It's time that we want to talk about the Aldarian text that shows up throughout the game! Have you seen it around? Did you know that it's translatable?! Spoilers in this one: the "gossip" mechanic, the Saturday Market V.2 vendors
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Let's compile our examples! We'll start with the places you can find text around Mistria. We have the sign over the forge, the Sweetwater Farm sign, the town event sign, and the text in the grocery store.
These examples are of varying resolution and it's a very small sampling to work off of. Let's pull up a few more! Here's the labels for the museum collections:
Alright, best for last - the greatest source of Aldarian text with easy one-to-one translatablility is the gossip portraits that you get when you talk to Elsie! Here's a sampling:
We know for sure what these translate to (character names), we have lots of examples, and we can then carry over what we learn from these to the signs before!
The first two things that I noticed were 1. the number of characters is less than it takes in English (first thought was that the text might be phonetic - not entirely correct!) 2. the same symbol is used to end "March" and "Fish" so there might be places where different sounds (ch and sh) are considered 'close enough' and use the same symbol. Keeping those in mind and looking through similarities, it wasn't too hard to start right in.
I'm not going to run you through the whole process, but as someone who hasn't done this sort of thing before, it wasn't terribly difficult to figure out what was going on (with enough trial and error and after eventually collecting enough gossip portraits examples); the text is focused on consonants. There is only a single vowel character, and it is exclusively used at the beginning of names. Doubling up of English characters is ignored for Aldarian - ie, Errol only has one R symbol in his name in Aldarian text. A few symbols are shared between sounds: CH and SH use the same symbol, and T and TH also share a character.
Here is the written example of the Aldarian alphabet (please excuse my handwriting!):
Notes: There aren't any examples of a hard G sound (like in Granola, as opposed to the soft G of Orange) so I cannot say if that would use an existing symbol or a new one. The Y symbol has a specifying (yuh) here because the symbol isn't used any time a Y appears - It is silent in Darcy because the Y sounds like "ee", while a the symbol appears in Terithia as the end to represent the sharp "yuh" that the "ia" sounds out. Also, we just don't have some sounds yet. No X names in the game!
After transcribing and translating the names, we can go back to the signs. (I am going to use an asterisk * to symbolize the starting vowel when typing). The town sign says *VNT (event), the forge sign says FRG (forge), Hayden's farm is labelled SWTWTR FRM (Sweetwater Farm). We can see that the museum signs say ARKLG, FSH, FLR, and *NSKT (archaeology, fish, flora, and insect). And then, finally, the grocery signs, which... are very small. Here are my transcriptions of all the character names that get portraits and the signs:
There is still room for interpretation of how some of the names are said, but I will note that this seems to confirm that Louis' name is pronounced "Loo-ee" rather than "Loo-iss" as there is no S symbol, Just LW (a previous point of contention between me and Galena). You'll also notice I struggled with some of the grocery signs! The text on those signs is at a very low resolution, so some characters took me a while to puzzle out (the spiral T symbol was especially hard to parse) and some still elude me. Some of the signs don't match their contents, so context only gets me so far... If you can make any sense of them, please let me know!!
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I hope that this was interesting! I tried to make sure that between the portraits and the signs there was at least one example of each character and the different ways they're used (i.e. both uses of the ch/sh character), so hopefully you can double check my alphabet using the pictures I've provided. I had a lot of fun translating the examples of text that we have, and I've been wondering if knowing this writing system might be helpful for the second one found elsewhere in the game... We'll talk about that one here soon!
Well, it’s getting trans-late, so I’m signing off. I wonder if you can guess witch topic we'll cover next...?
After talking about the Aldarian writing system, we wanted to share the available examples of the other writing system present in Fields of Mistria: Witchspeak! There might be more of it than you noticed present in the game! Spoilers for the mines and all available spells (and another type of spoiler to not get people's hopes up: we don't know how to translate this one (yet...?))
