I’ve been practicing my Erâtheet. It’s surprisingly difficult to learn to write foreign symbols; I imagine it’s something like learning Japanese or Cyrillic. Anyway, my own handwriting’s not that neat – I would love to see what someone with neat handwriting could make of it! Want to try it out? Email examples to satiswrites@icloud.com!
So now that I have a database of about 100 words in the Erâtheet language (I’m not starting on Cosari yet), I realized I had enough to start to work out common sounds and phonetics. This allows me to start to create an alphabet for this language, based on the sounds in each word. So far I’ve come to the conclusion that Erâtheet is comprised of 22 distinct sounds, being:
A B D E F G I K L M N O P R S T U V W Y TH SCH
The hard part was coming up with the shapes for each sound. I wanted to have a link to the latin alphabet, as Erâtheet is mainly corruptions of existing latin and germanic words, but I also wanted each letter to visually represent the sound in some way. So far I’ve come up with a few designs, but I haven’t been able to easily replicate them all digitally so far. Here’s a picture of them written out by hand:
And here’s the first few letters replicated digitally:
As you can see, the shapes are there, but they lack…finesse, I think. The A is showing an open sound; the B a closed sound. D is a variation of B, E represents the tightness of its sound, and F the complexity. The other letters go on from there. What do you think?
So here’s my big question: are there any calligraphers out there who fancy helping me create a language?
Now that we know that the late beloved and despised Iron Lady was a chemist in a past life, here are some more well-known people who did pointless things before discovering their life’s purpose.
What: PhD in Neuroscience
Where: UCLA
Now: Actress, Big Bang Theory
What: PhD in Astrophysics
Where: Imperial College, London
Now: Guitarist for Queen
What: MSc in Chemical Engineering
Where: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockhlom
Now: Not looking so good after having the shit beat out of him by Rocky IV.
What: Alive
Why: His parents were advised to abort in 1958 when she developed appendicitis whilst pregnant.
Now: Probably the second-most famous blind musician after Ray Charles.
What: Graphic Designer
Where: London
Now: Snape
What: Professor of Physiology
Where: London
Now: Dead, but left us with a little thing called the Thesaurus.
What: Depressed, insane, suicidal criminal sailor
Where: Everywhere in the world, pretty much.
Now: Dead as Joseph Conrad, the guy who wrote Heart of Darkness, upon which Apocalypse Now is based.
What: PhD in Amphibious Letters
Where: Southampton College, New York
Now: Cashing in unemployment cheques after a series of disastrously dull movies.
Credit to cracked.com and thefrisky.com for their insightful lists of interesting celebrities. Since I know very little about celebrities, I’d have found this article rather difficult to write.
