The practice of combining individual letters into ligature forms—known in Armenian as Ktsa’gir (Կցագիր)—originated primarily from the necessity to conserve space, particularly within the contexts of epigraphy and the design of seals. Although rarely employed in manuscripts executed in the Erkata‘gir script, such ligatures occasionally appear when spatial constraints arise at the end of a line. In these instances, multiple characters are visually conjoined to accommodate the limited surface.
Ktsa'gir Կցագիր Armenian Calligraphy by Ruben Malayan 2025
the Aurebesh isn't very great from a conscripting perspective. not only because it's a fucking cipher (a mere font to write in English, with English nonsensical spelling rules) but also because all letters are blocky squares.
Which us fine because this isn't the focus of Star Wars, it's purpose isn't to work well linguistically or practically, it is to set an atmosphere and pretend it's not English
Chinese, Japanese and other syllabic scripts work that way because each symbol stands for a while syllable, not an individual sound. and English has syllables with massive consonant clusters like scratch
an alphabet needs many tall, thin letters like l i r q r t p d f h j k l b
if all letters are fat and wide like ლ then any text occupies far too much space and is overly long. and larger chunks of text consume exponentially more space, paper, ink, digital pages, stablishment titles, etc, not to mention being annoying to read
the simplest solution is to create thinner versions of each letter, making them thinner and thinner until it's a totally different alphabet
a different solution that preserves the blocky feel is to combine letters together into ligatures, like in Hindi, specially for common words and consonant combinations, so, fusing E and R into a single ER letter, for example.
to illustrate, this is "Republic" in canon Aurebesh:
and this is "Republic" after combining some letters:
we could go more aggressive and combine more than two letters, but speakers would have to know all ligatures, but that's fine, Hindi speakers learn hundreds or millions of letter combinations and they're not random, they are intuitive
now with Skywalker:
of course, i'd still prefer to make an alphabet which actually makes sense
real life example: Korean
if we wrote English with the Hangul, Republic would be 러풉맄
Constructing the Ligature ffl instead of ffi: everything dances
-Creative Study Copy of Guide for Constructing the Ligature ffi about 1591–1596, original shown below by Joris Hoefnagel (Flemish, / Hungarian, 1542 - 1600), copy shown atop by Ibrahim, 2025
