HELLO HI, YES- I HAVE DISCOVERED THE BOOKS IN ROATHES AREA HAVE OROKIN IN THEM.
I've been working for the past 3hrs to translate them & it looks like it's some kind of ancient creation myth. Then I got to the second page.. and.. well..
I feel like DE is messing with us now making sure we can't translate this bit. Either that... or these are entirely new Orokin vowel symbols we haven't seen before..
Everything else is perfectly translatable, TO A DEGREE. I either have to figure out how to read these pages in order correctly, or these are just as much text as they could fit on one line, and they hop to another line, fuck if the last word doesn't make sense.
I'm like.. 30% done with page one. I saw those squiggles while I was scrolling and just had to go have a look. They only appear in two sentences on two pages out of the three that I have.
For reference, the sentence above it translates to:
"Rivers forgot their names and the stars withheld their light, men wandered-"
Using context.. this one wiggly boi is apparently 'o' as in 'for'
I'm sure someone has probably translated this book before.. but.. it's good practice for me.
I honestly started translating this & thought DE was gonna Lorem Ipsum/Rick Roll us (and I wouldn't blame them) BUT THE FACT THAT THEY DIDN'T.. means they knew SOMEONE was going to translate this, or at least try.. and that it should have something that goes with the in game lore written in it.
I plan on posting the full translation once I've gotten it to the point of being understandable, including the book pages.
You asked for it, so this is my Christmas/Tennobaum present to all of you Tenno! :D Hope you're ready for some SERIOUS Nerding about constructed languages! (Click Expand for the un-skippable cut scene!)
Firstly, Orokin is a phonetic language, meaning that instead of each symbol representing a letter of the languages alphabet, it instead represents a SOUND which is used to make a word. An example of a real world language like this that uses symbols to represent sounds is Japanese, where "き" is a symbol that represents the sound "ki". For example, the word "Moon" or "Tsuki" in Romaji (the Japanese word written using latin script) would be written "つき" in simplified Hiragana (The symbolic alphabet that is used to spell words that are of Japanese origin).
Keeping that in mind, you might be able to see now why some words in "Orokin" look longer or shorter than they are in English. There are four "sets" of symbols in Orokin that represent the sounds of consonants, vowels, and also written numbers and punctuation. This post is going to cover reading & writing consonants and vowels to make words, since numbers & punctuation are not used very often and are also very straight forward to read and write compared to the 'writing words' portion of Orokin.
Consonants and vowels are arranged in the word in a specific manner, sometimes including a 'placeholder' letter for words that start with vowels which have no consonant attached. This is SIMILAR to how the Japanese language uses "o"/"を" to define the object of a sentance, even though it's not technically PART of any word. With Orokin however, it's more to denote that a vowel should be a stand alone sound, typically at the start or end of a word. Whether that's used or not of course boils down to HOW the word is PRONOUNCED, because that's what matters when reading/writing Orokin since it's essentially "English with extra steps" (No offense, I find it cool as shit).
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NOTE: If you look at some older Orokin writing (like what's found in relays, other early development "Tenno" areas, or even writing on some of the Warframes themselves) you can see many vowels are used a bit inconsistently. Many times 'aw', 'ae', and 'aye' are all used interchangeably, possibly accidentally, or just generally inconsistantly as the language evolved. There are also many instances where vowels on the ends of words do not use the 'h' holder, which would generally be wrong in present day Orokin.
As a result, we'll be focusing on more recent usages of the Orokin language, since DE has significantly refined vowel usage over the past few years especially. This will make translating and learning more consistent as I feel like the older writing isn't a good representation of what you're going to see in game from this point in time going forward. (Stuff changes, developers refine and redefine things all the time, and I feel like the Orokin language is no different. I'm SURE the Corpus & Grineer languages also suffer from this, but I digress.)
