#ligatures

Ktsa'gir Կցագիր Armenian Calligraphy by Ruben Malayan 2025

Which us fine because this isn't the focus of Star Wars, it's purpose isn't to work well linguistically or practically, it is to set an atmosphere and pretend it's not English

Chinese, Japanese and other syllabic scripts work that way because each symbol stands for a while syllable, not an individual sound. and English has syllables with massive consonant clusters like scratch

an alphabet needs many tall, thin letters like l i r q r t p d f h j k l b

if all letters are fat and wide like ლ then any text occupies far too much space and is overly long. and larger chunks of text consume exponentially more space, paper, ink, digital pages, stablishment titles, etc, not to mention being annoying to read

the simplest solution is to create thinner versions of each letter, making them thinner and thinner until it's a totally different alphabet

a different solution that preserves the blocky feel is to combine letters together into ligatures, like in Hindi, specially for common words and consonant combinations, so, fusing E and R into a single ER letter, for example.

to illustrate, this is "Republic" in canon Aurebesh:

and this is "Republic" after combining some letters:

we could go more aggressive and combine more than two letters, but speakers would have to know all ligatures, but that's fine, Hindi speakers learn hundreds or millions of letter combinations and they're not random, they are intuitive

now with Skywalker:

of course, i'd still prefer to make an alphabet which actually makes sense

Constructing the Ligature ffl instead of ffi: everything dances