#constructed alphabet

This alien alphabet was designed by Iain McCaig for Attack of the Clones -- specifically, I think, for the signage around Coruscant.

Click here to see another alien alphabet I shared a while ago, which James Clyne designed for Rey’s escape pod in The Last Jedi.

Clyne also assigned each symbol to an English letter. McCaig didn’t assign each symbol to a letter, as far as I know, though the boxes hint that he might have categorized them somehow (or they might just be for show). There are 29 letters in McCaig’s alphabet, so it’s totally possible to assign them to different sounds if you wanted to.

“Rian really wanted to make it clear that this [Rey’s escape pod] came from the Falcon; he wanted ‘Property of Han Solo’ written across it. I was flying back the following day and Rian was like, ‘On your flight back, you need to sit down and come up with a new language.’ So on the plane, I looked at preexisting languages from Thailand, from the Middle East. I put that reference away, started to do some scribbling, and eventually came up with three different versions. Rian chose this one and wrote a response email in it. And I had to translate it like an old fifties recorder ring [laughs]. I had no idea what it said!”

“But it said, “Beautiful!!’ and that made my day. He specifically wanted something that was more like calligraphy, more like cursive, as opposed to something like a font. There was some discussion that it could be Corellian.”

-- James Clyne, VFX Art Director for The Last Jedi

I also really like this quote from Rian Johnson about the design for the pod:

“In C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra, the main character travels across space to Venus in a coffin. For some reason, that image really stuck with me. And so I kept pushing James to make it more like a coffin. He kept throwing me spaceships -- ‘Nope, make it more like a coffin.’ There was something kind of cool about it feeling like that, with her flying to the final confrontation. Something about it felt really right.”

This is the official Tumblr of the Ceseprian language. Ceseprian is a constructed language, or conlang. Ceseprian’s alphabet, or abcheg (abçegi), was created in 2011. It was developed initially for use in Northern Sami and Finnish. Its alphabet was inspired to be a cursive, or papyral scrpit, for Futhark runes.

Ceseprian, the conlang, not the script, is a highly agglutinated language, with sound and grammar roots in Turkic languages. The majority of Ceseprian vocabulary is original, but does borrow either parts of or entire words from different languages - with non in particular focus.

˥˧I˧I˨I˨*˥꜌˥˧˥꜖*˥꜖˥꜖˥꜊*˥˧I꜔I˥-˥꜌I˨-

˥꜖˥˧˥꜖*˥˨I˩˥꜌˥꜊*ʭ˦˥꜌˥꜌ ˥˧a˥˧˥꜖-ʭ˦˥꜌-I꜔I˥-˥꜌I˨-ʕʖ<> ˥˨˥꜖˥꜖˥꜊*˥꜖˥꜔-˥꜌I˨-I꜔I˥-˥˧˥꜖˥꜔ ꜑˦ʭ꜈˥꜖˥꜒*I˩˥꜌˥꜊*˥꜊˥꜖-˥꜌I꜖-I꜔I˥-˥˨˥꜌˥˧˥꜖*ʕʖ<>

hmm, It's a lot easier to read in a fixed width font and prettier when I can format the words into blocks, but this says something along the lines of:

my name is (omitted)

I think that a cipher is interesting as a language

This was a fun little project I did because of my constant world building efforts. I reached the point where the culture I had would benefit from having a written language, and I wanted something that could be spoken, followed consistent rules, gave some impression of the ideology of the peoples behind its development and looked good.

it's something of a pain in the ass to speak, actually, and I can't really write down a phonetic version because some of the symbols translate into body language rather than spoken word. literally translated from the spoken words only, the above reads: "*name* think cipher interest language" which sounds dumb.

thankfully It no longer takes me five minutes a word because I built a nifty python "translator" that does all the heavy lifting.