It’s been known for quite some time that Orrian syllabary was intended to be a new translatable written language in Guild Wars 2. However, according to Matthew Medine, it was scrapped due to difficulty in translation and QA testing it. As a result, there is one model/texture in the game that uses it – and quite a sample size at that, thankfully.
The model was extremely hard to read, however, due to a constant glow around. The most accessible location for the object is Orrian Runestone. I’ve asked folks at reddit if anyone could pull out the texture, and they supplied a few alterations of it (link to all down below, my preferred ones are attached).
So I’m opening this up for a community translation attempt at it.
Some notes:
The GW2W’s notes (provided by Titus the Third) I find to be false, as I’m noticing differences in the claimed runes – this likely came about from the difficulty of seeing the model.
It is unlikely to use a simple substitution cipher nonetheless, given Matthew Medina’s statement of its complexity for translation.
There is an Orrian Syllabary, actually. Sadly, it was rather challenging to use and to QA test, so we shelved it – but yes there are at least a couple samples in the game. I’m going to inquire about whether I can talk about it more, since I think it unlikely that we’ll ever actually use it for anything outside of sating your curiosity. :-)
Attachments:
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
It seems the syllabary extensively combines different symbols to create new ones. A few runes are used as basic starting points; and with the addition of smaller/less complex runes, new variations are created. E.g.:
Attachments:
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
So far, 12 runes have been identified and drawn: see Wiki: Orrian Syllabary.
To give myself a clearer picture of what’s still missing, I filled them in. Might be helpful for others as well (patterns etc.).
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
I may take a look at this once I finish my classes for the semester. For now all I can say is that it’s gorgeous, and reminds me of my research into the Hieratic script of ancient Egypt a couple years ago.
I may take a look at this once I finish my classes for the semester. For now all I can say is that it’s gorgeous, and reminds me of my research into the Hieratic script of ancient Egypt a couple years ago.
Would be great to get a “academic look” at this. The more I dig into it, the less I understand. Does anyone happen to know of any RL syllabaries that uses combinations of base symbols to create new ones?
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
featural alphabet of 24 consonant and vowel letters. However, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, such as ? han, each of which transcribes a syllable. That is, although the syllable ? han may look like a single character, it is actually composed of three letters: ? h, ? a, and ? n. Each syllabic block consists of two to six letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel..
Still, as with Japanese and Chinese, the similarities fall away when you consider the total complexity:
The number of mathematically possible distinct blocks is 11,172
I counted up how many runes we should end up if it’s a fully fleshed grid by your set-up, with no additional rows or culumns. The result is 56. A quick google searched turned up w:Abkhaz as having 56 letters.
On that note, I should mention that I haven’t covered all the base symbols yet. Just to mention a few missing: vertical line / up-arrow (+ with dashes across) / small T.
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
This is very much a feature alphabet. It seems that where vowels are used they are attached to the proceeding consonant or can stand alone assuming there is no proceeding consonant one or possibly if there is already a consonant-vowel attachment. Therefore, following the chart on the wiki page the columns would be the vowels and the rows would be the consonants.
Might be helpful to start figuring out what the Roman letter equivalents are while figuring out the runes. That might even help figuring out what exactly other runes are.
Syllabic alphabets, alphasyllabaries or abugidas are writing systems in which the main element is the syllable. Syllables are built up of consonants, each of which has an inherent vowel, e.g. ka, kha, ga, gha. Diacritic symbols are used to change or mute the inherent vowel, and separate vowel letters may be used when vowels occur at the beginning of a syllable or on their own.
But, if it is such a “typical” syllabary, and if it’s based upon the latin alphabet, the total number of syllables would be quite crazy:
5 vowels * 21 consonants = 105 unique symbols.
21 symbols are required for the consonants themselves (/muted syllables).
5 symbols for the vowels (diacretic symbols) to be able to stand on their own.
The sample has about 50 (+/-10) unique symbols.
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
Just a little teaser for you The code is cracked, translation nearly completed.
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
Behold traveler
The glory and
might that is
Orr. Be it
Known that here
in the mighty city
of Arah, the Gods
did walk upon
earth, and teach
mankind the nature of
magic. Be it known
that it is here
that the brilliant
and doomed Malchor
carve their likenesses
into the living stone,
so all may behold
their might. Let the
Kings and Queens of
other lands and lesser
creatures witness our
wonders and cry out in
astonishment and humble
themselves. Beware our
mighry[sic] works. Let this
marker last an eternity.
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
Will do, but tomorrow. My gf went to bed angry an hour ago, I think she’s fed up hearing about my enthusiasm for Orrian syllabaries :P
P.S. Glad to hear you’re feeling better!
