Languages: Archontic alphabet, its historical development and present day use as a writing script

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Six years ago, during the summer of 2017, I developed a fictional writing script for my Orbis Furum fantasy setting, the one I utilise for my Thick as Thieves RPG. As the setting is historical in tone, I wanted a script that's fictional and weird by the standards of the real world, but takes inspiration from real world ancient scripts and feels like it could have developed in the real world. Simply, the script should reflect the tone of the setting, and it should have some logic behind it, instead of trying to be too flashy.

I wanted to develop a Latin script equivalent for Aporue (the Europe equivalent of the setting). This Latin script equivalent is called Archontic. As they say in my setting, the Orbis Furum, Archontic is an alphabet writing script with roots on three continents and in common use on two continents. The name of the Archontic alphabet and script is based on "Archontia", the popular colloquial name (but not necessarily accurate name) commonly used for the Old Empire.

The history of the "Archontic" alphabet and writing script

Like the Latin script of OTL history, the initial roots of what became Archontic can be traced back to a phonetic alphabet originally created and used by a Phoenician-like culture. However, unlike in OTL, where our Latin alphabet developed in antiquity from the Greek alphabet, which had in turn developed from the Phoenician alphabet, I wanted to go a slightly different route.

Right from the start, I felt that making a fictionalised Greek alphabet equivalent would be boring and unrewarding, so I looked around for other historical phonetic alphabets from around the Mediterranean, developed from the Phoenician alphabet by various different cultures.

Two alphabets that caught my interest the most were the old Berber script from antiquity and a slightly later script, Tifinagh, used by both Berbers and Tuaregs. Modern day countries with Berber (Imazigh) languages-speaking nationalities also use a modernised and expanded Tifinagh for public signs, etc., known as the Neo-Tifinagh. Based on the Tifinagh/Berber inspiration, here's the fictional Archontic alphabet I came up with, as well as its fictional history within my setting...

There are technically three developmental variations of Archontic:

a.) Proto-Archontic Scripts - the ancestral scripts for Archontic. There were originally several phonetic alphabets competing with each other for dominance in daily use, including in bureaucracy and commerce. These were reminescent of the various Phoenician-influenced phonetic alphabets that showed up in our real world's antiquity.

b.) Old Archontic Script / Classic Archontic Script - also called the Imperial Script back when the Old Empire still existed. During antiquity, the Old Empire eventually chose one selected phonetic alphabet, and mixing and matching it with elements from its cousins, standardised it for the needs of secular administration and later also churchly administration. As the most powerful imperial family at the time came from an equivalent of post-Punnic North Africa, and had some notable fantasy!Berber ancestry, they lobbied for basing the Imperial Script on the writing they used in their corner of the empire. As a concession to the other parties, the Imperial Script also implemented some elements borrowed from related alphabets that were in use around the empire. This script remained rather unchanged, even many centuries after the dissolution of the Old Empire (a.k.a. Archontia).

c.) New Archontic Script / Aporuean Archontic - the one I showcase here. Rooted in a more recent series of development that occured during Aporue's "medieval" and "early modern" period. The basic script is actually the same, the changes were mostly down to expanding its capabilities. With the spread and diversification of Archontic among many nations of Aporue, Old Archontic underwent several significant additions in more recent centuries. Motivations for expanding the existing script were two-fold: practical and stylistic. The practical considerations included a desire to better reflect the different phonetics and unique features of different Aporuean languages, with the addition of diacritic marks seen as one of the key solutions. Needless to say, these efforts boosted the developing proto-nationalisms of Aporue, including the growth and development of national literatures and national translations of sacred texts. The stylistic considerations, while more secondary, were no less important when it came to Aporuean cultures expressing themselves as "having moved on from living in the shade of antiquity's accomplishments". While Old Archontic already had a variation of the basic script for the needs of hand-writing, the first major stylistic variant added in more recent times was the so-called "Lokytian Archontic". It is similar to the real world's Schwabach blackletter typeface (Schwabacher), from the late-medieval and early modern period. It's also used in a very similar manner to Schwabacher, including on printed texts created in printing presses.

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Behind the scenes: Developing the Archontic script

P. Molnár, head of Knight-Errant Studios:

"This section focuses on the development of Archontic as a fully-fledged fictional writing script. A fictional but fully-functional writing script based on real world inspirations rooted in the traditional Berber alphabets of North Africa, themselves inspired and derived from ancient Phoenician scripts, which also gave rise to the later Greek alphabet, Latin alphabet, and a number of other alphabets in Europe, Asia, parts of Africa and elsewhere. I will quote my original notes from back in 2017.

First of all, based on the Tifinagh/Berber inspiration, here's my original, initial notes on the fictional Archontic alphabet I came up with.

'Though I tried to make each letter reflect at least some of the features of the alphabets that served as a source of inspiration, this being a fictional alphabet, I also did plenty of things on my own. The way it suited the ideas I was going for.'

Beginnings are hard. Eventually, I found reasonable patterns that served as a homage to the real world scripts that served as inspiration, but were clearly a pattern all of their own, for a new, fictional system of writing. Now, let's continue. Here is the initial "complete" overview that emerged from the development process:

'There is some basic phonetic logic behind these letters, introduced already during the Old Archontic standardisation in antiquity. All non-i vocals (a, e, o, u) share an arch-and-a-dot-in-the-middle design to their shape. All i/y vocals and the consonant j share the same basic design for their shape.

