The Creation
Of Runic Alphabets
By Ben Miff
A lot of people write. That’s obvious. Some of
those people write fantasy. That’s also obvious. But a lot of people tend to
recycle old runic alphabets. While that’s perfectly fine, since you are often
writing about completely different worlds, there’s a good chance that runes
would have evolved differently. If you are one of those people who have decided
to have a go at creating said runic alphabets, then you may start thinking
“where to begin?”
Especially since you’ve just
ruled out mutating existing rune sets.
One of the key aspects of creating runic
alphabets is deciding first whether you want them to be artistic (i.e. pretty)
or realistic (i.e. created for ease). If you are going for a realistic runeset,
then you need to think of what sort of texture your people would be writing on;
bark and dyes will accommodate curves, where as scratching runes into
rock-faces will be a mostly straight line affair. Also, you need to take into
account how long the runes have had to mutate since there were different
limitations (two years will have very few effects, but two thousand would have
a lot). Once this is decided, you will have a basic idea of what your runes
will look like; if they are likely to be full of curves, then you will probably
still head down the artistic route.
But if you’re stuck with straight lines, then
where do you go? Think of simplicity; the current alphabet is useful since the
26 letters are not too many, yet allows for a huge combination. However, you
could also argue that the Japanese don’t seem to have any problems, but they
have hundreds of different symbols they use. Nonetheless, if you want a rune
for each word, remember something; you’ve
got to make every rune yourself. Let’s say you’ve chosen 25 symbols; now
you need to create them. Since you are aiming for simplicity, one of the
methods available for you is what I call the “noughts and crosses” grid. This
involves taking a divisor (such as, in this case, five) and assigning a
vertical line (straight, with a bend or without; your choice), so that each set
gets a line amount from 1 – 5. You then assign one vertical for each symbol in
a set, again of your devising; this results in a “grid”, hence the name.
Example - for the 16th rune, the symbol would be |||.
Say you find that dull. A pig-pen style rune may
be an alternative, introducing lines of different angles and not necessarily
having to use multiples. This is handy if you want each letter in your language
to be easily identifiable from another.
Artistic runes are where you can really let the
creative juices flow. This is because there is so much variety available, now
that curves are allowed. You can sit down and doodle
away, drawing squiggles and random stuff until you come up with enough symbols
that you like. Or you can mutate existing letters. (I know I said mutating
existing rune-sets is naughty, but the alphabet is a bit different
:P). The method I use for doing this is to take an 2 x 4 grid for each
letter, like this :-
|
A |
B |
1 |
u |
u |
2 |
m |
m |
3 |
m |
m |
4 |
d |
d |
The 4 m squares represent the space taken up by
most letters, such as o or e. The u squares are for “uppers” on letters (such
as l or t),and the d’s for “downers” (such as g or p).
You then switch columns / squares, and sometimes overlay squares over each
other. You can also add little quirks to make the runes look more
well-rounded. An example of this type of creation is below (created by
moving row 4 into row 1 and row 3 into row 2, and then swapping column A with
column B) :-
Once you have your runes, you will then probably
want to convert it into a language. There are a number of ways of doing this;
the easiest is to do a straight conversion from English (or French, or German,
or Swahili, or whatever you use) to the runes. This, of course, means that the
right number of runes is helpful, although for an alphabet with too many, hard
and soft sounds can be differentiated, and for an alphabet with too few,
similar sounds can be combined. To add a bit, try mutation of a language.
Moving all vowels one forward (so a becomes e, e
becomes i, i becomes o, o becomes u and u becomes a) will change the
pronounciation, as will moving the first syllable to the end, or vice versa. An
example of this is that by using the vowels (forward one) and syllabic (first
to end) transitions, there is a new (ish) language, e.g.:
“Once the lever had been wrenched down, the
gates opened to a flood of sand.”
Becomes
“Ciun thi virli hed inbi chidwrin duwn, thi
isget inidup tu e uf send.”
Voila! New language.
For the completely masochistic, you can work on
building a language from scratch. This takes quite a while, though, so be
prepared for this aspect. The average vocabulary size for a university graduate
is 25,000 words; this is a lot to convert. A major problem is that you may find
yourself discovering “blocks” to new words; as the size of the language you are
creating increases, then you will find that many new
words are old ones with just a letter changed. While some of these are fine, an
excess will make the language awkward; although they are useful if you want to
have your language spoken mainly in rhyme. However, the creation of language is
a bit more complex, and so I shall leave this for later.
And that’s pretty much it. The basics of runes
have all been covered (apart from the use of existing runes, but that just needs
a little research to find them), and therefore I finish.
**promptly snoozes**