An Appreciation of Circular Gallifreyan
Oct. 18th, 2014 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yomikomaLoren Sherman's Circular Gallifreyan is a way to write English and other languages using Roman letters, inspired by the Gallifreyan language as depicted in set dressing on the new Doctor Who series.
It's effectively an abjad, with large circles representing consonants and small circles modifying those to follow them with vowels. Consonants are distinguished by their position relative to the word-circle and by how many dots or lines are associated with them, while vowels are based on position on the consonant-circle and direction of an optional line (for U and I).
Wonderfully, aside from a loose direction in some cases there is no constraint on where the lines go, and you're encouraged to find ways to connect one letter to another, even across words. This gives sentences a fantastic interconnected look, making the writing system appear to be much more complicated than it is. (I like imagining that actual Time Lords writing this already know where the other end of the lines are going and can write this in any order.)
This writing system does a great job of simulating the graphics from the show while still fully encoding Roman text, and it's beautiful.
Coming up with my own postscript code to write this has been fun. I'm particularly happy with the inter-word line code, which uses setmatrix to take the current point back into the sentence's reference frame and saves the coordinates in order to connect them all up at the end.
Also, deciphering the short sentence at the top of the Writing Guide was a well-done surprise.
It's effectively an abjad, with large circles representing consonants and small circles modifying those to follow them with vowels. Consonants are distinguished by their position relative to the word-circle and by how many dots or lines are associated with them, while vowels are based on position on the consonant-circle and direction of an optional line (for U and I).
Wonderfully, aside from a loose direction in some cases there is no constraint on where the lines go, and you're encouraged to find ways to connect one letter to another, even across words. This gives sentences a fantastic interconnected look, making the writing system appear to be much more complicated than it is. (I like imagining that actual Time Lords writing this already know where the other end of the lines are going and can write this in any order.)
This writing system does a great job of simulating the graphics from the show while still fully encoding Roman text, and it's beautiful.
Coming up with my own postscript code to write this has been fun. I'm particularly happy with the inter-word line code, which uses setmatrix to take the current point back into the sentence's reference frame and saves the coordinates in order to connect them all up at the end.
Also, deciphering the short sentence at the top of the Writing Guide was a well-done surprise.
