User blog:Aaron Larsen/Fun with Draconic Phonics!

So the other day I took another look at the official, CG symbol for Tiamat and thought, "Hmm., maybe that wouldn't be as hard as I thought it might be to make into an icon..." So I took another look and started experimenting with it and got something that looked like it'd work, all except for that what, writing (?) runes (?) glyphs (?) around the edges. And I thought: maybe that's Draconic Script. So I pulled out my hand-dandy Draconic Alphabet translator:



... Only to discover that as best I can figure the official Tiamat Symbol is wrapped with some (very attractive) meaningless gibberish. So I modified my Icon to have an inscription in actual Draconic letters:



It says "Tiamat" across the top (of course) and "Skaild" going from the left to the bottom corner and "Tyrant" going from the right to the bottom corner. Yes, I know I spelled "Scaled" "wrong." One of my pet peeves is people who experiment with other fun writing systems only to recapitulate all the traditional absudities of English spelling in the new system. So I decided there was no "Silent E" in Draconic... And yes, I also contemplated translating the words into Draconic as well as the letters, but when I checked my friendly neighborhood draconic translator, there really wasn't an exact translation for "Scaled Tyrant." The closest I could come ("Ternock Daariv") was "Scale Queen" and I wasn't even sure that that was right, since apparently the draconic word for queen serves as both a noun and a verb (?!)

The only problem with the new icon is that it's a bit on the big side: when I tried reducing its size at all, the image got all distorted and the script was back to being gibberish. But if its size isn't too much of a problem, I think it's otherwise pretty spiffy and also frees up the previous icon to be used for either the Cult of the Caustic Heart or the Chroma Conclave faction logos (either of which could be well-represented by the previous 5-color logo...)

Oh, and for all you Draconic aficianados out there, I know its kind of hard to read the tiny little letters on the icon, so here's what the full-sized symbol would look like if it had some actual draconic script on it:



Once again, your friendly neighborhood iconographer,

Aaron Larsen