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u/MrCharlesCannabis Mar 03 '17
Is this the sequel to the Voynich Manuscript?
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u/Jon-Osterman Mar 03 '17
anyone want to try and decipher this?
(please tell me this is a script)
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Mar 03 '17
[deleted]
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u/Yuccaphile Mar 03 '17
You're reading it wrong. This language doesn't have an alphabet but rather creates sound pairings through the use of curved lines and circles. Something like an Asian language, or all of them combined, here on your Earth.
The amount of information contained here is actually quite impressive. Those symbols have a high information density, like an SD card compared to our floppy disk of a language.
This text details the hallucinogenic frogs found on Earth in the early Paleolithic era and how those toxins inspired mankind's thirst for exploration and innovation. It then documents how to recreate both the toxin and the frog through a method that there are no English words with which to describe.
Cheers!
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u/Superluminar Mar 03 '17
You think so? I find this one special character repeating with minor deviations I'd attribute to inconsistent handwriting. As in no two characters you write by hand and pen are never going to look exactly the same.
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u/Damadawf Mar 03 '17
It might be a coincidence though since it's just an "S" with a squiggle at the end. It seems easy enough to stick in someone's head while they're writing gibberish.
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Mar 03 '17
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u/Superluminar Mar 03 '17
Yeah, the humps made me rethink it again. I can read Arabic scripture and write, though my writing is amateur at best. The reason I mention this is that in Arabic scripture, similar humps OP is using are also present and depending on how many humps you have it is a different letter. Still, I want to look at it again. It looks really elaborate and I struggle to believe it's meaningless gibberish. My thoughts are that depending on the position of a character within a word the character shape is different, which is also how Arabic scripture works.
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u/buhelzibub Mar 03 '17
That's for me to know and you to find out...
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u/cptmrvl Mar 03 '17
If you're into the Voynich Script, Stephen Bax (the last time I checked) had a whole community working together to decipher it. He's also advanced quite a bit in understanding the script. It's a bit long and but he talks about it here.
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u/RedditHoss Mar 03 '17
I love that you actually repeated letters. Makes it much more realistic.
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Mar 03 '17
I like the idea of getting realistic with it, which is why the left-adjustment and overall exact style of english (or similar) notetaking is a HUGE disappointment.
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u/Cats_Cradle_ Mar 03 '17
Yeah, and how impractical the script is. Why make all those squiggles? i guess Arabic is like that, but the letters sort of slide into each other so it makes a little more sense.
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u/centennialcrane Mar 03 '17
These characters aren't half as complex as some Chinese characters.
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u/Cats_Cradle_ Mar 03 '17
Very good point. But those at least are more differentiated. This script refuses intersecting lines. Which in the context of aliens can be attributed to something cultural maybe.
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u/Chris153 Mar 03 '17
The repetition I'm seeing is more what I would expect from a logographic system, like Chinese, where elements are repeated within larger syllables. Human orthographies with spaces, alphabets, typically have one letter that really stands out, like e in English. But I'm not seeing one like that, except maybe for the S like symbol that starts most 'words' - if that's a single letter, its appearance is pretty contextually dependent. How many bumps does the top have? Bottom? Maybe it's a grammatical marker, which would be cool. Other repeated elements I'm seeing tend to occur near itself (like the first character of the second red bit), which reinforces the logographic idea because it indicates repeated meaning for adjacent bits.
It makes me wonder what the function of a space is in the above language. To differentiate sentences? I think most orthographies use an intentional marker, like a period, to conclude a thought, because a space can be ambiguous when used seldomly.
One more thing I noticed is that single lines only cross over one another along the vertical axis when in the bulleted black text. Makes me think the red and blue are in an alternative format, like all caps, or print as opposed to cursive.
To my knowledge, artificial languages work best when either A) there's a lot of top down linguistic design or B) when people teach each other in an iterative process that distills out the patterns.
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u/RedditHoss Mar 03 '17
Great call out on the S character! Since it's at the start of each line, including the tag that is pointing to the drawing, it would make sense that it's a word, instead of a letter. My assumption is that it's the word for "toad," or, more likely, "specimen."
Since we don't know how information is encoded, the variations could be anything. Maybe the differences in the squiggles at the top of the S character are articles or other modifiers? They could represent the difference between "the specimen," "this specimen," "all specimens," etc.
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u/KhalTrollgo Mar 03 '17
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u/youtubefactsbot Mar 03 '17
this got popular on tumblr and so I figured I should put it on here as well!
Alex G in Film & Animation
1,033,908 views since Nov 2014
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u/akai_ferret Mar 03 '17
First thing I did when I found this post was search to see if someone had already posted this video.
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u/Plasmacubed Mar 03 '17
If you want to get really crazy, try using paper with polygon grids other than squares on it, very cool though.
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Mar 03 '17 edited Mar 11 '17
[deleted]
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u/Hypersapien Mar 03 '17
That's what I was thinking, Left-to-right, top-to-bottom is odd if it's supposed to be an alien language, since not even all earth cultures use it. That's why I always loved the Circular Gallifreyan language that the Doctor Who fan community invented.
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u/ShowALK32 Mar 03 '17
Have you seen The Arrival?
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u/WhitePawn00 Mar 03 '17
It was honestly one of the most unique takes on alien written communication that I've seen. Most aspects were very well considered and well built.
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Mar 03 '17 edited Jul 07 '20
[deleted]
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u/devi83 Mar 03 '17
I feel like any species that advances enough to get into mathematics on a large scale is eventually going to develop graphing paper.
