hangul alphabet has superb conveyance because it was specifically designed to make the language easy for people of any standing to understand. In my research, I will critique the fictional scripts on the basis of how accessible they are for someone with no prior experience with the language.

**Analysis: Tengwar Elvish**

In the Tengwar alphabet, vowels are indicated by diacritics called tehtar, which appear above or below their paired consonant. In the Quenya mode, vowels pair with the consonants which precede them; in the Sindarin mode, vowels pair with the consonants which follow them. When a vowel starts/ends a word or otherwise stands alone, a special vowel holder character is used. This character is a short or long vertical line, depending on which vowel appears. Long vowels never pair; instead they always use a long holder.

The use of diacritical vowels in Tengwar allows for a single character to cover a wide range of intonations with only minor changes. Furthermore, a stand-alone or long vowel has its own character, while paired vowels appear as one unit with their consonant. This places a visual emphasis on the phonetic syllables, as each glyph carries a full syllable and its pronunciation without extra notes or multiple marks. For example, take ‘Quenya’ in the comparison below. In Tengwar, the word appears as two characters with the pronunciation explicitly noted by the type of diacritics used. The ‘Que’ syllable is pronounced as ‘kwe’, as indicated by the ‘kw’ tengwa and the ‘e’ tehtar, and the ‘nya’ is obviously one syllable with a short ‘a’. By contrast, in English the word is six characters, and pronunciation is ambiguous without any accents or other notes. The ‘Qu’ could be read as a ‘kw’ or ‘k’ sound, and any of the vowels could be short or long, giving any number of syllables. Using diacritics to contain the verbal information of a character is a strong feature of Tengwar.

The same tehtar are used with different placement for each mode

Tengwar has an extensive character set, yet only a few basic character shapes. Take, for example, the first Quenya tengwa in the second column, ‘parma’. With the bow doubled, it becomes ‘umbar’; with a raised stem, ‘formen’; with a raised stem and doubled bow, ‘ampa’; with a short stem and doubled bow, ‘malta’; with a short stem, ‘vala’. In this way, only four basic shapes cover twenty four phonetic sounds. A tilde or bar under a consonant doubles the sound of the letter. Despite this simplicity, Tengwar has several rules that alter a character’s form or usage:

1) When followed by a vowel, the letters ‘s’, ‘ss’, and ‘r’ are written with the tengwa ‘silme nuquerna’, ‘esse nuquerna’ and ‘rómen’, respectively; otherwise these letters are written with the tengwa ‘silme’, ‘esse’ and ‘óre’.

2) When a consonant precedes an ‘s’, it is written with a small downward hook and the ‘s’ tengwa is omitted.

These rules serve to make a word’s meaning more clear by using a specific character for a specific purpose, much like English capitalizes the letter ‘i’ to ‘I’ when used as a personal pronoun. The characters of the Tengwar alphabet are not inherently complex, however their implementation has features that allow simple adjustments to create complex results.

Quenya mode tengwar

Sindarin mode tengwar

Tengwar is an incredibly structural script, and should be parsed as such. Identifying individual phonetic combinations is key, and the diacritical vowels make this involved but simple. Take the sentence below. The first word begins with a vowel holder for ‘e’, followed by a ‘Te’ pair and an ‘n’. The second word has an ‘s’, a holder for ‘í’, and a ‘La’ pair. Continuing in this manner, we can read the sentence as ‘Elen síla lumenn omentielvo’, which is Elvish for ‘A star shines on the hour of our meeting’. It is possible to parse this sentence without being explicitly told which mode of Elvish it uses: the first word is paired as ‘E Le N’, not as ‘El En’, so it must be Quenya mode because vowels pair with their preceding consonant. In this regard, Tengwar has superb conveyance because the structure of the word itself gives the reader information they may not have had to start.

An Elvish greeting in the Quenya mode

Analysis: Circular Gallifreyan

Circular Gallifreyan uses diacritical vowels somewhat like Tengwar, but pairs are always made with the preceding consonant. Stand-alone vowels have no holder character, instead ‘floating’ on the main circle of the word. When two vowels follow a consonant, the first is paired and the second floating (e.g. ‘REAL’ = ‘Re A L’). Pairs can be broken at the author’s discretion to elongate short words (e.g. ‘THE’ = ‘T He’ or ‘T H E’). Doubled vowels are indicated by two circles instead of one. Vowels appear as small circles relative to the main circle, and no pronunciation is noted by the vowels. That is, both a short and long ‘e’ would appear as the same small circle on the line of the word. This usage of only simple vowels is a weakness of Circular Gallifreyan; no accents or other modifiers are represented, only the basic sound. However, using diacritics for vowels in the first place is a strength shared with Tengwar. Pairing a consonant with a vowel conveys phonetic or syllabic information that is not present in the English translation.

Circular Gallifreyan vowels

Circular Gallifreyan also uses only four basic shapes: a horseshoe, a circle inside the word line, a semicircle, and a circle on the word line. Different characters are formed by adding a number of lines or dots, allowing each base shape to represent six individual phonetic sounds. Dots are contained within the consonant shape, while lines can be written in several ways: they can extend a small distance in-line from the consonant, connect with lines from other consonants or words, or extend all the way to the opposite side of the word. This is a purely aesthetic choice, and has no impact on the meaning of a word or sentence.

