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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dungeonosophy" data-source="post: 7940608" data-attributes="member: 6688049">Thanks!Of course the first thought would be to present the Classical/Koine Greek alphabet as-is, in its native order, and with standard Roman transcription. If I wrote D&D Hellenic Adventures book, I would include that as well, for reference.But if one really sits down and tries to make a way to write the English language using the Greek alphabet, you will find some creative difficulties. It is not easy. Believe me, I've done it. I'm a linguist, and have also invented ways of writing English using Chinese hanzi and bopomofo, Korean hangul, Japanese hiragana, Cyrillic, and other scripts.In fact, the first draft of my Fantasy Greek Alphabet did just as you propose. It was based totally on the sounds ('phonemes') of English, rather than English spelling. But how many D&D gamers have the linguistic self-consciousness to parse the phonemes of their own language, when prepping for a game? Plus, American English and British English (and other varieties and subvarieties) map to a somewhat different set of phonemes.Yes, Greek script, at one time or another, has been used to write a bunch of different languages: Albanian, Turkish, Coptic (Egyptian), Arabic, Gaulish, etc: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet#Use_for_other_languages" target="_blank">Greek alphabet - Wikipedia</a>And my first draft drew from those, to find a letter for each English phoneme (rather than letter). It was a Phonetic English-Greek Alphabet. Like Albanian-Greek it had a "dotted sigma" for the "sh" sound, a "dotted t+s" for the "ch" sound, a "dotted zeta" for the "zh" sound, a "dotted epsilon" for the schwa sound, etc. But even when adapted to to other languages, the Greek Alphabet was a bit lazy when coming up for letters which distinguish "b" and "v" and "d" and voiced "th" (as in "then"), and just used Latin letters!So, a Phonetic Anglo-Hellenic Alphabet could be done, and I did it, but it looked even less "Greek" than my Fantasy Greek cipher, and would require DMs to phonetically parse every English word.Yeah, it would foster knowledge, but have you seen, for example, the Azcan gazetteer for the Hollow World setting of Basic D&D? It features a very detailed 'authentic' representation of Aztec hieroglyphs, calendar, and such. It's super complicated. Uses a different number base, etc. But it reads like a Mesoamerican academic report.That is why I'm in favor of 26-letter "Fantasy Gamer Cyphers". In fact, I've done the same thing for several other scripts, which could be used for D&D Rashemi Adventures (Fantasy Cyrillic Alphabet, should've been included in Ravnica book), D&D <a href="https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Koryo" target="_blank">Koryo Adventures</a> (Fantasy Hangul Alphabet), D&D Wa Adventures (Fantasy Hiragana Alphabet), D&D Shou Adventures (Fantasy Bopomofo Alphabet), and could easily do others.There's already a firm precedent for going with simple 26-letter alphabets, in the various official D&D scripts: Draconic, Dwarven, Elven, etc. From a scientific perspective, surely these ancient languages wouldn't have coincidentally ended up with 26 letters each (and no syllabaries or logographic scripts!) But that's just the way 'fantasy linguistics' rolls, for the D&D Multiverse. (Same could be said for how Planescape asserted that all the Common languages of the various D&D Worlds happen to be mutually comprensible!) It's fantasy linguistics.-Travis</blockquote>

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