My Martian Alphabet and Rosetta Stone
As a child, I made up various planets and civilizations for my stories. Back around middle school, I developed my own alphabet for the characters and drawings I was always making for Martian stories.
These gentle creatures had their own eras, fashions, customs….They used orange to match their planet. The women even painted their faces like Mars, with orange and white patches for the poles.
They believed in God, and did not sin, never had a Fall, as hypothesized centuries earlier:
Ernest Tuveson, in his “Swift: The Dean as Satirist,” which I read in 1990 or 1991 for an English research paper, suggested that Jonathan Swift was influenced by concepts in Henry More’s Divine Dialogues. These dialogues have different speakers with different points of view; one was the
theory of the plurality of worlds. What about the salvation of rational beings who may well exist in distant planets–as well as in remote places of our own earth?
It is suggested that they may be creatures, endowed with reason, who have never experienced the fall. Such beings would have no need of “that Religion that the sons of Adam are saved by.”
They would live a perfectly orderly but monotonous existence, and “no Properties but those either of the Animal or middle life would be needed.”
They would have all sorts of virtues, skills, knowledge–but this is just a “middle” life, with no heights or depths. The Houyhnhnms would be like this. This, also, became my concept of Martian theology.
The alphabet was based on the International Phonetic Alphabet. One day, I made a document based on the Rosetta Stone: English (for the planet Spimpy, colonized by Earthlings) on the top, Martian (Shah-Lee) in the middle, and some other language (Uranus, maybe?) on the bottom.
I’m glad I made this, because several years later, my mother inadvertently tossed a whole bunch of my Martian pictures and stories, including the alphabets. Here it is:
Shilva, a Martian. Ancient Era, I think, though it’s hard to remember exactly–My Martian drawings and histories were lost in the Great Accident of 1991. 😛 :
Shilva Akika: a doodle on Astronomy notes, college, 1993:
