Alien civilization with writing system taken from the constellations

I just kind of assumed that the constellations being more simple shapes would somehow make them smaller and/or that there would need to be more constellations in their northern hemisphere then on earth in order for there to be an alphabet (since this language would have evolved naturally in one geographic region which would mean no constellations from their other hemisphere could be used) and for some reason tried to maintain my initial assumption instead of the idea behind it and also got fixated on the idea that this language would have a large amount of characters and there being enough for there to be separate capitalized and lowercase and maybe even middle case letters for some reason the entirely pragmatic limit that the less stars that could fit in a standardized amount of space (unlike on earth all the constellations would be roughly the same size) the less shapes you could make not even getting into the fact that you can't connect the same pattern of stars in two separate ways since the constellations are meant to be intuitive

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Jul 11th 2023 at 6:08:42 AM

Well, the point is that your plot and it's needs should be driving all these decisions. It's generally a mistake to let the worldbuilding take over the story.

Okay! Thank you for those answers! They help, I do think!

I would disagree with both assumptions.

It's perfectly possible to make simple constellations with large clusters of stars; not all stars have to be involved.

I mean, look at our constellation Orion—it's composed of a handful of stars—and contains a great many more that simply aren't part of the pattern.

And again, if there are few stars visible in the first place, then you end up with simple constellations in large shapes.

As to alphabet, there are 26 characters in ours, but (going by Wikipedia) the Phoenician alphabet had only 22, and the Rotokas alphabet has only 12.

Let's then consider a base alphabet of... oh, 20 characters.

Going back to Wikipedia, I see that a Babylonian star catalogue listed "17 or 18" constellations—so, it seems to me that with our night sky and approach to constellations, it would be well within bounds to make a full alphabet from them.

Now, you mentioned capitalisation—but is that a requirement here? I note (again on Wikipedia) that "Old English did not have a distinction between uppercase and lowercase"—so it doesn't seem to be a necessity for an alphabet.

And if it is desired, it doesn't necessarily require a separate character: it can be the same character writ large, or with a diacritic applied.

So, in conclusion, I don't think that an alphabet really requires a huge number of constellations, nor that simpler constellations have to be smaller constellations.

That's perhaps somewhat true—but I think that you underestimate the number of potential patterns.

My Games & Writing

Thanks for clearing up my misconceptions about constellations however I do have to say that it's not just letters that come from the constellations but also numbers as well and while the number system is only base 6 that still only leaves 11-14 letters if we assume there are only 17-20 constellations in the northern hemisphere.

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Jul 18th 2023 at 2:07:24 PM

To the first, it's my pleasure! ^_^

To the second, fair enough!

So, let's again take an estimate of 20 letters, and as you say, 6 numbers. That would then require 26 constellations, which seems quite plausible to me based on our history—and on the sheer number of stars between our zodiacal constellations.

I really don't think that there needs be any significant difference between their astronomy or constellation-system and ours in order to achieve what you want.

On a related note, I've just learned of the Ancient Egyptian "decans"—while it seems that they were smaller than constellations, they may prove of interest or inspiration to you!

My Games & Writing

while we're looking at resources, a logical extension of this conlang is that the alphabet is split into monthly, seasonal and northern letters but I can't seem to find any good star maps that show what stars can be season and month

Surely our starmaps wouldn't help?

After all, given that this is an alien species, I presume that they're located on a planet other than Earth. As a result, I daresay that they would almost certainly see a very different field of stars to ours.

(Barring some incredible set of circumstances resulting in the array of stars as viewed from their perspective somehow happening to appear just as does the array of stars from our perspective.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jul 21st 2023 at 8:17:11 PM

My Games & Writing

I mean like in order to see which areas of our sky can be seen in which month as in which areas of the sky can be seen in multiple months

like every star map i've seen doesn't show that only showing the month on the edge

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Jul 22nd 2023 at 11:37:37 AM

Hmm... You could try one of those astronomy programs that float around sometimes—I think that you may find one that allows you to specify the date (and thus the month), and thus observe what the celestial sphere looks like at that time.

My Games & Writing

Have you tried a Star Wheel?

I am specifically looking for things that are free online as I don't currently have money

Here you go (online)

Or, if you prefer to make one

Edited by DeMarquis on Aug 10th 2023 at 9:17:56 AM