Mysterious Alphabet

General discussion for the game Anacreon
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Hussell
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Has anyone figured out the alien writing on various bits of the Anacreon interface? I've identified only 16 unique symbols, so I'm thinking it isn't just a cipher for English. Frequency analysis shows a reasonable distribution for a language, given the small sample size.
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digdug
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I don't recognize it at all.
I tried to look up some dingbat fonts to see if I could stumble upon it, but I couldn't find it.
If it's a font, then it's a beautiful one :D

This only glyph looks similar to Wingdings "g" char code 0x67
glyph.png
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In any case, let's keep the same example, a word with 5 letters in which 1,2 and 5th letter is the same ? I don't think it's English :)
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AnacreonGlyphs.png
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This is the complete alphabet. I'm sorry to say that I do not have a translation key (so there are no secret messages in the current glyphs).

However, I've thought I bit about how this might work. This is the principal written language of the Aelion Empire at its height (before the Fall). It consists of 16 glyphs, one for each number from 0-15. It is essentially a hexadecimal code that represents any concept or verbalization.

We still need to work out the following:

1. The number that corresponds to each glyph. [The image above is not intended to be in order.]
2. The basic construction of a "word" in the language: Presumably a word is a sequence of glyphs (numbers) of variable length. Are there any encodings or modifiers on a word? For instance, perhaps pluralization is formed by adding a trailing number (or something). My sense is that, like UTF8, there are word markers that indicate the length of a word (the number of glyphs). Perhaps the first glyph in a word describes how to decode the remaining glyphs.
3. What is the basic syntax of the language? Is there a specific ordering for words? Or is it like Latin, with enough word-endings to determine sense? [I kinda prefer the latter.]
4. What are some common words in the language (i.e., a rudimentary dictionary).
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Cygnus.X1
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Assuming a grid of 12345678 on the horizontal and AB on the vertical.

We can attempt to sort the symbols by complication.

There appear to be four kinds of strokes used in the symbols:
A short straight line (like "l" ), Weight=1
A chevron (like ">" ), Weight=2
A simple curve (like "c" ), Weight=3
A complex curve (like "s" ), Weight=4

By assigning a weight to each stroke, we can determine a total weight for each symbol which should hopefully provide enough diversity to prevent duplicated values.

Using A1 as the first example:
1 short line = 1
1 chevron = 2
3 simple curves = 3*3 = 9
Total = 12

A1: 1+2+3*3 = 12
A2: 2*2+3*3 = 13
A3: 1+3*3 = 10
A4: 1*2+2*3 = 8
A5: 1*2+3*3 = 11
A6: 1+3*2 = 7
A7: 1*2+3+4 = 9
A8: 2+3*2 = 8

B1: 3*3 = 9
B2: 1*2+3*2 = 8
B3: 1+3*2 = 7
B4: 1+4 = 5
B5: 1+3*2 = 7
B6: 1*2+3*2 = 8
B7: 1+3 = 4
B8: 1+3*2 = 7

Well... that didn't work out nearly as well as I had hoped.

13:1
12:1
11:1
10:1
09:2
08:4
07:4
06:0
05:1
04:1
03:0
02:0
01:0

A bit bell-curved :oops: Oh well, leaving this up in case it helps with somebody else's inspiration. Also, simple math and my mild dyslexia can be frustrating :mrgreen:
Hussell
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The very first thing I noticed about this alphabet is that many of the individual glyphs are quite complicated. I suppose this wouldn't have been a problem for the Aelion Empire, since they probably typed everything instead of drawing each glyph by hand. And the glyphs look good together, regardless of how difficult they are to write.

The order you choose for the alphabet doesn't seem particularly important to me. For now, I'll refer to the glyphs by hexadecimal number: 0123456789ABCDEF. I'm also assuming the pronunciation of each glyph isn't important.

I have some small experience in constructing artificial languages ("conlanging"). Most languages can decompose words into smaller parts (morphemes), which act as roots, prefixes, or suffixes, so I'd start there. Perhaps the number of leading 1s in the binary representation can tell how many extra glyphs are part of the current morpheme. That would give 8 one-glyph morphemes (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 64 two-glyph morphemes (8?, 9?, A?, B?), 512 three-glyph morphemes (C??, D??), 4096 four-glyph morphemes (E???), 32768 five-glyph morphemes (F0???, F1???, ..., F6???, F7???), and so on. From these, I'd pick some to act as word-end marking suffixes (or maybe word-start marking prefixes; your choice). You could choose just one (e.g., 0), but that would mean you'd have to use it on every single word, and it would carry no extra information. I'd pick a larger number, say four from each length-group (e.g., 0, 1, 2, 3, 80, 81, 82, 83, C00, C01, C02, C03, etc.). Then you can use the different word boundary markers to convey extra information, like whether the word is a verb, noun, or modifier (adjective or adverb), and various sub-types such as noun cases (necessary for Latin-like syntax), verb tense and aspect, and so on.

When you start building a dictionary, please try to assign meanings to the morphemes in such a way that the shortest morphemes will be used most often, and the longest least often. So, short morphemes for things like pronouns and pluralizing nouns, and long morphemes for things like proper names.
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Atarlost
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Those symbols are far too complicated for such a small alphabet. You can easily get 16 easily distinguished symbols with 3 straight lines.

Most of those glyphs are too intricate to be practical for anything where a word is not represented by a single glyph like in traditional Chinese.
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Vachtra
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I have do disagree with the last statement. It seems most likely that theses are words instead of letters and that these are just the ones used in the game for whatever reason. That there are an even sixteen is merely a coincidence. That some symbols appear more than once may be a rating of various degrees like hazmat labels.
The only other thing that might make sense is a hex number system. Everything may just be numbers. This could be that that's all you happen to be able to see or that's how they write words as well.
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Atarlost
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Vachtra wrote:I have do disagree with the last statement. It seems most likely that theses are words instead of letters and that these are just the ones used in the game for whatever reason. That there are an even sixteen is merely a coincidence. That some symbols appear more than once may be a rating of various degrees like hazmat labels.
The only other thing that might make sense is a hex number system. Everything may just be numbers. This could be that that's all you happen to be able to see or that's how they write words as well.
I think you mean agree because we're saying the same thing. Or we cross-posted and you're not referring to my post as the last statement.

Repetition is used for emphasis in some real languages. We even see it in English with the pronoun "very."
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Vachtra
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Probably right. The statement was:

"Most of those glyphs are too intricate to be practical for anything where a word is represented by a single glyph like in traditional Chinese."

I took this to mean you though they were to intricate to be words. Didn't make much sense but I couldn't seem to find a way to read it any other way.

There are also times where both word and letter symbols are used such as #&@+- etc.

Note: I still don't have the hang of quoting...
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Atarlost
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Oh, I was missing a not. :oops:
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