The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Invent your own alphabet
How it all began

All these people were trying to be useful (well, let’s hope so) with their different alphabets. But what about inventing a whole new alphabet just for fun?

That’s what J.R.R. Tolkien, the writer of The Lord of the Rings,did. He made up an Elvish alphabet, inspired by runes, for writing his own invented Elvish language. He’d been making up languages and alphabets since he was a schoolboy.

Here’s an example of Tolkien’s Elvish script:

The makers of Star Trek also invented a special alphabet for the fictional language Klingon. And in the Star Wars movies the language Aurebesh has its own script too. Here’s what it looks like:

Can you guess what I’ve written? (Yes, my name does look rather strange . . . )

Now, if you were to make up your own alphabet, how would you go about it? You could start with another alphabet, as Tolkien did with runes, and play around with it and change it until you make it your own. Or you could invent something entirely new.

Try using the shapes of things you see around you. Remember the Phoenician alphabet? Those letters started off as pictures of things that the Phoenicians saw in their everyday life. For example, their word for ox was “aleph,” so the letter we know as A was originally a picture of the head of an ox. B or “beth” was a house, C or “gimel” was a camel, and D or “daleth” was a door, and so on. Over time with lots of drawing, the picture became simpler and simpler, till you couldn’t tell how it had started off.

So for the letter for the sound C, for instance, you could draw a very simple picture, say, of a Cat. Or a Computer. Or a Cake. Or a Coconut.

Or a . . . actually, I think I’ll leave it to you!