Witchspeak
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.]
˖⁺‧₊˚ ˚₊‧⁺˖✮-------------------✮˖⁺‧₊˚ ˚₊‧⁺˖
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!!
⯌Petra
