It’s been 14 months, Stil. No takers.

That tells me that the other 99.96-ish per cent of the population (like me) who aren’t cryptography geeks, will need the help of our protocol droids if we’re to solve this without shelving all our commitments for a month or whatever.

I’ve had a brief look at this following your tweet about nobody solving it.

Observation 1. It could be a simple character substitution code given that at least two “scribbles” are repeated throughout the script – the first “scribble” and last “scribble” on the first line for instance. If this is the case the commonly used English character frequency of letters table starting ETANOISH… could be of use.

Observation 2. Although you state it has absolutely nothing to do with “Tolkien” clearly this is a clue in itself and research into Tolkien is clearly in order. I note the the “Tolkien logo” bears a resemblance to the strokes (scribbles) in the script.

Observation 3. If this is a character substitution code and if each line is a word then the second line could only be the “word” a or i.

Observation 4. If the second character is an a or an i and if each line is a word then the penultimate line would be a two character word that could only start with an a e i o or u. If the second letter is an a or an i this reduces the number of permutations to words such as it or of etc.

Observation 5. I had never heard of Ursula LeGuin but Google research into “quotes Ursula LeGuin” results in quite a few interesting observations about life the universe and everything but none quite match my deliberations although “if you light a candle you also cast a shadow” has an appropriate place given that it has an “a” where I might expect to find an “a”.

Right the greek alpahbet has 24 letters alpha beta though to omega

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet (linked to above) offers some promise but there is no clear relation between the symbols in either the Greek or Phoenician alphabets to the script above.

Wikipedia informs me in their article on Egyptian hieroglyphs that there are logographic and alphabetic representations. The Japanese I seem to recall tend to mix their logographic symbols with English and/or European characters which makes travelling in Tokyo quite interesting as the English bits give an idea of what’s going on.

(working on it.. working on it… It’ll take longer than two days !)

Stilgherrian’s comment that “grapheme” is indeed a wond’rous word…

reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme

“A grapheme (from the Greek: γράφω, gráphō, “write”) is the fundamental unit in written language. Examples of graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world’s writing systems.”

noting that “Alphabet” is an interesting word too, and ONE WHICH DESERVES FURTHER CONSIDERATION” appears to indicate that we can ignore Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and the odd assortment of individual symbols of any of the word’s writing sytems.

This rules out such things as Ideograms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideogram

“An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idea “idea” + γράφω grafo “to write”) is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms”

Over the coming weeks I’m concentrating on fonts !

Ok, I think I understand the principle, but then I should.

I wonder whether you had to go to the library to sort this out back when it was first set?

I’m up for the challenge.

Interesting: the Tolkien script uses those accent-like dots and squiggles for vowels, so for example the first word, transliterated as Ennyn, is really [n][n] with an [underlined acute] meaning [e], and a [pair of dots] meaning [y]. I speculated there was something similar in your example: the first symbol (top left), looking like an F with two dots, recurs in a bunch of places, and there are also similar ones with different dots and frou-frou, like the second symbol on the fourth row. I’m dividing the larger symbols into what I think are letters — for example, the first one on the bottom line may be one of those F things with one dot and a loop, preceded by a smaller L shape. Two letters? Three, counting the loop+dot as a vowel? Perhaps. I should really be working…

Stilgherrian may not have found it necessary to go to a library to solve this as I get the impression that he is a fan of this type of fiction and so has a head-start over those of us who haven’t quite got the hang of it. I have therefore been delving into the works of Ursula Le Guin and have discovered that in the Wizard of Earthsea Le Guin introduced a “special language”

http://stuffedhead.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/88/

Part I: Magic Controlled by Speech

One of the most well known aspects of the Earthsea series is the magic system. Le Guin created a system where wizards use a special language called the Old Speech to work magic. As a passage from A Wizard of Earthsea explains,

“In the world under the sun, and in the other world that has no sun, there is much that has nothing to do with men and men’s speech, and there are powers beyond our power. But magic, true magic, is worked only by those beings who speak the Hardic tongue of Earthsea, or the Old Speech from which it grew.”

