ooc Decoding Journal

[scootloops]

Door inscription

[Ayeba]

Left door closeup:

 

Right door closeup:

Edited May 10 by Ayeba (see edit history)

[Ayeba]

Letters, with my nicknames for them.

---

m-like letters:

 "m", appears to be a common letter

"m with tail"

"m with tower"

---

cl/a/q-like letters; letters that look like variants of 'c' and 'l' combined, with varying 'size' on the 'l'.

"almost a". Seems to be very common.

 "q", very common. Also appears at least once as a single-letter word.

"cl", that is 'c' and 'l'

"anchor"; reminds me most of a "d", and distinct from "cl" above.

 "cl + j". This looks like the start of the "cl" above, but it has more attached to it.

---

Other letters that looks like the Latin alphabet

"n"

 "u"

"h"

"y"

"s" -- though it looks more like a "5" some places. Rare. Not a single one on the left door.

---

Other letters:

 "w with tower"

"w with tail"

 "lasso". It can also be considered a 'q', but I already have a different letters with that name.

  "delta". Not entirely; lacking the bottom line compared to uppercase Delta.

 

If you see any more distinct letters that I've missed, let me know.

Edited May 10 by Ayeba (see edit history)

[bwatford]

[Newcomer]

This is great. There are additional runes above the doors. I'll spend some time looking at this as well in the coming days. The script reminds me quite a bit of Tolkien's tengwar, which I dabbled in years ago.

When I have more energy (tomorrow, probably), I'll add an IC post, but Zelda will happily provide light and attempt to comprehend languages as well, only to see that fail, too. That failure will fascinate her just as much as Question.

[Newcomer]

In fact, this looks like it's almost directly using tengwar letters, with a few stylistic alterations, though I'm not sure how much that helps us decode it. I'll add in my best guess for each letter below. I'm including their usual pronunciations in various forms of Tolkien's languages (using the Wikipedia chart as a guide), but I know they've been adapted to various other languages by altering the meanings of the letters.

4 hours ago, Ayeba said:

Letters, with my nicknames for them.

---

m-like letters:

 "m", appears to be a common letter númen (typically /n/)

"m with tail" ando (/d/ or /nd/)

"m with tower" ampa (/v/ or /mp/)

---

cl/a/q-like letters; letters that look like variants of 'c' and 'l' combined, with varying 'size' on the 'l'.

"almost a". Seems to be very common. anna (o/aw or /ü/ (French /u/))

 "q", very common. Also appears at least once as a single-letter word. calma (/k/ or English /ch/)

"cl", that is 'c' and 'l' harma (German /ch/ or English /sh/)

"anchor"; reminds me most of a "d", and distinct from "cl" above. variant of hwesta (German /ch/ or /hw/) or hwesta sindarinwa? (/wh/)

 "cl + j". This looks like the start of the "cl" above, but it has more attached to it. variant of ungwe (/g/ or /ngw/) or quesse? (/k/ or /kw/)

---

Other letters that looks like the Latin alphabet

"n" óre (/n/ or /r/) or vala (/m/, /v/, or /w/)

"h" thúle/súle (/th/ or /s/) or formen (/f/)

"y" arda (/r/ or /rd/)

"s" -- though it looks more like a "5" some places. Rare. Not a single one on the left door. alda (/l/ or /ld/)

---

Other letters:

 "w with tower" anca (/nk/ or /zh/ (French j))

"w with tail" anga (hard /g/, /ng/, or soft /dge/)

 "lasso". It can also be considered a 'q', but I already have a different letters with that name. silme nuquerna (/ü/ or /s/)

  "delta". Not entirely; lacking the bottom line compared to uppercase Delta. yanta? (/ee/, /eh/, or /ay/)

 

If you see any more distinct letters that I've missed, let me know.

 

[Ayeba]

I've edited my first post with close-ups to include the inscriptions above the door as well.

Here are some notable words:

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 Appears twice on the left door, once on the right door. Assuming the inscription on each door is a single sentence, it seems likely that this is word that makes sense to be repeated, such as preposition "for". To the right is a similar word, with one additional letter, appears on the right door. That may not mean a lot. There are lots of words in English that use the same syllables, but they may share some similarity. Consider "for" and "before".

 

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Appears once on each door.

 

 

 

 

 

Appears once on the right door. Maybe relevant, maybe not.

 

 

 

 

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Appears once on each door.

 

 

 

 

 Easily mistaken for the first one. Once on the left door, once on the upper left of the door.

 

 

 

 

Once on the right door. Only bringing it up to show the similarity with the last two letters. Unlikely to be relevant.