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
Sorry, should have been a little more specific. Yeah, you understood correctly. And I meant it’d be a syllabic alphabet, much like Hindi, or a consonant alphabet like arabic. Was gonna start testing that out tonight after work, but obviously you got to it already haha. Good job.
I read that translation, and all I could think of was the poem Ozymandias by Percy Byron Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Made sure to not actually look at your translation, just know that it was there. Think I’ve got the knack of it now. Looks like I was right?
Edit: Some of these vowels have two forms. Tricky tricky.
Yep, you were. I had briefly looked into the consonants+vowels setup before you mentioned it, but the different forms of the vowels made me think it couldn’t work like that. There were just way more “add-on symbols” than there are vowels.
However, when you mentioned it, I figured I’d give it another try. I was already looking at the most distinguished patterns. The word “X.Y.X” is repeated 4 times: starting and ending with the same symbol (which is very very rare for short words). I looked up Top 100 English words, and only one of them fit the bill: T.HA.T. Then I found T.HE, T.HE.I.R, T.HI.S. and the pieces eventually started to fall toghether.
I also knew there had to be something about Orr, Arah, Kings, Gods etc. in there somewhere, which helped a lot.
This was really fun to have a go at! Thanks for all the praise everyone
Attachments:
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
I was a fool and actually tried to write it all out by hand. Would be interesting to see how others see some of these consonants. M took me FOREVER to figure out how to write. At least the spelling rules with some of the vowels follow sense.
I find it very interesting that “th” is still essentially “t h” despite being a syllabary. That makes even less sense than it does in the Latin alphabet. The whole thing clings a bit too closely to the way English uses the Latin alphabet, really. It’s a bit disappointing that they went as far with this as they did, but didn’t go all the way.
I find it very interesting that “th” is still essentially “t h” despite being a syllabary. That makes even less sense than it does in the Latin alphabet. The whole thing clings a bit too closely to the way English uses the Latin alphabet, really. It’s a bit disappointing that they went as far with this as they did, but didn’t go all the way.
Excellent to see it deciphered, nonetheless.
I wouldn’t call it a disappointment. From what I understand it takes years of development by skilled linguists to really “perfect” a fake language. I doubt GW2 has a specialized linguist on staff and I doubt they put more than a few months of man hours into making this.
Considering the time and resource limitations Anet likely had at the time I think it’s pretty kitten incredible.
Hopefully we’ll see some more samples of Orrian syllabary in the future
I had to take a few educated guesses, due to the texture’s poor quality. E.g. it’s quite difficult to determine if all three or only two lines of the letter “I” are kept when creating DI, HI, LI, NI.
In benefit of the doubt, I’ve tried to draw them the way that makes most logical sense.
The vertical alignment of each symbol has also been a problem, since it varies a LOT. I’ve tried to make all runes work together and appear uniform. Basically, I’ve taken an average of how runes appear next to others (T, S and I makes up some very good reference points). Later today I will upload revised versions of the first 30 symbols.
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
… so now do we get to extrapolate the remaining symbols? I looked at the updated wiki, and now I want to fill in the gaps where certain consonant/vowel combinations weren’t used.
… so now do we get to extrapolate the remaining symbols? I looked at the updated wiki, and now I want to fill in the gaps where certain consonant/vowel combinations weren’t used.
Well, that is possible to do of course. But as long as we don’t have any confirmation of how the rest look like (I know most of them are quite obvious, but still), I’m not sure if the wiki would be the right place to put them.
I was thinking of making the missing symbols, but save them with 50% opacity, to clearly show what’s based on in-game sources – and what’s “fan-made”.
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
I was intending to try to get in contact with Matthew Medina. Maybe he can send us the remaining, and maybe if we find all the New Krytan words in Orr we can fan-translate and send them for the art team to subtly change. Ahhhh, here’s wishful thinking.
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
You guys are amazing. I hope someone at ANet acknowledges all the hard work you’ve put in to deciphering this language by adding the bits that you filled in
I apologize for coming so late into this thread – major thanks to Konig for messaging me of it’s existence, by the way – and all I can say about this is wow! Congratulations! Well done!!
I honestly am very impressed with the effort you all have undertaken to get as far as you did with the little scraps of information that were provided, and I seriously wish I could give everyone involved in this a hundred achievement points for your hard work. :-)
I do want to do something more to mark this momentous feat, and I’m eager to wrangle up an appropriate response but as you may or may not be aware there’s this thing happening at PAX South on January 24th that we are focused on at present (hopefully you can understand). I plan to talk more about this tremendous accomplishment with you, and I hope to be able to follow up on this with everyone in the coming weeks and/or months.
I read that translation, and all I could think of was the poem Ozymandias by Percy Byron Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Excellent eye on the information gathering Koenig, and Titus, excellent work. Kudos to both of you for the vision and talent to figure this out.