Now if a person has read Le Guin’s works then he or she would have a head start over the rest of us methinks…

I’m making a very different set of assumptions to yours Bob – I think it’s a whole lot simpler than that. I don’t think it’s a numerically based script – I did think about twig runes which work as a counting code, but I don’t think it’s that.

I have now eliminated quite a few possibilities for words, but haven’t found any definite combinations.

I’m proceding on a largely grammatical/linguistic basis.

@Stilgherrian “Is any of that a clue? I have no idea”

You make mention of vowels reminding us that alphabets are comprise vowels and consonants which may be the issue we have been overlooking when it comes to alphabets. As it notes on an Internet page somewhere there are a considerable number of “vowels” in the International Phonetic Alphabet — which as an aside is referred to on Ursula Le Guin’s home page. There are over 40 vowel sounds I believe.

As I write the word “sounds” I am reminded that alphabets attempt to document sounds that can be produced by the human vocal chords — as opposed the symbolism of number found in mathematics.

Perhaps we should be looking at intonation — the rise and fall of the strokes and attempting to reconcile this back to human speech — in English.

An approach I took yesterday was to draw a thin blue line through the middle of each row of graphemes and examine the marks above and below the line.

Quatrefoil appears to be attempting a solution using FORTAN — a computer language which derived it’s name from FORMula Translator. Perhaps we should be using LISP — the language for Artificial Intelligence — “Lots of Irritating Stupid Parentheses”.

After a fruitless search I am keyless. I can even picture in my mind’s eye the old notebook I need – Stats 1H. But of all the old books in a box in the cellar, that one is missing. Found lots of books of notes with my handwriting in them, but no recollection of ever taking the course. Applicable Analysis anyone? Actually looked to be pertinent too.

My very faint recollection of the explanation Danny gave me was indeed that relative position above and below the dominant line is a key part of the encoding. I think I have the main structure of the text sorted, but fitting the minor consonants isn’t so trivial. One clue to the provenance of the quote is that I will bet the text we see was inscribed in 1978. So that seriously limits the books from whence it came.

Perhaps as something with little skill in phonetics, translations and cryptanalyses – I may be at an advantage by, as you say, keeping things simple.

I had started to just copy each of the “symbols” (again, please excuse my terminology) with the aim of converting them into a “sound” and then simply try and read the sentences.

The hard part would then simply be trying to work out where these “sounds” can appear on their own, or as a part of a word.

Having said that, I think Joel will probably nail it soon…

Would I be right in saying that where that “mid-line” connects the different “symbols” – we are looking at a word? Where they are not connected, and we see isolated “symbols”, theses are words like in, at, of and so forth?

To answer your final question, the top line has eight words.

That was my count too (see my very first post). Thank you very much for confirming it.

Here is a hastily written narrative of my decipherment process. Let’s say it’s a first draft of the full report I’ll hopefully be able to write. I have many more observations, charts to clarify many points, and so on. I haven’t just got the time to put them together right now.

When I learned of the challenge at the end of August, all hints pointed to a phonetic writing system for English (I did mention Deseret and Shavian in my first comment), so I started from there, working by the book: I broke up the challenge text (henceforth: the Document) into words, the words into characters, produced fig. 1, and, based on known facts about word freqency in English, I immediately identified three words: “the” and “of”, which I mentioned, and the single-letter L4W2, which had to be the article “a”, the most frequent English single-sound word. In cryptography jargon, such clues are called “cribs”. Then, let me quote myself:

3. The most prominent feature of the script is the line (code named “blue line”, painted in blue in my figure) which appears in every word and is sometimes interrupted. I’ll call “ascenders” the strokes above it and “descenders” those below it. Even if a long slash as the beginning of L1W2 really is only one pen stroke, I will analyse it as two strokes, an ascender and a descender. These are standard typography terms. A unique feature of this script is that, while descenders can live either with or without a blue segment above them,
an ascender always requires one. The reverse is not true: in two instances, L1W3 and L6W4, blue segments start without being triggered by ascenders.