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Now that we have addressed some of the older quirks & inconsistencies of Orokin we can move on to:
The alphabet/phonetic keycode. This is one I have made & altered MANY times over the years, and I use it to double check everything I write, as I now know how to read & write the language without this key.
I've arranged it here in a way that's hopefully familiar to anyone who has learned something like Japanese, where the primary symbol set that represents a consonant and vowel is along the top, and any 'notation marks' to that SAME SYMBOL denote a modification or additional sound. (Example: In Japanese, 'Ka' か becomes 'Ga' が with the additional mark in the upper right corner) Yes, that's right- there's actually only 12 consonants in Orokin, the other 10 are VARIATIONS on those first 12 which denote a change or addition to their sound.
In the key above, you can see the "P" & "Fh" symbols for example, share a primary symbol SHAPE, but the "Fh" symbol has a notation mark in the center. This turns the hard "P" sound into more of a "Fh/Ph", think "Pie" vs "Fly". We also have "M" and "N", where "N" is the same symbol as "M" but with the notation mark. These two specifically can also be a bit troublesome to people learning to read Orokin, because they are virtually identical to "L" and "H". The trick with these four however is to check the length of the symbol- "L" and "H" will always be HALF the length of any other letters in the word.
Specifically with the letter "H" you will see it's often used to "hold" vowels. In Orokin writing, vowels are NEVER found on their own. Looking at the chart, you can see on the right hand side, I have examples of the reading order of Orokin script in various setups. Red is the consonant, green is a vowel, gold is the 'placeholder' symbol that holds a vowel. I made this at first specifically for the 1999 version of Orokin, but the premise is the same when reading 'fancy' Orokin. You read any "holder" first, then any vowel above it, etc, you can follow the arrows on the chart.
Now that I've gone over symbols, the basics of vowels and placeholders, and you have my chart, how do you organize these so that they actually "spell" a word correctly?
Primarily, that comes down to pronunciation and how you would say it out loud. For example, let's start with the word "paper"- I'm a New Englander, so I have a bit of an almost 'lazy' accent (we tend to 'round' e sounds so they sound more like a u. Ya'll ever heard a New Yorker say "water?" ..yea. That.), so for me I say "Payepuhr". Writing that word would look like this,
You could also technically leave out the 'h' here if you wanted, but I left it to emphasis the 'puhhr' sound at the end.
Now, you may have noticed, I also spelled this VERY weird. If you pronounce it, it probably sounds like it should just be ‘Payepur” right? Well, this is because there is no “Y” or “W” in Orokin. Both those sounds are made by combining usually two vowels into or above one symbol. In this case, to make “Y” I use “AYE” (like in the word (day).
You may have ALSO noticed I used tennotyper for this. While this is an INCREDIBLE tool that is super awesome, it’s only PART of the equation. It seems to have gotten better in the past few years, but until recently it was a big reason why I cringed a little when people posted something ‘translated’ on tennotyper. Before whatever it was they did to improve the translations, people would spell stuff out in plain English and not the ‘Romaji’ version of Orokin, and it would end up being very wrong.
Now, COULD you put in “Paepuhr/Payepur” and get something legible? Could you even put in just “Paper”?
Absolutely! And here's the important bit: all three of them give you a different result. Are they correct? Possibly. Due to the fact that Orokin isn’t a REAL language, and words will differ according to how different people pronounce them, you may end up with various spellings. TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, all three of these COULD be correct.. but only one of them will read right according to however DE writes it.
So, let’s put a phrase into tennotyper that we know has a translation in game. Something we KNOW the 'correct' spelling of, “Honorable Death”,
Versus, how it’s written in game:
You can see in this example, DE emphasizes different vowel sounds. The one from tennotyper literally translates to “H aw n aw r aa b l d ea th” where the in game one reads “H aw n oo r aa b l d ea th”.
So at the end of the day, typically the translation that’s consistently 'correct' with what you would find in game, ends up being the one that accentuates certain vowel sounds to make it obvious what the word is supposed to be. Hence why I wrote “Paper” as “Payepuhr” originally.
