ciao! for starters, i have no idea where to put this. kind of an out of place topic.
secondly, hi! I’ve been knocked out of commission by insomnia and depression, so i haven’t been too vocal on anything lately.
me blathering on about background
in my low time, i’ve been obsessing over this idea to write a story of a more personal nature. it involves suicide and necromancy and alternate worlds, and the need for a language of its own arose. i spent a while making the alphabet and constructing what it would look like based on the sounds i’ve modified, but then i thought it would look amazing if i could type this mess on a computer.
here's where the help comes in
i am as technologically savvy as a blank template on word. yes, i could look up websites and tutorials, but my brain sort of turned off as soon as i did. i know a lot of people here get super creative when it comes to their stories and walls and banners, so i was hoping someone could either coach me through getting this alphabet on my laptop, or being open for some sort of compensation for doing it, all within site rules of course.
if you think you can help me with something that will sort of cement the reality of this project, i’d be happy to talk. well, i’m never happy, but i would appreciate the heck out of it, and i will support you on anything you ask if you can get these weird letters to pop up.
Hey! I can lend a few tips and tricks. Pretty busy with school, but I’m also a con-langer myself (a maker of languages) and I’ve gone through the full process of alphabet creation.
It seems like you’ve already chosen your sounds to start off with, so that’s good! That’s the first step.
In the real world, written script most often evolves from pictographs, or pictures with meaning. Their pronunciation, then, informs what sound it will make. Through thousands of years of evolution, those pictures become characters (letters, numbers, etc…). In very rare cases (see Cyrillic) are alphabets ever engineered by humans.
So, to inform how your alphabet would work, I’d start off with asking yourself, “what kind of medium will these people write on/with?” For stone, often crisp, jagged lines work, because they’re easier to carve. For parchment, often swirls and curls are easier to write because they don’t interrupt pen stroke.
From there, it’s only a matter of asking yourself “how do I want this to look?” and letting the creativity seep. You can make a bunch of prototype scribbles, and often the good ones can become your alphabet letters.
i think mostly i’m at an upload-and-watch-as-the-letters-appear stage. i used to make languages for fun in early high school and write stories in them, but they weren’t very advanced looking. i like the thoughts on the style being important for its history. so far, since the entirety of the story is exposing this side along world that hides just under the surface of reality, a lot of the letters look oddly close, but still malformed from latin letters.
ciao! for starters, i have no idea where to put this. kind of an out of place topic.