4. In almost each case where an ascender and a descender are drawn one above the other, possibly in one pen stroke and probably as part of the same letter, one of them is “more complicated” than the other. This prompts me to classify the candidate letters of this script into four groups:
(i) strictly negative: consisting of descenders only. These are the only letters which can live without a blue segment. All other categories require one, because they involve ascenders.
(ii) extended negative: descenders, with an additional ascender (a simple vertical segment)
(iii) strictly positive: ascenders only (a rich inventory of hooks, loops, dotted variants…)
(iv) extended positive, the same as (iii), with an additional descender, which is a vertical segment (sometimes with a dot)

When I wrote this I wanted to state facts. I didn’t want to share my wild guesses, but I already had an idea in mind: all vowels of my cribs were extended positives, the two consonants were strict negatives. What if the positives represented vowels and the negatives represented consonants? In that case the odd behavior of those glyphs with respect to the midline would have a fascinating explanation: the midline represented voice! Vowels, i.e. positives, are always voiced,
as well as sonorant consonants (the extended negatives!), while plosives, fricatives and affricates, the consonants that in English come in voiceless/voiced pairs, had to be represented by the strict negatives, which appeared in the Document both with and without a midline segment above them. If this was true, it wasn’t simply like Shavian, were the glyphs representing voiced consonants are flipped versions of the ones representing voiceless ones. In this script, voice was really written down with separate penstrokes of its own, as in some kind of spectrogram!

(In the following, I write IPA symbols between slashes, as /hɪə/, both to represent phonemes and to represent their corresponding script letters as I decipher them. I know this is against common IPA usage and I hope this causes no confusion.)

The hypothesis had to be verified. Of the two crib consonants, L1W4.2, the voiced final /v/ of “of” had indeed a “blue” segment above it, and this would imply that L3W4.1 represented /f/, its voiceless counterpart, but the other crib consonant, L1W1.1, the initial /ð/ of “the”, was also voiced, but had no segment above it! The whole construction, however, was too beautiful to be dismissed by that simple dash. Many writing systems have special exceptions for common words, so I didn’t consider my idea disproved, but I badly needed real data to see if actual English phoneme frequencies matched what I thought I was seeing in the Document. The ETANOISH sequence mentioned by Bob Bain is well known, but it holds for conventional spelling, and I considered it of little use here. Fortunately, one of the most authoritative living English phoneticians, Prof. John C. Wells, whose blog is in my RSS feed, had posted a piece completely written in IPA in June. It was probably long enough to extract significant phoneme occurrence statistics from it. I preferred starting from scratch and counting the phonemes myself, because Wells uses a standard transcription system I’m completely familiar with, while many articles that could be found on the web used somewhat different systems, different phoneme counts, were based on different varieties of English and would require more adaptation work (I was assuming that the Document represented an Australian variety rather similar to Wells’ British English, at least in phoneme distribution if not in realization… I hope I’m upsetting nobody with this sentence).

In any case the timeframe I could dedicate to this matter had expired. The challenge went into my TODO list with the lowest possible priority, and it stayed there for months. Last weekend, I pushed it to the top.

Not surprisingly, 12.38% of my sample consisted of the single phoneme /ə/. It was clear that in the Document no character was so frequent, but Wells’ is a radical transcription, where, for instance, “the” is transcribed either /ðə/ or /ði/ according to its pronunciation. If Danny, the inventor of the script I was deciphering, wanted to keep the same spelling for the same word in all positions, he might have used /ði/ throughout, reducing the frequency of /ə/. Such an approach might also have explained the disturbing fact that the single vowel of L4W2, a candidate for the indefinite article, far from being the commonest, appeared only there. I still don’t know the reason: now, I think that that letter means “indefinite article, sometimes /ə/, sometimes /eɪ/”. In any case, the positives made up 43.09% of the Document, and 39.44% of the sample consisted of vowels. Not close, but not apart enough to disprove the theory. Maybe there were some positives which weren’t vowels. I know now that that was indeed the case: L1W2.1 appears three times, 2.73% of the Document, and represents /h/, not a vowel and not even a voiced sound. But it is a simple slash, it is somewhat outside of the system just as /h/ is a somewhat special sound, so it’s OK.

