March 18th, 2013
This week's vote incentive is a silly extra doodle that raises more questions than it answers!
Y'know. The usual.
Vote Incentive for This Comic.
Well, it might not even be a cipher. I wouldn't put it past Shazz to have a at least a psuedo-language constructed, though I think that's unlikely in this case. I know If I'd made one, I'd probably plaster it everywhere I could. It's possible to have null characters (I forget the technical term) inserted into to a coded message as part of encryption, but that seems like an awful lot of work to me (doesn't rule it out though). My bet is that it's a syllabary rather than an alphabet, so... wait, wait.
...
Dangit. Page 2.31 (index =81) seems relevant. So, yeah, probably doesn't correlate to English.
posted at 1:56pm on March 18th, 2013
OH MY GOSH I'M SO IMPRESSED THAT YOU'RE DOING THIS. It's a cipher, but it isn't English! c:
(ahhhhhhh no dude I don't do conlang, that is just not my specialty at all xD )
posted at 2:33pm on March 18th, 2013
Okay, I took a look at Sev, Johan, Iavin, the earthbender, and the lady from the Agorath Order's incantations, and I've got only 18-20 unique characters, though I'm not counting any of the written runes yet. I thought the '#|' pair was a single character until I noticed that third "word" of Johan's, so now I'm wondering if the same is true for the 'backwardsF I' pair. Hmm.
I feel kind of conflicted about this too, in a Am-I-just-spoiling-this-for-myself sense, but I guess I'll get over it?.
posted at 1:50pm on March 19th, 2013
OH WOW I AM A HUGE DERP. Hahahahaha thank you for catching that -- that is a single character and Jonan's activation phrase should be fixed on both pages now. xD
But as I've said before, the phrases can be translated, but in the world, they are basically just like "abracadabra" or Harry Potter latin -- knowing the etymology of the magic word is cool, but it won't tell you anything extra or secret. :") Don't worry about spoiling anything!
posted at 3:37pm on March 19th, 2013
Okay, so, in a fit of nerdery, I put together an Excel spreadsheet to compare the activation phrase glyph frequency's to other languages. Since the sample size is only about 93 characters, the correlations aren't very decisive, but might help narrow things down some if anyone cares to take a stab at it.
Frequency Analysis of Activation Phrases
posted at 7:35pm on March 21st, 2013
html...skills...developing...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/86wayh2ez8ni11h/Runewriter's%20Phrase%20Analysis.xlsx
posted at 7:50pm on March 21st, 2013
Dropbox killed the old link, so here's a new one. Has it been two years already? Yikes.
posted at 4:34pm on April 1st, 2015
Comment by Brie
I don't know if you've already answered this question, but are the rune words that runewriters shout English?
I'm going mildly crazy trying to translate them. I've got 23 unique letters, but when I try to pair the frequency with letters in English, I'm getting wierd nonsense 'deishat tr?tiato' for Severan or 'lniiota nutede' for the guardwoman. It all looks sort of pronouncable so are they just actually shouting nonsense that happens to have fancy lettering or do I need to work on the correlations further?
posted at 1:21pm on March 18th, 2013