Standard Galactic Alphabet
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The Standard Galactic Alphabet, also known as its TLA SGA, is the writing system used to depict Omnispeak, the alien language of choice in the galaxy in the Commander Keen fictional universe.
The player first discovers the alphabet in the first Commander Keen game, Marooned on Mars, where Keen telepathically hears an alien inside a shrine say: "It is too bad you cannot understand the Standard Galactic Alphabet, human.". In reality, it is a simple substitution cipher created by Tom Hall for his Commander Keen series of computer games. Originally for Keen 1 he drew some graphics for Exit signs which he made look a bit more alien by changing the ordinary Latin letters a bit. After that he added other signs saying "hi" and "this is neat" (near rayguns), and he ended up creating conversions for the other letters of the Latin alphabet in order for the signs to resemble writings in an alien language. Because the texts are still in English however, it is not an artificial script. Besides the 26 letters, he created a little used ._. symbol to use as a full stop, but no other punctuation, nor does capitalization exist.
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Deciphering
Players of the Keen series that spent the necessary time could figure out SGA by looking at the many signs throughout the games. Especially Keen 3 was helpful, since it has a relatively large number of signs including both SGA and Roman letters. Also in Keen 3 a sign with the complete SGA can be found in the secret level, similar to the Rosetta Stone. Another alphabet sign can be found in Keen 6 in the Blooglab Space Station level. Knowing the complete alphabet came in handy while deciphering a letter which explains part of the storyline at the end of Keen 5.
Other uses
Joe Siegler later wrote a secret message "Dopefish lives" in the walls of a Rise of the Triad level. SGA has not had much other official use after that, but Tom Hall invented a syllabary to create a more complex "alien" language used in Ion Storm's Anachronox. After that, id Software, developer of the Commander Keen series created a simple substitution cipher very similar to SGA for the Strogg race in Quake 4.
See also
External links
- Omniglot, a guide to writing systems A table of all the characters in the SGA
- A Look Back at Commander Keen: Other Stuff A scan of the original design
- 20 Questions For Joe Seigler (sic) Joe Siegler mentions SGA use in Rise of the Triad