Hope you guys enjoyed this silly little TEDTalk on the Orokin language, and I hope it helps you make more accurate Orokin translations!
Alright! You guys asked for it! :) Here is the first set of fully translated Hollvania Zoo signs! Also, now I'm wondering if DE decided to go with Tagfurs story before or after this creature was named Tgfr.
Makes you wonder how reliable the info the Cavia gave us is..
ALSO interestingly, the CONTINENTS are still referred to as 'North/South America' in Ook's and Tgfrs entries, which is just kinda odd considering Amir, Velimir, and Minerva come from the 'United states of Libertatia' meaning.. the nation did NOT take on the name of the continent. (probably for LOTS of IRL reasons it needed to be changed in game to be fair)
Edit: I made a mistake in the Ooks entry. It should be 'where' not our in his 'where we live' info section in the upper left. You'll see what I mean when you get there.
I wanna go ONE DAY without finding some Orokin bullshit lore drop that I didn't expect when I was looking for something else. lmaooo
I don't like this.. Not at all.
I accidentally found out what was written on the notes in Entrati's labs that fly all around when you destroy one of his desks..
"It's heralds are the stars it fells,
the sky and earth aflame.
Debris.
The tale of a comet.
Space (possibly an error in the usage of 'k' here instead of 's'?) junk.
They told themselves comforting stories (possibly errors in the flipped usage of 'uh/eh'), Vaylehn (name DROP???) was (this is cut off)
The last word in the last sentence COULD be a lot of things really. Without the rest of the word it could be;
-heard
-hurt
ALSO not to mention here, this is in Entrai's labs. A tileset that was added well before 1999, and WEEEELL before the round table with Flare and the comet. They planned this shit out & I'm scared lmao
...oh. These are in Duviri.. W-Why would they talk about THE TENNO in Duviri..?
"You are the hope and future of the tenno"
Side note: This may play a bigger role hint wise, adding onto Amir's nickname for us as 'Marty McFlea', & later on, him straight up using 'Future' as a nickname for us potentially.
What if this is a 'we create ourselves' situation?
OR maybe the Drifter isn't who they think they are- like in my long standing theory that they ARE the adult version of our Operators that got yote into the void.
Soooo something I discovered while watching/playing with my buddy @hushravengoobertown ... Apparently in the Hollvanian Simulacrum, the text on the wall is different. Here is her stream on the left with her playing on xbox.. here is mine on the right, playing on PC..
That's not even the weird part. The even weirder part is that this text uses one of the NEW vowel symbols that was introduced with The Old Peace. You can see it here above the ph/f
WHICH MEANS THIS TEXT IS NEW. Some dev PUT THIS HERE.. on PURPOSE.
NOW... this was probably done because the decal on PC is a very high resolution, and likely to save space/ram on console they used a lower res asset.. but wtf. like.. what a choice lol
Translating what it says on xbox,
"ooee gou ooeer uhnd ehrownd
ihn thuh nayet and awr
kuhnsoomd baye phayeuhr"
"We go around and around
in the night and are
consumed by fire"
Was in Descendia with my friends and almost got caught by the fire cause I had to stop to read this LMAO
"Endurance"
I'm so proud of myself. I've had trouble learning languages all my life, but buckling down the last few days working on that massive translation seems to have helped a lot :D
To celebrate, I will be writing a small smut comic in Orokin. No, you can't change my mind, yes I will put it on Ao3 when it's back up, no I'm not posting the English translation, that's the fun part. lol
..It will be a slutty letter to Margulis from Ballas.
Also for the record, this is a PERFECT example of 'knowing the language' vs 'putting it in tennotyper'.
Using 'c' will give you the symbol for 'k', and this is just wrong. And even when using the right phonetics, the 'oo' is on the wrong symbol Not to mention the 'r' and 'a' are too far apart.
