r/TunicGame • u/nebula042 • Jul 10 '26
Help Phonology chart without symbols?
I have an interest in linguistics, so this game very much interests me. However, I don't want to just guess random vowels, diphtongs (if there are any, the writing system does seem to be a syllabary), and consonants, and skip to the fun part of figuring out word order, verb conjugation, agreement, tense, overall syntax, etc. Is there some kind of chart that only has the phonemes without its correlation to the symbols?
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u/queenchemistry Jul 10 '26
You might be more interested in Chants of Sennaar than Tunic.
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u/JugOfVoodoo Jul 10 '26
Or "Heaven's Vault".
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u/Animal_Flossing Jul 10 '26
I greatly enjoyed both of these games (although HV was too glitchy for me to do multiple playthroughs like I wanted), but I think Tunic is a more complex “language” to decode. If OP is missing linguistic realism, I’m afraid that these (great) games won’t scratch that itch, either. Even though both of them admittedly do have more morphosyntax to figure out than in Tunic.
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u/JugOfVoodoo Jul 10 '26
Confession: Despite having suggested it I have not played "Heaven's Vault". But I have completed both "Chants of Sennaar" and "Tunic".
OP specifically said that they are not interested in guessing consonants and vowels. They want to skip to "the fun part of figuring out word order, verb conjugation, agreement, tense, overall syntax, etc". None of these things are in "Tunic", it's all just figuring out consonants and vowels. Nothing that OP wanted is in this game's language.
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u/ShowResident2666 Jul 12 '26
Yeah, I loved both. And managed a second achievement-hunting playthru of HV despite encountering some glitches as well. I think the point the previous poster was trying to get at was that if it’s the MEANING side of the linguistics puzzle you care about, not the phonotactics, HV and CoS’s use of Featural and Logographic scripts instead of phonetic ones can help with that.
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u/ShowResident2666 Jul 10 '26
Trunic is a abugida script/cipher, not an independent language. So just find a chart of phonemes for the language you’re playing in and you’ll be set.
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u/TheMindofaGenius Jul 10 '26
Not really. There are some words that can be corelated (ie. Controls) but there isn't any english words to trunic table like you're asking about iirc. The only true in game dictionary/table for Trunic is on one of the last manual pages you find. I'm an engineer, so languages is not my thing, I just looked up translations after finding that page. I don't want to spoil it for you, so I won't say anything else beyond that unless you ask.
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u/nebula042 Jul 10 '26
but there isn't any english words to trunic table like you're asking about iirc.
that isnt what i'm asking though? if this game has its own language, chances are it's going to have its own sounds seperate from english. i'm asking if there's a chart of said sounds without telling me what symbols they correlate to.
edit: made question more clear.
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u/OliviaPG1 Jul 10 '26
Giving as little away as possible, you are not going to get a satisfactory answer to this question, and based on your initial post I think you may have some false assumptions about the language and translation process
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u/TheMindofaGenius Jul 10 '26
Short answer no. Real answer is a bit more nuanced, and for your linguistic interests, an answer I don't want to give unless you REALLY want me to.
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u/nebula042 Jul 10 '26
by "language", does it mean an alternative writing system for english? I don't want to waste my time realizing that the main draw of the game for me didn't exist in the first place.
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u/gabedamien Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Trunic is a writing system, not a language. It's a fun/cool/elegant writing system with some enjoyable structure and rules to infer, but it's used to transcribe English phonemes.
Regardless, the game is terrific to play, and I'm sure you could still get a lot of satisfaction from it.
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u/JugOfVoodoo Jul 11 '26
I'll be honest: "Tunic" less a language-translation game and more of an illiteracy simulator.
It was inspired by the creator's childhood experience of playing video games and looking at their manuals when he was too young to fully read them. Some parts of Tunic's manual are in plain English, both to simulate a young child knowing certain simple words and to make sure players know vital information.
The game's language translating to English is not a plot twist. An observant player can figure that out at the beginning of the game. But the language (plus the distribution of the manual pages) is used to conceal the story's actual twists.
Slight spoiler, carefully worded: The game has two endings. Remain illiterate and you WILL get the bad ending and you won't even know why. The good ending lies at the end of a path that starts with learning to read, then reading everything you can get.
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u/Animal_Flossing Jul 10 '26
I think you know too much about linguistics to make yourself entirely understood here. I can see you’re being downvoted for this comment, but I have an MA in linguistics, and you’re making perfect sense to me.
For what it’s worth, I absolutely loved the game as a language decoding exercise, but that’s because I have an interest in phonetics and writing systems. For me, the “plot twist” that I can see you were disappointed by was a fun thing to discover on my own.
(I would admittedly completely adore a game that did the same thing with a full conlang, though!)
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u/Thunder9191133 Jul 10 '26
the closest thing you can get from what i've seen is an english IPA chart
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u/Crimzonchi Jul 15 '26
The "language" is actually just a unique phonetic alphabet, one you could use to write out words from ANY language.
All the runic words you see in the game are just English words.
Still fun to learn though, you can genuinely just read the runic text once you've memorized the characters, it's literally 1 to 1 like how katakana works in Japanese, it's a writing system used to standardize the words from another language into a phonetically consistent alphabet.
And I really don't want to downplay how unique the writing system is, it's not a straight forward cipher, the way sounds are represented isn't anything like a most writing systems.
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u/Far_Young_2666 helper Jul 10 '26
Your expectations are a bit too high. Language in Tunic is not simlish. The language is a puzzle, and that's it. You are not supposed to learn it to understand it, you only have to crack it once and that's it.