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**