Circular Gallifreyan
Circular “Sherman’s” Gallifreyan is a fictional writing system from the TV show Doctor Who. The original translation key was created in 2011 by Loren Sherman as a fan project, and it was recently made official by the BBC!
The Gallifreyan alphabet is a substitute for Latin, with some Gallifreyan characters standing in for pairs of letters like TH and SH. In traditional Circular Gallifreyan, letters are arranged in “word circles”, and the word circles are arranged in larger “sentence circles”. Consonants are constructed by drawing a base shape and adding dots or lines. Vowels are small circles that can stand alone, or be attached to the preceding consonant. Consonants with the same base shape can also be combined with each other.
A detailed translation/writing manual and other helpful links can be found on Loren Sherman’s website: https://shermansplanet.com/gallifreyan/
Because of its complexity and circular nature, Sherman’s Gallifreyan is typically drawn on paper using a compass, or in vector software. I started out drawing Circular Gallifreyan in MS Paint, or on paper during class, and later Photoshop and Illustrator.
Here is a slightly simplified version of Circular Gallifreyan, with the word circles arranged in a straight line:
Auto-translate apps exist, but the results are aesthetically unappealing and sometimes incorrect. Some scribes use a much quicker, “unfurled” version to plan out drawings, which is what inspired this project.
Linear Gallifreyan
Contextual Alternates
Enabling contextual alternates will add a full width word bar to inner parentheses and brackets, so you can write mathematical expressions with a continuous line. This will not affect parentheses at the beginning or end of an expression.
The quadratic formula can be written as (x)=[-b±(b^2-4ca)^(1/2)]/[2a], using fractional exponents because there is no square root symbol in Sherman’s Gallifreyan.
Text Samples
Lalita Kohls 