The degradation of names

[wdmartin]

The font Junicode was designed for use by professional medievalists, and has quite a large selection of glyphs for obsolete characters like wynn, eth, and so on. I used it extensively when I was in grad school.

It's not designed for looks -- it matches Times New Roman fairly closely so you can stick words in Anglo-Saxon or whatever into the middle of a sentence without too much of a jarring transition.

[J.Edward]

I do name degradation all the time. Makes town names more interesting. Adds depth.

[Mark Oliva]

We still use æ in French and also œ but I've never seen æ in capital letters. And the letter Æ seems to work with a lot of fonts.

Windows fonts that use the full Unicode character set have everything including Chinese. That's why we use the standard Arial font for our texts. We use derivatives out of such languages as Icelandic, old Icelandic, Czech, German, Finnish. etc. For that reason, we're able to write:

Æsir instead of AEsir, have an undead duke named þráinn and give a village an unspeakable name like Strážnice.

The seeming down side of this is, that such names are a bit of extra color that many gaming groups are happy to do without. For that reason, we also offer the same names in English, so that those who wish to do so can say Thrainn instead of þráinn and Sentinel City instead of Strážnice.

[markem]

wdmartin : WoW. That Junicode is really neat!
J.Edward: *nod*
Mark Oliva: I found that if the font looks bad - people get upset trying to figure out what is printed but good fonts make SOME people really happy to see the strange characters. One of my problems with using those characters is remembering how to actually pronounce them. I always used to practice saying the various archaic letters so I'd pronounce them correctly.

Did anyone ever use an Apple ][+ or //e? Did you ever use the Beagle Brothers' Font Machine or (I forget the company name) FontTastic?

[Mark Oliva]

I found that if the font looks bad - people get upset trying to figure out what is printed but good fonts make SOME people really happy to see the strange characters. One of my problems with using those characters is remembering how to actually pronounce them. I always used to practice saying the various archaic letters so I'd pronounce them correctly.

Agreed. Bad fonts are bad fonts. Avoid them. There are too many good fonts available to waste one's time with bad ones. In the real-world languages upon which we based the languages for our campaign setting, I certainly learned what pronunciation(s) is/are associated with the non-English characters. I think that any game master who tends to go with these languages also should find out how to pronounce them. Most of the languages we used as bases for our languages are phonetic (unlike English).