Alien civilization with writing system taken from the constellations

I'm thinking of aliens that are human-like. Each constellation is one phoneme with some more important phonemes having a major and minor constellation (equivalent to capital and lowercase letters). The names of people and things taking the first letter of their names from the constellation their most associated with so for example the months would have the first letter of their "zodiac" constellations.

I think constellations would work better as pictograms or ideograms, like Chinese or Ancient Egyptian.

Hmm... It seems to me that constellations are fairly non-obvious, and for humans at least I feel that it might be hard to both teach which stars make which pictures and to then build language on top of that.

So, I would be inclined to guess that either these aliens or their situation is different to us or ours in some way that mitigates that. Perhaps they're stronger pattern-finders than us (which may have consequences in other fields). Or perhaps their sky has some feature that highlights certain stellar patterns. Or something else besides...

Here's a question that occurs to me: as the aliens progress in technology (presuming that they do), what do they do about light pollution? Or do they progress in such a way that light pollution isn't a problem? Or, conversely, has their writing system developed by that point to no longer rely on sighting of the skies...?

Regarding the matter of pictograms or ideograms, mentioned in the post above, it seems to me that both might be true: that the constellations started off as pictograms/ideograms, but that over time they were whittled down to more-versatile components.

FWIW, some people did make symbols for the non zodiac constellations (as well as some asteroids and dwarf planets. The latter group making their way to Unicode). And a Japanese guy then made a font with those. So the symbol part can be done at least.

This seems like something you'd do for a conlang lingua franca. Like there's dozens of different nations with their own unique languages. In order to facilitate trade and diplomacy someone invents and promotes and artificial language designed to be flexible and easy to learn. In order to not show bias, the language uses constellations for characters since no one nation owns the stars.

Edited by Belisaurius on Dec 14th 2022 at 1:42:53 PM

their writing system has developed by that point that they no longer rely on sighting of the skies

Constellations sound like a great starting point, but if this alien civilization is anything remotely human then you're gonna want to iterate on those constellation-pictograms until they turn into actual glyphs. See also: this chart depicting the evolution of our alphabet. Notice how the proto-Sinaitic letterforms look more like stick figures than letters.

(Why develop it into an alphabet like this? Because if you went the pictogram / ideogram route like we see with Chinese then this alien culture would probably disregard the constellations entirely.)

Edited by AwSamWeston on Feb 26th 2023 at 10:24:29 AM

Well this page should provide a starting point for either approach at least. As it has glyphs for the modern constellations

(the guy that designed it also designed the planet symbols that recently made their way into unicode, themselves also a likely starting point in addition)

Also, why did the Romans flip the glyphs for their alphabet?

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Feb 26th 2023 at 8:32:36 AM

Keep in mind that if this is an alien culture, then their constellations back home will look different from the ones we have here on earth.

Remember kids: Constellations are just stars, and stars exist in 3D space.

"Because if you went the pictogram / ideogram route like we see with Chinese then this alien culture would probably disregard the constellations entirely."

How come? Chinese ideograms underwent a very similar sort of evolution.

True! You could totally use the aliens' constellations as a starting point for a logographic writing system, but you'll very quickly have to invent new characters after the first... hundred? Give or take? For context, Earth has 88 constellations across both hemispheres, while the Chinese language has over 50,000 characters.

If the aliens' language were highly "smash-words-together-to-make-big-ideas-y" then it might be doable, but you start to get into some weird logistics and conveniences that only really make sense if the aliens' culture prides itself on logic and regularity.

Also, just thinking about the level of effort involved, it's simply easier for a worldbuilder to map individual symbols to unique phonemes. This is why constructed languages feature a lot more alphabets, abjads, and abugidas than logographies.

Oh, I see what you mean. But the basic ideogram isn't based on a single constellation—you make them combinations of three or more. Then, assuming 100 basic constellations (to make the math easy), then that's 100x100x100 possible combinations, or more. Seems like enough to cover a very large lexicon. If placement within the overall ideogram conveys some grammatical meaning, that would seem to provide sufficient base for a full blown language.

keep in mind there's also capitalization so if there's 100 constellations there's like 50 letters not even counting other types of characters like numbers, I'm also thinking maybe there would be "middlecase" letters, but I have no idea what those would be used for

Does capitalisation have to involve a second constellation? Could it perhaps be done via diacritics?

(Maybe the diacritic is itself a star near the constellation, making the capital a modified form of said constellation.)

As to "middle case", there are a variety of potential uses for such, I imagine: denoting speech, adding emphasis, denoting relative social station, etc. etc.

Not all scripts have separate miniscule and majuscule (lower and upper case) forms either.

yeah but I feel like otherwise there'd be too many constellations if each letter was unique even if numbers and punctuation are involved

I mean, does the writing system have to use every constellation? (After all, our zodiac doesn't, as far as I'm aware.)

Or, conversely, might the aliens simply have identified and named a smaller set of constellations than have we?

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jun 24th 2023 at 10:04:03 AM

The zodiac isn't the basis of an entire written language TBF (though I must remind people that some people did create signs for the other 75 or so)

that said if I expect any constellation to be left out of a hypothetical writing system, than it implies that it is either too recent or too minor to warrant inclusion OR that it simply has too few letters and those are allocated to the more culturally important ones.

Like going back to the zodiac, these constellations had been given cultural significance by their position in the elliptic, complete with alternate myths (like the Pricus one in the crank-o-sphere) and personality types, Something that isn't granted to the other constellations. The Ursas, Orion and Canis Major for example, do not have people theorycrafting entire archetypes for them or using them for prestidigitation for example, despite being important and visible through history.

That is to say that I'd imagine sucha language to either encompass all the constellations unless some were very recent, or be specialized towards a specific group and used not for general communication, but instead for more mystical ends, and even that doesn't guarantee it would excludes less significant constellations (even though I suspect it is why the zodiac have signs and horoscopes to begin with).

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 24th 2023 at 9:51:36 AM

Sure, but we don't really have an applicable analogy.

But nevertheless, it's a case in which only a very select sub-set of all identified constellations is used for symbolic purposes.

Not necessarily: It could well be that the civilisation in question defined only so many constellations, or that they defined constellations from larger sets of stars than we do (thus "using up" more stars per constellation), or that they only assigned constellations to groups of stars that they deemed significant (e.g. those that include a particularly bright star, or a red star, etc.), or that they have more atmospheric haze than us and so in their alphabetising phase saw fewer stars. And there may be other reasons besides!

Either way, it seems very plausible to me that these aliens simply don't have as many constellations as do we.

Why? I don't see any reason to think so, myself.

I suppose that the question is this: Did they come up with a new letter every time they identify a new constellation? (That's the only reason that I see offhand that their alphabet would necessarily encompass all constellations.) Or did they identify constellations, then later start using them as letters? (Or something else?)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jun 24th 2023 at 7:04:06 PM

My presumption is the latter, but then again there is some anthropocentrism involved. The number and forms of the constellations were static for a few decades if not a century now, something that isn't necessary true for any alien civilizations, especially if they lack an authoritative body equivalent to the IAU

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 24th 2023 at 10:09:29 AM

In that case, I see no inherent reason that they would necessarily have made a point of using all constellations—or that they might not have come up with significantly more constellations in the centuries or millennia (I would imagine) since they settled on a (base) alphabet.

Again, much like our Western Zodiac: Our ancients identified lots of constellations, but only twelve were given lasting cultural significance.

And that's before we get to the possibilities that, as mentioned, they added to their list of constellations after alphabetising; or that they used more stars per constellation than we do; or that they have more haze, and so observed fewer stars, leading to fewer constellations; etc. etc.

I have a question.

How is this language written?

From right to left, left to right, up to down, down to up, inward spiral, outward spiral, in two or three or four dimensions, inwards or outwards or by following pages.

In short: What would a book written in this language be like?

Xidnaf has a youtube channel on Linguistics. It'll help explain how languages differ.

I think they recognized more stars in the sky which led to constellations being more densely packed into the sky and I was originally thinking this would be done by using fewer stars per constellation but I failed to realize there would be a limit to how many unique clusters of stars there could be and am currently wondering about that and I also just realized while typing this that I don't know whether or not constellations could be more densely packed and still be recognizable

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Jul 11th 2023 at 4:48:58 AM

So, to clarify, is it your desire that there be a huge number of characters in their alphabet?

I suppose let me ask: What are the fixed parameters here? What do you specifically want for each of the sky and the alphabet? For example, are you aiming specifically for a large alphabet? Are you aiming specifically for a densely-starred sky? And so on and so forth.

If we have a better idea of what you have set in place, we may be better able to make suggestions.

What limit is that? (Aside from simply something like the number of stars divided by the average number of stars per cluster, of course.)

They're an alien species: their faculties are not necessarily as human; whether or not it's humanly feasible, it could still be so to this species, it seems to me.