Kilrathi Font Forgotten, But Not Gone (June 1, 2016)

ChrisReid

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Designers Guild has put together a reference sheet for a Kilrathi font that was first designed in the weeks that followed the Wing Commander Movie premiere. We wrote about it in the news way back in March 1999, and then never again! It used much of the film's text and added a few more characters to get a complete alphabet. Several Kilrathi fonts exist in our download archives, but this one was seemingly lost when Geocities went offline. It's since been resurrected, and now you can see it again below. Don't worry, we saved (12 k zip) the file this time around!





Use this as a reference for study, etc. As this is a charityware screen font (not a vector image font), just the layout and its template components are under copyright.

Made with:
- Adobe Illustrator CS2
- Mike H. Lee's scriptographic study & rendering: "Kilrathi" font seen in "Wing Commander" movie, 1999
- freeware dl @ Tommy of Escondino's Alien Fonts, a great collection. Includes Babylon 5, Star Wars, Stargate & Dune.

Mike H. Lee's Kilrathi true type font: This Kilrathi font comes from 1999 Movie: Wing Commander. The Canon letters are (A thru P), the rest of the font was invented by Mike. Kilrathi is an Ideographic language - the letters stand for a word or Idea. The little squares and dots change the meaning of the characters. The Kilrathi font, from what Mike has seen, can be written left to right & up and down. Michael Lee 3-17-99
Click to expand...
Thanks to DrJon for the tip!

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Original update published on June 1, 2016
 
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Yeah, each symbol would represent an idea. This is the Potato Jason-esque "Kilrathi Kanji"-style font, where adding a little blip changes the meaning from "Beware of the Dog" to "pass me the cheesy balls..."

JA'LRA, KILRATHI'HRA, JA'LRA?!?!?! Ri'orqma'ag gris er duhra! Lede'ha k'varg! JHAK!!

(Reference - from the last time this form of Kilrathi writing came up in conversation on the forums...)
 
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Back when the movie came out, the Kilrathi font was yet another one of those things I found rather troublesome in terms of the movie ignoring existing continuity: couldn't they just have used the Kilrathi font from WC3? Did they have to make up a new script?

Today, I find myself appreciating it for the exact same reason. Even though all Kilrathi scripts are referred to simply as "Kilrathi", implying that they are all actually one and the same, it's not a great leap of faith to assume that the Kilrathi might have multiple ways of writing. Indeed, it's the exact opposite of a leap of faith - it's obvious and logical, whereas the existence of a single unified Kilrathi way of writing (or, for that matter, a single and unified Kilrathi language) would be silly and ridiculous, given the incredible variety of writing and language we have on Earth. So, yeah, it's great to have this additional element out there, messing things up in the canon.
 
What I also find fascinating is that this was actually considered lost having used it for years now (and reminds me I should finally take a photo and post it here. grrrr so few time). Is there anything else in the WC verse that was once on the web and is now lost? Might still have some of that stuff around.
 
I'm sure there's still plenty of lost nuggets otherwise consigned to 'Net oblivion that are waiting to be panned out and rediscovered. And I totally agree with the notion of there being more than one system of Kilrathi writing - hell, Japanese (the usual comparison) has at least three or four different writing systems, IIRC. You could say that they originated with different clans or some such nonsense.
 
I am not sure this one was really lost; I've had a copy forever, too!

The Kilrathi writing in the movie is a bit of an odd bird in so far as 'they changed it!!!' complaints go... it looks a whole lot more like the Kilrathi writing from Wing Commander I than the Wing Commander 3/4/P script! (And the WC1 and WCM writing both seems a lot more realistic a writing system than the carefully sketched characters in WC3+...)
 
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