Thursday, August 29, 2013

Link Round-Up: Gallifreyan Language


BrittanBGood has gone ahead and created a who language system based on the Gallifreyan symbols seen on the Doctor's crib in "A Good Man Goes to War."  It was inspired by Sherman's Circular Gallifreyan, which you can learn online.  The idea intrigued me, so I looked around and discovered that a sizable community formed around the past-time of re-creating the language.  Check out some of the best sites below.

Bold, with a simple compounding way of translating and building sentences, the results of Circular Gallifreyan are visually imposing and impressive. This is a system designed to make the writer’s original language look bad-ass letter-for-letter. It is dependent on the alphabet of the non-Gallifreyan writer. Created by Loren Sherman. Known on Deviantart as BlackHatGuy.
Sherman’s Gallifreyan is exceedingly popular, because it’s both dramatic and practical from an aesthetic viewpoint. Because of this, there are a lot of variations upon the theme.

Greencrook Gallifreyan has little curls and swoopy bits, tiny bubbles and appears quite delicate and poetic. This version of Gallifreyan has unique rules and is interpretive, designed to be artistic as well as functional. This allows for Gallifreyan words and phrases to be translated several different ways from one root source and leaves a lot of translation freedom for the writer and reader. This is a symbolic language, where concepts (love, joy, wonder) are pulled from a lexicon. Created by Tumblr user Greencrook, known on Deviantart as Lewiscrook. 
Greencrook’s Gallifreyan has also gotten a lot of attention and some interesting riffs, as 7eye’s translations show, as they reflect compound concepts forming simple words.

For a straight-up font for your computer: WS Simple Gallifreyan. Designed by Wiccked Stepmother Fonts, Melanie Cook.

DrawlingNell’s Circular Gallifreyan is a representation of Gallifreyan that depends on strong evocative elements in circular form. It is not a system designed for translation so much as bold iconographic statements.

The first linear version of Gallifreyan, it’s also the original version of Gallifreyan represented in canon as far as I can tell. It is a chaotic writing system in that it was never codified for the show and therefore has been variously represented every time it was needed.  Freakism on tumblr parsed out a linear Gallifreyan version that follows the show’s Old High Gallifreyan, but is actually functional and not gibberish. This is a phonetic (more or less) version of linear Gallifreyan than can be used to translate from the writer’s native language.

Circular Gallifreyan (aka Doctor’s Cot Gallifreyan):
A Graphic Design major, BrittianyBGood’s version of circular Gallifreyan is both solid, bold, and entirely phoentic, using overlapping circles that represent sounds. Finished and updated, the writing systems detailed here is the closest to the circular Gallifreyan represented in the show.

The Gallifreyan Conlang Project is an exercise in linguistic nerdery of the highest order. It is the most comprehensive Gallifreyan I’ve set my hands on. It uses the reading direction ‘counter-clockwise from the bottom’ as Sherman’s Gallifreyan does, however the alphabet is phoentic, and each ‘letter’ is based upon a phone, so that a transcription into Gallifreyan is both a written word and a road-map on how it’s pronounced.

Ten Rules For The Gallifreyan Language:
This is really only a tongue-in-cheek list of assumed grammatical rules for Gallifreyan.  Mostly, it's just for humor.

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