I tried making Hearthian writing translatable
I thought it’d be cool if I could write/read Hearthian, so that’s what I did. I'm not expecting this to be easily readable but I wanted to stick to something similar to what we see in-game. I did originally want to do something funky than just a direct translation (like using sounds) but there's just not enough possible letter combinations? Idk maybe if I tried harder it'd be possible.
Anyway here's the alphabet:
There are 7 unique characters that letters can be made up of. The size/length and placement of the characters differentiate them.
Left image is showing the 7 possible unique characters all letters are made up of, and the image on the right shows which lines are supposed to be equal length with one another.
For now the Hearthians have the same symbols for punctuation as us.
All vowels (I chose to categorise y as a vowel) begin with a floating character for easy identification. Only vowels begin with a floating character. (a) is a singular line, (e) is a double line, (i) and (u) are mirrors of each other, and (o) and (y) are mirrors of each other as well.
There are 20 to memorise. I (loosely) based a few off the shape of their corresponding lower-case letters, for example:
Hey did you know every traveller apart from the hatchling has an (r) in their name
Now I don't know who's actually interested in learning this, but in case you are, here is some untranslated text if you want to try translating it yourself (answer at bottom of post*):
One flaw (to be changed/added) is the lack of capitalisation. In-game some of the founders do use capitals when writing their names, so technically both lower-case and upper-case probably exists. I had one idea, but I thought of it after I decided on the numbering system so I'll have to think of something else.
This bit is a little more complicated. Having only 6 fingers, Hearthians are likely to count in base 6 as opposed to our base 10. I had to learn how a base 6 number system works for this dhjskndjs (it was fun tho). Um I had great difficulty explaining base 6 but I tried my best.
Now bear with me. Where we have 10 unique symbols for numbers (0 through to 9), the Hearthians would have 6 (0 through 5), and 6 would now be a two-digit number just like 10 is for us. I wanted the numbers to look slightly different from the letters, so only the numbers have horizontal lines (excluding punctuation, like -). 0 through to 5 looks like this in the Hearthian language:
In a base 6 number system, where we would normally have a ones, tens, hundreds, etc. column (which are 10^0, 10^1, 10^2, and so on), we would instead have a ones, sixes, thirty-sixes, etc. column (6^0, 6^1, 6^2 …).
In the image above we have a Hearthian 2 in the thirty-sixes column, meaning the value of that column is 72 (2 x 36). A 3 in the sixes column means 3 sixes (3 x 6) which is 18. Then we have 5 in the ones column, meaning just 5 ones. Therefore this number is 95 (72 + 18 + 5).
6 in Hearthian would be written as 1 six and 0 ones:
Numbers that come after 6 such as 7, 8, and 13 would be written as “1 six and 1 ones” (7), “1 six and 2 ones” (8), and “2 sixes and 1 ones” (13) like so:
36 would be the first 3-digit number and would be written as “1 thirty-sixes, 0 sixes, 0 ones”.
Here are the digits for the first 48 numbers for reference.
Let’s figure out what a number is based on its digits so we don’t always have to refer to the image above and also so we can know what bigger numbers are.
Here we have the symbols 4 and 1 in Hearthian. A 4 in the sixes column means 4 sixes (4 x 6), and 1 in the ones column means 1 ones (1 x 1).
Now for a 5-digit number:
The first column on the left is the (big inhale) thousand-two-hundred-ninety-sixes column and the one beside it is the two-hundred-sixteens column, but I didn’t want to write that, and they are respectively 6^5 and 6^4. In actual Hearthian they would have simpler names for them like we have for “thousand’.
And lastly let’s combine both the letters and numbers in a sentence (answer will be at bottom of the post**):
There we go we can now write in Hearthian. Yippie!!!!!
Big thank you to my girlfriend @eucalyptmoth who greatly helped with this (especially with all the base 6 shenanigans).
*answer: "Timber Hearth is a planet among the Outer Wilds solar system."
**answer: The time loop is 22 minutes long
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