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We have a couple of examples of Witchspeak scattered throughout the game. Through progressing the story in the mines, we know that these tablets are written in Witchspeak, a language that was potentially used for communication between humans and dragons according to Eiland. Here are the examples we have so far, from levels 20, 40, 60, and 80 of the mines.
Note that we have translations of varying exactness for the first three tablets and, as of the current build of Fields of Mistria, none for the fourth as of yet. Note also that these inscriptions are quite short and low resolution and if they are indeed a translatable cipher they do not correspond exactly to the translation provided by the game. Anyway, if you want to try your hand at translation, definitely do not start with these.
We see similar, much clearer text on the floor in each seal room alongside the tablets. The text does not seem to directly correspond with the accompanying tablets.
We don't have any explanation for what they say offered up by the game, but it is interesting that each of these inscriptions starts with the same two branching symbols on the left.
More text appears on the spell book cards that are obtained through Caldarus. These have a direct translation provided on the cards themselves, and the Witchspeak is quite clearly readable. Personally, I think these are our best bet as a starting point!
There are two non-dragon-related altar statues that offerings can be made to: the Mistmare in the Narrows, and the chicken statue near Sweetwater Farm. The pedestals of both of these statues are inscribed with (quite small) Witchspeak.
And finally, one example that is not in-universe exists! The loading screen when you boot up the game holds the longest example of Witchspeak we've seen so far at 13 branches.
While in the game the language is apparently quite difficult to translate, for our purposes, given how specifically the text is written out, the number of times it appears, and the patterns that repeat throughout, we would not be surprised to learn that it can be read. Given that, I wanted to talk about some of the patterns I noticed. So, let's examine the text a bit now that we have all the examples compiled! Here's some notes and my best interpretations:
The text is made up of a horizontal line with branches shooting off both upwards and downwards, either in an up-down-up-down pattern or both up and down simultaneously. Because of this patterning, it is unlikely that the direction of the lines has any effect on the branch's meaning. (We had initially considered that it might be similar to Ogham when first examining it, an old Irish writing system that also uses a center line to write along and does have contextual directionality. Not the case here!)
The center line is broken up into interrupted pieces if put into a vertical space, as seen with the tablets. As this is the only place where we see broken up lines, it is likely that line separation does not designate space (between words etc). There is either a different designation of separation or there is none within this system.
Some examples of the text end with a branch, while some end bluntly after continuing briefly after the final branch. Unsure if this means something!
The floor writing in the seal rooms always starts with the same two branches on the left side. Potentially these could be designations, "seal" or "floor" or something of the like.
The spell cards have the only direct translation available to us out of all these options, so they seem a reasonable place to look for patterns. Here's my guess on a possible start with those:
Looking at the shortening of the spells to consonant syllables as would be done with the Aldarian text - SMN RN, GRWTH, FL RSTR (remembering that TH is a single letter in Aldarian, using the same symbol as T) - the number branches on the lines of Witchspeak corresponds relatively closely to Aldarian letters, matching 5-5, 3-4, 5-6... except the last one: DRGNS BRTH, 3-8. If the pattern isn't just coincidence on the others, it is possible that the final spell is shortened when translated (ie, "dragon's breath" to "breath" (BRTH), maybe considering "dragon" to be redundant), which would bring it to a match of 3-3. This theory needs more evidence, but linking the languages would be neat! Even if it isn't exactly correct, I believe there has to be some explanation for the difference in length of the Dragon's Breath spell name in English versus Witchspeak.
[For the record, there's similar closeness in the statue text - MSTMR and CHKN match 4-5 and 3-3 - CH being also a single symbol in Aldarian.]
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That's about all that we have to offer right now for observations! Ciphers are not our specialty, but if we make any interesting discoveries we will come back to this. In the meantime, if anyone else wants to take a crack at it, I hope this helped!
Well, I've spent enough time staring at this text, so I think it's time to set it a-side-pher now! Thanks for reading!!