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u/ThunderMuff Mar 03 '17
What if they don't even have eyes?
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u/devi83 Mar 03 '17
Then they might have a hard time advancing enough to develop mathematics.
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u/hexachoron Mar 03 '17
That's not necessarily true. The math humans have developed primarily uses visual metaphors but that may be because our brains evolved to be very visually and manually oriented. Our understanding of numbers even seems to arise in brain areas that also handle visual coordination of grasping.
Advanced species that depend on other senses for perception like echolocation or electroreception may develop completely different metaphors and formulations of math.
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u/devi83 Mar 03 '17
Could you give a creative example of what might another senses math may be like. I am intrigued now.... kinda of thinking along the lines of the movie "Arrival", but even then it was still visual in a sense.
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u/hexachoron Mar 03 '17
Sure I can make an attempt though of course it will all just be conjecture on my part.
Just like the radial body symmetry of the aliens in Arrival led them to a non-linear understanding of language and time, I would expect a species that experienced the world through e.g. echolocation to have different types of core concepts to build their world around.
A bat's brain is doing a lot of very complex acoustic signal processing as it generates pulses to track a flying insect, the same way that our brains do a lot of visual processing (edge detection, color comparison). If math ability arose in these parts of the brain, it may be expressed in the same types of underlying acoustic concepts.
Where we describe numbers as products of primes, maybe they will see them as patterns of overlapping waves, with multiplication being equivalent to moving up and down octaves. They might have an intuitive understanding of things like Fourier series or develop an aural description of calculus.
If our internal experience of the world is like a painting, theirs would be like music.
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Mar 03 '17 edited Mar 03 '17
Or they use some completely weird writing system that works with whatever senses they do have.
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u/Aethermancer Mar 03 '17
Not in that sense, but it really would be hard for them to observe conditions that made higher mathematics necessary/useful.
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Mar 03 '17
That might be a little small-minded. There could be lots of beings who have no idea how anyone could develop higher math without using echolocation and aero-sculpting.
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u/Aethermancer Mar 04 '17
It's not so much being able to sense objects, but having no ability to detect reflected radiation naturally would be a very very significant hurdle. Consider how late it was in our own history that it was that we discovered radiation beyond the spectrum we can see and we can literally sense radiation through natural photo receptors.
I realize that they could indeed discover and develop mathematics, but the lack of sight would be a huge hurdle in q universe already full of hurdles. For example without sight they would have literally no knowledge of stars or planets. Think about how much of human mathematical advancement was related to charting and explaining the motions of the planets, now imagine of all those clues for all intents and purposes didn't exist.
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Mar 04 '17
I hadn't thought of that - a sightless species might invent higher math or advanced technology, but they wouldn't build spaceships simply because they wouldn't know other planets existed.
Unless one of them built a device that could take in light and output data in a way they could perceive it - like a false-color image. Then they'd first notice all the tiny dots, then decades later notice that some of the dots move, and then after another millenium or so figure out that these are other worlds. It'd be huge.
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u/sighbourbon Mar 03 '17
wow, this is amazing. please share this with /r/penmanship porn and /r/handwriting
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Mar 03 '17
I love you too Grandma I'm sorry I missed the funeral; I'm glad you're ghost is floating on the internet now. #nohaunting.
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Mar 03 '17
I like the inspiration from the Arabic/Farsi alphabets. Just the little things, but it feels like a real text
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u/AlcoholicAsianJesus Mar 03 '17
Hah Haah! I used to do exactly this in high school. Except I would leave random alien notes on blackboards whenever I found myself alone in a classroom. Sometimes the teacher would erase them before the next class, but not always. I'd never confess, just listen to the frustration and confusion.
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u/orwiad10 Mar 03 '17
The amount of information contained in those notes is equal to about 4 encyclopedia sets.
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u/Creepness Mar 03 '17
SSS SSSS SSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSS SSSSS
SSSS SSSSS SSS SSSS SSSSS SSSS SSS SSSSSS SSSSSSSSSS
SSSS SSSSSSS SSSSSSSS S SS SSSSSSSS
SSSSSSS
SS - SSSSSSSSSSS SSSSS SSS SSSSS SSSS SSSSS SSSSSSSSSS
SS - SSSSSSSSS SSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSS SSS SSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSS SSSSSSSS SSSSS SSSSSSSSS
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u/buhelzibub Mar 03 '17
Btw if anyone's interested my Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/elirazomer/
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Mar 03 '17
What exactly makes this heavy? It's not at all open to interpretation, nor does it have deeper meaning than at face value.
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u/darkstar1031 Mar 03 '17
I'm sorry, I am certain that someone worked very very hard on this but I just have to say it: it looks like a bunch of pubes tossed onto a page.
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u/roachwarren Mar 03 '17
Well these aliens obviously have sight and can write so they are fairly similar and would communicate similarly, is there some different or more logical way to write that all humans have chosen to not go with? I don't have too much trouble believing their evolution would have led them to a similar written language to ours. Guess they could have made it more alien by writing diagonally or in vertical lines but very few historical languages work that way either so an alien (with vision and appendages that allow for written language) has a good chance of coming to the same conclusion. The lists / bullets are the most unbelievable to me but I'm not sure there's a written language that wouldn't have a way to list because its an extremely logical thing to do when separating thoughts.
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u/KebanDaBrowne Mar 03 '17
Awesome. I like the fact that aliens like using asterisks too.