After /ə/, the commonest phonemes in the sample are, in order, /ntɪslkr/. I had to go for consonants, that is, in my hypothesis, negatives. The extended ones had to be sonorant consonants. In English there are seven of them: /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /w/, /l/, /r/, /j/, and indeed I counted seven extended negatives, all scythe-shaped, one of them dotted, either with a sharp or a rounded angle where the “handle” met the “blade”, at three possible depth levels below the midline: 3 depths × 2 angle types + 1 dotted = 7! Some strict negatives, on the other side, were the handleless counterparts of those scythes (let them be “sickles”), while the one I had already identified as /v,f/ and /ð/ had a completely different shape. Wait! The latter were all fricatives… could the former be plosives? In that case, could the three depths correspond to the three places of articulation of English plosives? In that case, the scythe representing /n/ would be at the same depth of the sickle representing /d,t/ (with or without midline), and similarly /m/ with /b,p/ and /ŋ/ with /g,k/!
(if you feel confused, this chart might help). Frequencies showed where /n/ and /t/ are. They are at middepth. Labials tend to prefer initial positions, so they had to be the shallow scythes (/m/ and /w/) and sickles (/b,p/), which also showed this preference. The velars were at maximum depth, with a very conveniently final /ŋ/ at L3W4.6, which also showed that the nasals where the rounded scythes, so that /w/, /l/, /r/, /j/ had to be the sharp-angled ones, identifying the dotted one (L4W6.1) with /j/ (I think you all know that /j/ is the initial glide of “you” /juː/, and not the “j” of “Jew” /dʒuː/)

There was also a spatial metaphor in this: the closer to the lips a sound is articulated, the closer to the midline its glyph is written. How elegant!

At this point I had most consonants, and I understood why vowels came in strictly positive or in extended form. Since there are so many scythes and sickles which can be easily confused with each other, some of them cut the stems of the following vowel, some don’t, and this is a way to tell them apart, alongside with sharpness and depth. For example, the boomerang-shaped vowel L3W4.4 isn’t cut by the preceding /l/ (middepth sharp scythe) but a preceding /r/ (deep sharp scythe) cuts it at L5W1.2. There are three possibilities: cutting, overstriking and joining, as in L6W4, where a shallow sickle (a /b/) joins the vowel of the article /ði/. Hey, this is the verb to /bi/! (There are still problems with the choice of strict vs. extended form of vowels, see below.)

Some fricatives were still missing, notably /s/, the commonest of them. A natural candidate was the commonest of the still unidentified glyphs, L1W3.4. It also appeared in a ligature with /k/ at the beginning of L1W7, which then could be read as /skr?b?/. Hmmm. “scribes” /skraɪbz/ perhaps? Tempting. This would identify L1W2 as “high” /haɪ/, solving the problem of L1W2.1, and understanding the initial sequence of L2W1 as /kh/. (/k/ is usually a cutter, as in L1W3, but probably /h/ can’t be cut at all, or /kh/ is a special case. Also, /j/ cuts L4W6.2 but doesn’t cut L6W6.2. Maybe cutting is optional for such an easily identified letter, maybe there are rules we cannot derive from such a short text. Never mind.)

A small problem with reading L1W2 L1W3 as “nine scribes”, however, was that /z/ was not represented as in L4W1 and as it should be, as an /s/ below a midline segment, but with a somewhat abbreviated form, easily confused with a final /v/ (the difference is that in /v/ the glyph hovers below the midline, while in the abbreviated final /z/ it dangles from it. I still don’t know if such an abbreviated form is always optional or is restricted to the cases when /z/ is obviously a suffix (plural, third person, genitive…), but again, it’s not a big problem.

