#galach

Now, I didn't decode Galach– a lot of other people did independently. All the stuff in the movie is written in quasi-phonetic English (you can tell the accent of the people who wrote given segments because of it), though we have some very sparse bits of untranslated Galach in the books. It's described as descending from a anglo-slavic hybrid language, which is a very... Cold War-era anticipation of a future Lingua Franca twenty thousand years in the future. If Frank Herbert wrote it today, his 'anticipation' of Galach would probably use different root language families.

The basic structure of most letters are the same as in the movie texts. I like their weird dream-writing similarities to the Roman and Cyrilic alphabets as well as Ge'ez script, which is an absolutely beautiful abugida, and there's a vague level of featural-script level similarities between similar letters (particularly all vowels, and to a lesser extent plosives). There are a few letters in the uncial script that also look very similar (particularly the vowels and P, K, and R) and I took the liberty of adapting them from that (let's say formal) movie font into something with more distinguished letters when simplifying them to their shapes here. And I also changed the numerical system: it's not exactly as clean-cut a subdivided base 5 pattern in the movie's system as it is in this one. But hey, who's counting?

This font's called Poritrin Bold and it works, but there's a lot of snags in terms of which version I want to give to the fandom community. The first is that it's a 32-character alphabet for what's normally a 26-letter QWERTY keyboard– which shortcuts do I use? Can I just get away with enabling ligatures, when Office and most other app groups don't really support them? Do I also create a thin-letter and italicize-able version of Poritrin? Why is my brain making a clicking noise?

And that's not even addressing the issue of whether I should add those extra characters I suggested into the font, or add those replacement ones I designed. Lots of questions with arbitrary answers.