I had a GM years ago that gave me an obelisk with a similar puzzle. It took me 21/2 years to break it, but it tumbled down and opened up many more questions than it answered, so hopefully this will too.
Nice work guys.
Finally! It has been bugging me for some time, wondering how a statue could be corrupted by Zhaitan… All of the lovely statues of the six gods look nasty and twisted in Orr, but now it makes sense. If the stone is ‘living’ stone, then it is corruptible by Zhaitan’s power.
I agree with the idea that a book containing the translation should be put in the Priory’s library stating the accomplishing players’ character’s names as the “scholars” who translated it.
I do want to do something more to mark this momentous feat, and I’m eager to wrangle up an appropriate response (…) I plan to talk more about this tremendous accomplishment with you, and I hope to be able to follow up on this with everyone in the coming weeks and/or months.
Thank you Matthew for this amazing puzzle. It was extremely fun to work with the translation, and throughout the process I learned a lot about all types of writing styles all around the world.
I also started working on a font, using ligatures for all the possible syllable combinations (see attachment no. 2). And by the way: that’d be the way to go if you wanted to avoid QA testing for typos. Write in your desired language; then just change font.
Now I do have one query: The tombs outside Azabe Qabar. Would it be possible for you to let us create new textures for you? It’s a pain to see inscriptions in New Krytan on these tombs, when your amazing language is out there just waiting to be used!
Attachments:
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
Well, that depends. I’ve been using FontCreator, but only have the unregistered version.
If Matthew is willing and able to work with me (give feedback on what’s correct and what’s not), I’ll absolutely buy the full version and finish the project.
If not, it’s not even worth finishing tbh. Too many guesses will be have to be made. Because of poor texture quality on the in-game sample, and more importantly: we don’t know all the base characters (consonants).
Let the Kings and Queens of other lands and lesser creatures
witness our wonders and cry out in astonishment and humble themselves.
Beware our mighty works.
I apologize for coming so late into this thread – major thanks to Konig for messaging me of it’s existence, by the way – and all I can say about this is wow! Congratulations! Well done!!
I honestly am very impressed with the effort you all have undertaken to get as far as you did with the little scraps of information that were provided, and I seriously wish I could give everyone involved in this a hundred achievement points for your hard work. :-)
I do want to do something more to mark this momentous feat, and I’m eager to wrangle up an appropriate response but as you may or may not be aware there’s this thing happening at PAX South on January 24th that we are focused on at present (hopefully you can understand). I plan to talk more about this tremendous accomplishment with you, and I hope to be able to follow up on this with everyone in the coming weeks and/or months.
Excelsior! ?_?
Wandered into here (found some untranslated asura stuff, found this post while digging). I was curious, did anything ever come of this?
I barely understand the half of it, but if there is anything to help with the understanding of that elusive culture of Orr in English, I would like to know more. I respect fonts, and typographers, but this is a step beyond!
Thanks to the real Durmand Priory members of Tyria that we see here in this thread!
Yeah, so apparently when I said weeks and months I must have meant years…sheesh!!
Something about rolling off of one expansion and right onto another has a way of making one shift one’s priorities. Nevertheless, I promised to get you the Orrian syllabary in its entirety and so I’m attaching it here. We’d talked about issuing a blog post or something similar to explain the alphabet’s origins, etc. but truthfully I think I’ve made you guys wait long enough. My sincerest apologies for letting this linger long enough as it is.
I also haven’t forgotten the awesome work of our intrepid scholars. I’m making sure that they will be getting some in-game recognition soon [sup]tm[/sup].
EDIT: Huh – I don’t know why the superscript markup’s not working, but you get the idea. ;-P
It’s interesting to see that the Orrian syllables are following the pattern of hiragana.
Mistaking “w” for an “l” first and remembering that in hiragana “u” is often not spoken quite late as well made me wonder about your third word for quite some time until I finally figured it out ;-)
Yeah, so apparently when I said weeks and months I must have meant years…sheesh!!
Something about rolling off of one expansion and right onto another has a way of making one shift one’s priorities. Nevertheless, I promised to get you the Orrian syllabary in its entirety and so I’m attaching it here. We’d talked about issuing a blog post or something similar to explain the alphabet’s origins, etc. but truthfully I think I’ve made you guys wait long enough. My sincerest apologies for letting this linger long enough as it is.
I also haven’t forgotten the awesome work of our intrepid scholars. I’m making sure that they will be getting some in-game recognition soon [sup]tm[/sup].
EDIT: Huh – I don’t know why the superscript markup’s not working, but you get the idea. ;-P
testing orian matthew medina
? the double T messed me up… until I looked up how u spelled ur name
whoop I feel like indiana jones! rofl prob super easy
The code is cracked, translation nearly completed.
Ahhhh, here’s wishful thinking.
