Calling all grapheticists: Eorzean versions of obscure glyphs

[Myranda]

It's well known that the Eorzean alphabet is a fairly minor alteration of the Latin alphabet, with quite custom 0-9 numerals. If you've really delved into it, you'll know that game names in many cases would use archaic spellings and ligatures (but for ease on the programmers, were not actually used as such in game) and that literacy in Eorzea is so low that those few rich folk that can read and write basically make up their own grammar and spelling rules (coming to an Adventurer's Aduyses near you!).

You may even know that I've taken these facts to create some variations on the original to create custom Eorzean fonts with some support for accents and other international characters such as ß, æ, œ, þ, ð, etc. Some characters, however, I have not addressed yet, which is where this thread comes in!

Since none of these characters exist officially, I've had to make them up. Some like æ and œ are obvious: you just smash the letters together or add a stroke onto a normal letter. Others not so much. So, how would you write the Eorzean versions of some of these characters?

Eszett (ß)

I've made a glyph for this already based on a combination of Eorzean capital S and lowercase z, but there's room for variation and I'm curious what people think.



The top one is what I've used in my fonts. Bottom left is a possible Ss combination, bottom middle an alternate Sz, and bottom right is Sz again but smoothed over in a different way that ends up looking similar to some existing RL versions of ß. Which of these forms do you think looks best? Any other ideas on how it could be constructed? I personally seem to lean towards Sz combinations over Ss ones due to how s is written in Eorzean, but maybe someone has other ideas to make it work.

Ampersand (&) / Question Mark (?) / Exclamation Mark (!)

So far I've written these as normal Latin in my fonts, but I'd love to think of possible original forms. The ampersand originated as a ligature of 'e' and 't', but I've yet to construct something in Eorzean I find satisfactory. The other two I have less of an idea of how I might make anything unique. Question mark is claimed by some to maybe be derived from a stacked 'q' and 'o', but I dunno how to work that into Eorzea's versions atm. It turns out there are sources for official ? and !... A question mark can be found in the blood writing in Tam Tara HM (looks like the inverted mark ¿ but with the dot still on bottom) and exclamation marks can be found in some of the older Lodestone event teaser images (pretty much a normal !) Thanks to Ken L. for an informative email exchange here.

Thorn (Þ þ)

So far all I've done for thorn is to take the Eorzean 'e' approach and flip it horizontally. If anyone has a better idea, by all means I'd love to hear it!

Yogh (Ȝ ȝ) / Ezh (Ʒ ʒ) / Insular G (Ᵹ ᵹ)

As it stands, these characters are similar to the Eorzean 'e' in a way, as well as to each other, and their introduction might be a bit confusing among the other custom glyphs. I've not implemented them anywhere yet for lack of ideas. Insular G I think is the character I'd least likely add to a font but I'm including it here just in case someone has anything to say about it.

Wynn (Ƿ ƿ)

Like yogh and ezh, I haven't added wynn to any of my fonts, as it can look an awful lot like Eorzean 'v' and 'y' (which are already hard to tell apart sometimes), and it can also be very similar to thorn in some handwriting. Any suggestions on how to include it without the resulting confusion would be welcomed.

Long S (ſ)

I can't really see much alternative here to something similar to Latin's long s. It could maybe be confused with Eorzean 'F', and so use on it's own may be discouraged, but it works decently well as a combiner in eszett above because it's also like the first stroke in Eorzean 'S'. Would love other opinions on it.

Eng (Ŋ ŋ)

Because why not? The concept is somewhat simple of just putting a little descender on an 'n' but where on the Eorzean 'N' would you put it? Especially since Eorzean's lowercase is basically a small-caps version and both forms have a more rounded corner where the descender exists in Latin script.

Any other characters I haven't mentioned that people would be interested to see or have ideas about?

[Myranda]

Sad to see there's not really any interest in this, however, I did come across some clarification on question and exclamation marks: official versions actually exist! That section has been updated and eventually my fonts will be too to incorporate the changes.