All m, n style consonants share shapes. All consonant counterparts or phonetically related consonants - such as G/K, P/B, F/V, S/C, T/D, or K-Q, V-W, K-X, etc. - also share some basic patterns for their overall shape. D, T share some shapes, B, P, R share shapes, F, V, W share shapes, etc.

Some consonants that were originally phonetically rare in the specific Proto-Archontic used as the basis for Imperial Archontic, were added as new letters by simply merging two existing consonant letters together. The obvious example is the letter c, which was created from a merger of t and s.'

The following final image from my early 2017 notes is a quick example of two short texts written in the basic form of my fictional script:

'Naturally, the letters and diacritics would be different if I had written it in English. Here are the translations...

'Master' (as I wrote it in my native tongue, you only need to drop the third letter to also get an English transcription of the same word)

'We, Terlo, let it be known, that on the second Restday after (St.) Hervil, we shall carry out the executions of the apprehended bandits from Jáh.'

'Unis, master of the craft of baking, lets it be known, that he offers for sale new butter dough pastries, also appropriate for weddings.'

This was just a quick test, of course. In the future, as I improve the hand-written variation of the letters, I'll also try to create a fully hand-written text, with the letters fluently interlapping with each other. :-)

The "Schwabacher"-style typeface for the alphabet I'm already quite pleased with, so I might photoshop some sort of medieval street poster (with woodcut illustration and all) in the near future, using this script instead of the real world's Schwabacher.' 8-)

Observe the scans of my developmental notes on the Aporuean alphabet (to the right, with basic, hand-written and Schwabach-style variants), side-by-side with the OTL historical Berber alphabets that provided inspiration (to the left, with the Tifinagh and old Berber script). These scans are from 2017, and until I recently completed a more professional-looking overview of the script and its variations (see below), it was the only visual documentation I had of the script."

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An overview of present day Archontic script and its variants

P. Molnár, head of Knight-Errant Studios:

"After all of the above explanation, and after more than five years of finally getting to it, I would like to present Archontic as used in Aporue during the "present day" of my setting. Note that the overview of hand-written, cursive-style script is not yet included here (it will be the second script), because I haven't fully standardised the shape. I will add a few images of hand writing done in Aporuean. Not the earlier developmental version, but one where the individual letters of the alphabet actually connect with each other, forming clearly delineated words.

Basic Aporuean Archontic script

The basic shapes of the overall writing script. The curvier-shaped, hand-written version of Archontic, used for hand writing, derives from this default.

Quasi-"Schwabacher" Aporuean Archontic script

This is a more stylised derivative of the basic script, and is used in books, ads, posters, title printing, etc., particularly ones created by way of printing press.

An example of a period diorama of Melza, with the name of the city written down in the "Lokytian Archontic" (Schwabacher-esque) script style.

(A late 16th century panorama painting of Bratislava, then known as Pressburg, Posonium or Istropolis. Might photoshop this one more in the future.)

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Author's closing note

I'll note that my motivation to create a fictional script for the setting wasn't done just for the sake of immersion, but as yet another hidden homage to PRE one of my setting's sources of inspiration. Namely, the Thief series had its own fictional writing script, used throughout the whole series, though displayed most prominently in the third game. It's also worth noting that the most prominently seen example is actually a derivative used for spells and other magical activities and is not the same as the most prominent script. Though the games display all plot-relavant readables and signs in real world Latin script, for the sake of intelligibility, the games' assets (especially in the third game) imply that this is basically "translation convention" applied to a fictional fantasy script.

When interacting with small metal signs and plaques in the game, you can notice that, though they display their readable text in Latin script, the surface of the actual in-game sign models seems to be covered in markings that look remarkably like very small renditions of the fictional script we glimpse every now and then in story-relevant animated cutscenes, and the like. I think it's safe to say that the world of that series has its own fictional alphabet (or perhaps it's a syllabary ?), but the games always depict it as Latin script whenever the player needs to read any text for gameplay-relevant or plot-relevant reasons.

As I have mentioned above, though I did want to create my own fantasy writing script and have it be a fictional alphabet that could plausibly fit with the predominantly ca 15th-17th century style esthetics, society and overall nature of my setting, I didn't want to create a simple clone of European alphabets descended from the Phoenician alphabet. So I looked at another major historical offshoot of the Phoenician alphabet, not one from Europe, but from North Africa. The long-gone Old Empire of my setting being a blend of Hellenistic era empires and the Roman Empire, complete with dynasties that originated in North Akirfa (the North Africa equivalent), it actually started seeming plausible that the predecessor of the main Aporuean alphabet (Aporuean Archontic) could have also originated in the southern half of this Mediterranean-centered empire.

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Other Thick as Thieves linguistic overviews
- Dead, rare and secret languages of human cultures
- Melzan dialect (Melzish) and its relatives
- Beastpeople species languages (Part 1)
- Beastpeople species languages (Part 2)
- Personal names and family names in Aporue

 

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Copyright

(C) 2017, 2022 P. Molnár
(C) 2017, 2022 Knight-Errant Studios