If you have followed me to this point, you are surely able to find out the vowels for yourself. I’ll list a couple of final remarks here:

1. L3W5 is “personage”. I’d pronounce that word /pɜːsənɪdʒ/, but the vowel values I found correspond to /pɜːsɒnædʒ/. This confirms what we had already observed, that vowel characters in this script are not precise phonetic representations. In particular, reduced vowel sounds are (often) written as the full vowel they etymologically come from, just like in conventional English spelling. This word is also the only occurrence of /dʒ,tʃ/. We don’t know how /ʒ,ʃ/ looks like, there are no occurrences in the Document, but /dʒ,tʃ/ is composed by the middepth sickle /d,t/ and a final curl. Maybe that final curl alone represents /ʒ,ʃ/.

2. The whole Document is obviously written in an r-dropping variety of English, as shown by L3W2 /rekɔːdz/ “records” (for /re-/ instead of /ri-/ see the vowel comment above). However, L3W1 is “hereby”, and after a unique first vowel that I interpret as /ɪə/ (and is not in extended form, for an unknown reason), there is an /r/ character: /hɪərbaɪ/. The /r/ would be read only before vowels, but Danny decided to write it always, so that the same word is always spelled the same. Also, I don’t know why /aɪ/ is dotted here (and in L5W1, “Rothmile”). Maybe because there is another stressed vowel in those words. I don’t know.

3. The final vowel of L4W6 is a bit strange. It could be unique, but I think it is an /ɔː/ as in L3W2 /rekɔːdz/ “records” (strictly positive) or in L6W7 /ɔːlwəz/ “always” (extended positive), so I read that word as /jəʊsentrɔː/ and transliterate it as “Yocentro” or “Yocentror” but I am really in doubt here.

Thank you very much for keeping up with me for such a long post, and may the Sands be with you always.

Dario
(an Italian mathematician by study, sysadmin by trade, amateur linguist by passion)

Updates on vowels

Thank you for your congratulations.

I’ve looked at the vowels once again and I must conclude that I still don’t know much about them. All I can show you is my vowel chart: under each glyph I’ve put the words where it appears, in ordinary spelling, with the corresponding letters underlined. If a character appears in the Document both in short and long forms (previously I called them “strict” and “extended”), I’ve put them both. I believe they are variants of the same character, but I must confess that all my previous theories about them proved unsatisfactory. At the moment, I still don’t know when to use a short or a long form.

As you can test pronouncing those words yourself, vowel orthography is not strictly phonetic: let’s say that Danny made some concessions to ordinary spelling. In any case, at least six RP vowels don’t appear in the Document and I have no idea how to represent them: /ɑː/, /ʌ/, /ɔɪ/, /eə/, /ʊ/ and /ʊə/ (assuming that Danny did not distinguish between /i/ and /iː/, /u/ and /uː/. Otherwise /iː/ and /u/ are also missing).

There are many uncertainties, I’ve already mentioned some of them. Here, I’ll say only that perhaps, the /ɜː/ glyph in “personage” is only the extended form of the /e/ glyph in “citizen”. A hint that there could be some phonetic meaning to short and long forms?

@Joel: I hope the chart I posted helps you with your question about the vowels in “May the”. It was Danny’s game. While the structure of the consonant glyphs was immediately transparent to me, the same is not true for the vowels.

What is missing now is a consonant chart. I’ll leave it for my next post.

@Stilgherrian: I hope Danny answers your mail soon. I hope he can remember some of the missing bits. If somebody asked me about the secret scripts and languages I’ve invented in my youth, well, there were so many of them I’d be embarrassed… but something I do remember.

Cheers,
Dario

I’m curious to know of the prize if Dario or Stilgherrian would kindly share?