I have created Runes Converter to convert runes to Latin and vice versa. After working on the runes for a few months, I finally felt ready to publish the language. If you would like to skip the details, click here: TLDR

The Language and the Alphabets

The language calls itself “carving” as people carved the letters on stones and slabs in the past, before the first word was ever spoken. Today, the runic alphabet is called The Forgotten Alphabet, and there are two ways to write down speech: either in the forgotten alphabet or the new alphabet.

The new alphabet uses circumflex and acute and the characters ñ, ö, ı, ü in addition to the English alphabet. The converter is mostly for myself and our devs so that we can write in the runic alphabet or convert the runes to Latin when needed. However, if you’d like to play around with it, you are more than welcome!

Creating the Fonts

After designing the runes themselves (and their logic), we had to create a font to represent the characters in a digital environment. For this, I have used Calligraphr and Adobe Illustrator. Currently, to fully utilize the forgotten alphabet, you would need a keyboard layout that has the ñ, ı, ö, ü characters. The Turkish keyboard layout works for me (except the ñ, which requires a key combo). I initially wanted to use different letters, but these were far easier to work with. I might change them in the future.

Currently, all of the runic characters in the font are mapped to numerical keys (for coding convenience) except the space character, which is mapped to the space key. You can find these posts on the new page, and the page should prompt you if you don’t have the fonts installed. The converter would not work without the fonts installed.

I have taken the seemingly most convenient path for me, but I kind of regret my approach as I realized later on that it was a very spaghetti way. I am sure there are much better ways to design fonts – and if that is something you have done and are good at and you’d like to help out, please get in touch.

TLDR

We have a webpage that converts runes into Latin and vice versa.

The converter still has a few bugs, but it is able to:

  • Convert Latin to the new alphabet (Ex: aa -> a, gg -> g̊ -> rr -> r̊)
  • Convert Latin to the forgotten alphabet (runes)
  • Convert forgotten alphabet (runes) back to Latin

You can find it here.

To make the font work on another platform (or to be able to copy and paste it from the website), you would need to install the font on your computer. You can download the font here.