 

 

 

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 Once on the left door, twice in the same sentence on the upper left, once on the upper right. Another word that makes sense to use twice in a sentence. Might be the most common words among all the texts we have.

 

 

 

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Twice on the left door, so a third repeated word. Also on the upper left, visible on the middle top picture.

 

 

 

 

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 The only one-letter word. Only appears once.

 

 

 

 

---

I've only looked at the shorter words for now. Do you see any more repeated words?

Edited May 10 by Ayeba (see edit history)

[Ayeba]

The upper right part is hard to make out, even with the better picture.

I'm reasonably sure it will not be possible to decode the inscriptions with just what we have now. My intuition is that we'll need to find more of these inscriptions somewhere, learn their meaning from context or other clues, and return here later with our expanded knowledge. But spending time on getting familiar with the letters and words now make it easier to connect it to anything we find later.

[Ayeba]

I might have found another letter. Consider the symbol in the following words:

---

The last letter in both words looks like a 'u' because of the bend at the lower left.

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The two first letters here look like 'n' because the bend is at the upper right.

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The problem is that it is extremely hard to see the difference. Consider the following:

 

The first letter in all three cases are so similar I don't know if they're the same or different.

[8w_gremlin]

Sorry, but I need to see the context of the whole thing.
So adding this to work on, before tacking the other sections:

Door:

[8w_gremlin]

1. Assumptions, I'm working down one side of the door then the other side, and not one sentence across both sides of the door.
2. Not many words end in double letters and the one on the bottom left "mQλλ" could be Ball, Wall, Fill, Hill, Will, Hull, Pull etc.
3. λ has to equal L
4. "qud", and "qud q" could also be AND and A respectively.
5. if "q" is A then "Q" is not A then the "mQλλ" can not be a Ball, or Wall word
6. I think the "dd" are two different letters.
7. "QM" and "qM" in the right-hand panel, which suggests "qM" is a two-letter word beginning with A so An, Am, At, As.

that's as far as I got.

[Ayeba]

3 hours ago, 8w_gremlin said:

1. Assumptions, I'm working down one side of the door then the other side, and not one sentence across both sides of the door.
2. Not many words end in double letters and the one on the bottom left "mQλλ" could be Ball, Wall, Fill, Hill, Will, Hull, Pull etc.
3. λ has to equal L
4. "qud", and "qud q" could also be AND and A respectively.
5. if "q" is A then "Q" is not A then the "mQλλ" can not be a Ball, or Wall word
6. I think the "dd" are two different letters.
7. "QM" and "qM" in the right-hand panel, which suggests "qM" is a two-letter word beginning with A so An, Am, At, As.

that's as far as I got.

I think we're working with very different presumptions here. It sounds like you're treating it as a code, where each letter corresponds to a letter in the English alphabet, and the sentences are readable in English once deciphered.

I have only discovered 16 unique letters, which feels too few to correspond to the English language's 26. Some letters in the English alphabet are rarely used, or can be replaced by a different letter, but 16 means a lot of letters are missing.

Thus, I am treating this like an entirely new language. So while the letters are of interest, I'm mainly focused about the words. As I said, I don't expect this to be solvable at this point. I expect we'll find more inscriptions with clues that allow us to guess at their meaning. Later, when we have a decent number of words in our "vocabulary", we can return here to see if we can solve it.

 

[Newcomer]

If it is an entirely new language (which I'm inclined to suspect), it's going to have to be pretty simple and repetitive if players can actually translate it during the adventure. So I agree we should catalog words for now, and later we'll probably be able to identify some key words because of obvious labels (such as "fire" where there's a fire trap, etc.).

On the other hand, if it's just a code for English, it's possible it's omitting vowels to make things harder to parse (a new language could omit vowels as well, but that wouldn't really affect translation). Then we'd only be missing a few letters, which is plausible in a limited text.

[8w_gremlin]

Yes, I'm treating it as a polygraphic substitution cipher; replace letters in the plaintext with other letters or symbols, keeping the order in which the symbols fall the same, and some letters are substituted in groups, instead of substituting the letters individually. (For example, TH becoming one symbol, but I do not see that.)

If it's a completely new language without a frame of reference or Key, you will never be able to translate it.

[MysteriousMiller]

On 5/10/2024 at 9:47 PM, 8w_gremlin said:

If it's a completely new language without a frame of reference or Key, you will never be able to translate it.

I concur. It's true that we will probably need more clues to crack this, but surely it has to translate into a known language..probably English (I hope)