We need to talk about Aurebesh (part 1)

In a post earlier this year, I brought up the idea of ‘reenactorisms’—the spread and perpetuation of an inaccuracy being unknowingly (or knowingly) passed around because somebody didn’t do their research. After that initial post, I realized one of the biggest reenactorisms in Star Wars costuming was my most infuriating pet peeve: the phenomenon of backwards Aurebesh letters. Having spent probably-too-much-time thinking about the issue, I thought I’d try something new and devote an entire month to the topic of writing in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. That’s right, folks: welcome to Aurebesh Month!

A quick search of Etsy for the term will easily reveal the problem we are facing: an annoying lack of consistency in how the letters are to be written. A number of these items are geared towards the Batuu-bounding crowd—patches, ID tags, Aurebesh ‘translators’, luggage tags, etc.—and I suspect it is the popularity of the Disney parks (coupled with the recent rise of Cricut-type machines that make cranking out crispy stickers so easy) that has caused the proliferation.

At the heart of the issue is the erroneous idea that Aurebesh has capital letters at all, let alone that it indicates them by horizontally flipping the letters. None of the Aurebesh texts seen at the Galaxy’s Edge park—the writing system’s most high-profile manifestation—includes these backwards capitals, so where did this idea originate???

Whenever I ask one of these horizontal flippers, they usually say, ‘Well, I just ran it through the translator.’ Since Aurebesh is just a 1-to-1 transliteration cipher, once you learn the pairings from the OG table above, the best translator is the one right between your ears.
As I’ve said, while this reenactorism has really taken off in the last two or three years, I did find a discussion on Aurebesh’s Wookieepedia Talk page *from 2007* claiming that capital letters should be flipped! Unfortunately, the Wook isn’t nearly as fastidious as Wikipedia in asking people to cite their sources, so I can’t tell where this idea comes from. Lately, I’ve seen folks point to an Aurebesh font, so perhaps that’s where we need to look closer. I’ve been using the same old Windows TrueType Aurebesh font for over 20 years, so I’m guessing this offending font must be a recent addition.

Prior to this mirroring nonsense, it was been pretty clear that Aurebesh was written much as the Latin alphabet was written by the Romans: all letters were written majuscule—a lot like the ‘Small Caps’ setting on word processor software. The idea that a writing system which doesn’t need capitals anyway would indicate them by flipping the letters is ludicrous. Unlike the Latin alphabet, over one-quarter of Aurebesh letters are already horizontally symmetrical (this is true whether we include its eight digraphs or not!), so even if upper/lowercase Aurebesh letters were a thing, many letters would be unable to be capitalized anyway!:

Furthermore, we have examples from the various continuities of people hand-writing Aurebesh and showing no (or at least not backwards) uppercase.

In Galactic Battlegrounds, we see Mace Windu writing his memoirs of Echuu Shen-Jon by hand, and everything is the same size and same orientation! (the S in Sith and J in Jedi are unchanged).

Even in post-Disney materials, we apparently see Leia Organa writing a letter by hand in Stattered Empire #2, which shows the first letters of names and titles (‘Mrs. Nereno’, ‘your husband, Able’) capitalized simply with larger versions of the standard letters. Personally, just thinking about writing with this kind of robotic consistency makes my hand cramp…I always liked Dave Canavero’s handwritten Aurebesh font for informal use. Give it a try!

Come join the conversation at the SWLH facebook community, and be sure to check in next week as Aurebesh Month continues in part two with a look at one of the biggest sources of backwards letters in Star Wars…and they’re all pre-Disney! 😉 See you then! You can find our two-part Aurebesh entries of the Galactic Style Guide here and here!

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