The characters used in Circular Gallifreyan are incredibly basic, and as such can be written by the most inexperienced of hands, which is a great strength of the language. Reading the script, however, can be much more difficult because the symbols are so much alike and hard to differentiate without a table like this one.

Circular Gallifreyan consonants

Circular Gallifreyan is, of course, a script built on circles. A word begins at the bottom of a circle and reads letters anticlockwise, and a sentence begins at the bottom of two concentric circles and reads words anticlockwise. In a manner of speaking, a sentence is like a word made of other words. At first glance, a sentence can seem a convoluted mass of circles, but the level of complexity can be reduced dramatically by breaking it up into individual words before parsing. For example, to analyze the sentence below, first see that the outer two circles designate a sentence, and the individual circles within represent four words. Note how the second version is much easier to parse as “Bow ties are cool.” once the lines crossing multiple words are broken and the sentence circles removed.

Bow ties are cool as a complete sentence and as individual words

Analysis: Daedric

In stark contrast to the other two languages, the Daedric script uses no diacritical marks. Vowels are their own sigils, and there are no accents or other modifiers. This could be read as a weakness because only raw letter information is contained within the sigils, or as a strength because the simple structure of the text makes transcription easy.

The Daedric alphabet has very distinct sigils. Only a few sigils share a base shape, however many sigils closely resemble their English counterparts. For example, note how ‘Doht’, ‘Lyr’, ‘Meht’, and ‘Neht’ appear as calligraphic ‘D’, ‘L’, ‘M’, and ‘N’, respectively. Others appear as inversions or other manipulations of English letters: ‘Payem’ is a backwards ‘P’, ‘Jeb’ is a rotated ‘J’, and ‘Yoodt’ is an incomplete ‘U’. In a way, Daedric functions rather like an ornate typeface for Latinate script and otherwise is structured identically, reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom.

Daedric sigils

Daedric is one of the easier fictional languages to parse because it is a direct one-to-one transcription of English letters. There are no diacritical vowels or phonetics to decode as in Tengwar, and no structures to break apart as in Circular Gallifreyan. Text is written left-to-right and top-to-bottom, either in lines or in clusters; in the latter case, the first letter of each word is enlarged and can be colored to easily separate clusters.

The thrice sealed house withstands the storm

On the other hand, the lack of such details can also inhibit a reader’s understanding of the script because only the raw letter data is presented. Daedric’s level of conveyance, therefore, is largely dependent on what the script actually says. When pronunciation is key, Daedric affords no help; when only written transcription is required, Daedric has superb conveyance. The text below is easy enough to transcribe, reading “Time for a celebration. Cheese for everyone!”, which is one of the more memorable quotes from TES4: Oblivion. Daedric has a very ‘Other’ feel to the sigils, which is entirely intentional by its creators. If the letters look arcane and occult, it’s because they are not meant for mortal eyes.

Sheogorath's words of wisdom

Overall Analysis

Tengwar is an incredibly well-built language, and is used extensively in Tolkien’s books to add depth to his worldbuilding. As a script, it functions much like Tibetan and other Brahmi-derived languages, with diacritical vowels and small modifiers to change between consonants. Tengwar’s primary strength is in its system of creating numerous phonetic combinations with only a small set of base shapes, and its main weakness is in the number of rules that a writer must keep track of to accurately say the right thing. The dual modes present an added layer of complexity which is great for mythos, but a nightmare for a practical application of the script. All in all, Tengwar is a complex language based on a large number of simple principles.

Circular Gallifreyan is born from the Time Lords’ understanding of the cyclical nature of time. Its script consists entirely of circles and lines, and sentences are circles within circles. For anyone writing the script, many aesthetic decisions are entirely up to the author’s discretion; for anyone reading the script, it is hard to understand without first undoing much of the work that went into structuring the sentence. Circular Gallifreyan is simultaneously simplistic in its character system and complex in its sentence structure. The varying levels of detail make the script easily legible in short form yet exceedingly arcane in long form.

Daedric script was created to be a direct one-to-one transcription to and from English, and so lacks many of the features that make the other two languages so unique. What Daedric does offer, however, is a look into how we view the letters themselves, and how the general ‘feel’ of a script can give meaning and mythos to a story. The rough characters crop up periodically in the Elder Scrolls video games, and whenever they do, it means the occult is soon to follow. As a script, Daedric provides a way to write English in a completely new way without the need to learn new structural rules, only a character set.

Recommendations for Writers

It is hard to say what makes a ‘good’ language and what makes a ‘bad’ one. We can, however, observe what features some popular fictional languages employ and see what impact they have on the script and how readers understand it. Diacritics can be a great tool for cleaning up a language, such as making vowels purely diacritical, but if you only want to make a written language, then leaving them out is perfectly fine. As long as you have well-defined rules for their usage, anything goes for what marks you put on your characters. Multiple characters that share a common base form can give you a lot of flexibility and let a small number of shapes cover a wide range of letters. On the other hand, perhaps you want to make a script that has many distinct shapes, in which case you can come up with your own glyphs or modify letters from real world scripts to suit your needs. In any event, however, your language must be able to convey its meaning to the reader. If no one can understand what your script says, then what useful purpose does it serve? Employ as many or as few of these devices as you wish, just remember that ‘more complex’ does not necessarily mean ‘sophisticated’, and ‘simple’ doesn’t mean ‘crude’. As long as your language can make its meaning clear through whatever features you decide to use, then any language can be a great one.