What is the coolest-looking written language?

Are you sure that isn’t Elvish? :slight_smile:

No love for Khmer?

I’m kind of partial to the chisled Latin that you see on the old Roman buildings. It just looks so majestic.

My nominee for the weirdest-looking script is Sinhalese.
Oriya looks like a parade of bald heads.
Telugu reminds me of scrambled eggs.

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Another difficulty they would have faced was being unable to post on message boards which don’t allow posts containing nothing but capitals.

FYI, recent historiography cites failure to develop message board technology as a key catalyst for the decline of the Roman Empire.

Every book’s a picture book in Dongba!

Butts. Butts everywhere. Is this the script of heaven?

I always liked this manuscript. Does it matter that no one can read it?

Many Asian languages still do this. In Japanese, you can sometimes tell when it switches between Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana. But a switch doesn’t necessarily mark a word change.

Also, YOVFORGOTTOVSEONLYXXIIILETTERS :smiley: (Presume this is post-ī Graeca)

Then you’re on the wrong message boards. And by wrong, I mean right. I’m sure that MODERNWARFAREFAN666’s message board lets you do caps.

I have to agree (though, I’d lump English in other European languages, as they use the Roman alphabet). Its simplicity also makes it versatile for a litany of pretty fonts, my favorites are the ones designed by the French artist A. M. Cassandre

Thaana, used in the Maldives.

Looks almost exactly like shorthand.

Klingon! It’s awesome, so guttural by the look and sound of it!

Well, I do love Spanish too.

I like it, too, along with the modern font Garamond derived from it. Especially the italics; there’s something charming about the way the italic capitals skew off in different directions.

And there’s a sans-serif font also derived from the Roman script, whose name I don’t remember offhand.

Your handy guide to Asian languages.

Gallifreyan. i win.:cool:

The simple, evocative script of the Wingding people has always moved me.

That’s a cute comic. Of course Japanese also has flying attacks, and then in Taiwan they have extra complicated flying attacks. Korean too, but way less common. NB: in Mongolia, they use a Cyrillic script, so “sort of like Russian but not.” The script is used in Inner Mongolia (PRC), and among some other groups for their own language.

I also like the Mr. Saturn font: Japanese (chart), English.

Wingdings is a trap. The Wingdingians are conducting a Neil Stephenson-esque secret war against other languages when you type something and it “coincidentally” seems meaningful. Thus toppling society by creating internet conspiracies about 9-11. Everybody knows that Snopes is a liberal-fascist-conservative-anarcho-syndicalist-papist-communist-Scientologist-dominionist conspiracy.

I think just regular Thai writing looks cool.

I don’t think plain old Arabic is that interesting but there is a rich history in Islam of ornate Arabic calligraphy that can be quite beautiful, inspired by a proscription against creating images of religious figures like Mohammed.

While I wouldn’t say it’s elegant, Ethiopian Ge’ez script looks cool.

Cherokee is pretty neat too.