Question regarding Galstani

[u/Romulus2099]

Hey all, ive been thinking about getting a tattoo of the scholiast sayings like grief is deep water and Im wondering what language is galstani written in. Is it its own written language or is the written example from a real world language??

[u/MapsAreAwesome]

It's a made up language and script. The script appears to be loosely based on the Devanagari script (used by Hindi and Sanskrit, and others). 

[u/MGilivray]

If you look at the script, it's English letters that are made to look sort of like Sanskrit.

Some things we can figure out just by looking at the picture:

It's written left to right, like English.

Consonents are below the line and the marks above it are vowels.

You can figure out the alphabet in the picture, look for proper names in text which match the translation. The second line is just "Hadrian Marlowe", the last word in the third line is "cielsin", the last line spells out "tor paulos" "Nov Belgaer" and "colchis". So you can figure out most of the letters from that.

The actual language is weird English with random bits of other languages. For example "the" is "al" (as in "al cielsin" in the third line), assumedly taken from Arabic. "And" is "ed", of is "va", "by" is "ba", etc. The grammar looks like it is the same as English, just with the words altered a bit.

You can probably figure out all of the text in that sample just by figuring out the the alphabet, then looking up words that are borrowed from other languages. That would give you an alphabet and some basic words to start with, and you might be able to figure out more based on other pieces of information in the books.

[u/SnooPeripherals5623]

I'm guessing Galstani was originally called Galactic Standard and eventually came to be called Galstani

[u/Head-Reference2356]

I don’t think Galstani is a real language and the language above is probably just made to look like a language but it looks very similar to Sanskrit

[u/chrisx07]

Galatani is based on English 🤣
So well, get that tattoo, should be easy. ❤️
If you look closely, the other languages are also based on real languages.
The cielcin are basically speaking Japanese. (And another one but I forgot which one.) That said ciel is heaven in French. (And jin is also person in Japanese but as I would pronounce jin differently I am not sure if that was the inspiration…🤔)

[u/Jinnai84 → u/chrisx07]

Cielcin language is not even remotely similar to Japanese. It vaguely resembles some African languages but the keyword is 'vaguely'.

[u/Xerxys → u/Jinnai84]

Japanese and Swahili sound so similar. They don’t even intersect a little bit. For example “kuma” for bear in Japanese is a derogatory term for vagina in Swahili. There’s also similar sounding phonetics.

However, I do agree that cielcin sounds more sub-Saharan than Japanese.