Fair Warning: this post is about 5.1 years old, so some of the information might be a bit dated. On the other hand, this post was last modified about 5 years ago, so maybe it's up-to-date after all. In any case, please keep all this in mind while reading. Thanks for understanding!
A Quick Diversion:  

The Actual News:

First off, I’ve updated the Galarian Word List with more stuff, now that I’ve made it to Spikemuth. … yes, I’m WAY behind on the game. 7o7

But now that I’ve made it to Spikemuth, I noticed something shocking:

Pokemon in Galarian

Pokemon in Galarian

It’s bad enough that they added a 40th letter—?—which has only been used like TWICE IN THE ENTIRE GAME…. but now there is clearly a missing 41st letter, which has ONLY appeared in this word (which is obviously “Pokémon”). Now what I’m now curious about is… first off, why?? Why did the devs do this? To be specific, that 41st letter is similar to both ? and G in that they only appear in very VERY rare circumstance; ? has only been seen on the red “Trainer Tips” signs and in the word “PokeJob” (and now “Pokemon”), while G has only appeared in the word “Galar” (GA9A4). So there is clearly a small class of Galarian characters which exist only in rare cases and is NOT used anywhere else. In that case, for all I know there might be another one-off 42nd and 43rd character as well. I guess I’d best keep it open. But still, normal languages don’t work this way; even letters like Q, J, and Z—which are literally the three least used characters in English—still appear in plenty of places, AND together—queen, jazz, quiz, equalize, jacqueries, jacuzzi, japanize, objectivize—they aren’t seen in ONE or TWO words, and that’s it. So I guess this is just one more mystery to unlock.

 

And secondly: consider how that 41st character looks like it would be an uppercase version of h, similar to how maybe e is the uppercase version of 2 or 9 is to 6. In that case, since we know that some characters are intended to be “lowercase” characters, is there an actual one-to-one connection between one certain lowercase character with a certain uppercase character? If so, then perhaps it’ll help sort out if there are any missing characters based on any lack of related upper- or lower-case characters. … That said, I personally don’t think that’s the case. Despite their similar shapes, there has been literally no indication that they actually ARE intended to be upper- and lower-case forms of the same character. Like, RQ38 (“Rose”) has never been depicted as, say, Ro2i somewhere else… rather, every case of “Rose” in Galarian has ALWAYS been written as RQ38. But even if I don’t think that’s the case, Galarian continues to surprise me, so I wouldn’t truly bet against that being the case.

Anyways… I’ll update Thraex Sans to include that missing 41st letter; I’ll probably include it as #, $, or &, as those shapes seem to be the most similar (at least of the ones I have left to use). I’ll post an update about it here when it’s done.

 

 

20200107 UPDATE:

OK, the Thraex font has been updated to include the 41st character, which is attached to the number sign (#), thus: #

And now, the Galarian word for Pokémon, in all its glory: