SAY NO TO SHERMAN
UGH SHERMAN
UGHThere are three fan-systems of Gallifreyan. Two are easily accessible, two are nice looking, only one overlaps and fits both categories.
The most attractive system is
Greencrook's Gallifeyan, and it is hieroglyphic in nature, with words represented by single glyphs. It's beautiful and it looks canonical, but not terribly easy to use. The glyph in my signature is an amalgamation of Greencrook glyphs that my friend designed for me to represent me :B
Doctor's Cot Gallifreyan is canonical-looking and goes by the one-letter-one-glyph system (to some degree, glyphs represent sounds). Its easy to use and it looks really great. It gets full marks for ticking all the boxes, and extra marks because it's much more likely to be consistent than Sherman's.
The other system, which everyone used because it's so easy that there's a generator that spits out glyphs when you plug words into it, is
Sherman's Gallifreyan. It's one-letter-one-glyph but if you press the 'make glyph' or whatever it is button multiple times it'll spit out multiple ways of writing the same word. It also gets super ugly when it gets complicated (lots of people write entire quotes in it and they all fold in on themselves and are awful) and it looks the least like show canon. I'm not a fan of how static it is...too many straight lines.
I have strong opinions on Gallifreyan because I paint it a lot >> I don't actually use any of the fan systems (though my gibberish looks a lot like Greencrook) because I'm a bad linguist and can't be bothered learning them. But it's very worthwhile to learn one of the non-Sherman ones.
One day Sherman will find me and tell me off for badmouthing them all over the internet but I don't even care~
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