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...?
Now, I feel like this is some interesting theory and headcanon territory, so I’m going to toss my idea in the middle of the circle and you can see if you like it or not.
Gamma Jack was canonically being monitored, it’s one of the few things we know for sure about him. Not only that, but the monitoring is listed as A Level, which I feel is safe to assume as the highest level.
Theory- Bob was one of the monitors.
Bob was well trusted by a LOT of heroes, genuinely friends with a lot of them as well, this included Gamma Jack. Gamma Jack has beliefs about superiority which definitely can be tied to other belief systems like racism, ableism, sexism and classism.
However, luckily for Bob, he fits into Jack’s view of ‘superior’. He’s tall, muscular, his powers make him indestructible and he gets his job done, he’s capable, but most importantly, most likely, is he’s a man, and he’s white.
Now, someone can point out, ‘hey! Gamma Jack was in that deleted scene with Bob AND Lucius! He’s not racist!’, my friends, Jack thought Supers were superior, he also more than likely based his good connections on how powerful a Super is. However, the Glory days are set before the 50’s, before literal segregation was lifted, a man like Jack most definitely has deep rooted biases. It’s most likely he only liked Frozone because he was the only Super who could call himself Mr Incredible’s best friend.
Now, why do I say all this?
Someone with the complexes like Jack would gravitate towards someone like Bob, making him more likely to let his walls down, giving Bob the chance to ask some questions to either get things straight or report back to the NSA. Watching for if something goes sideways in Jack’s mind, because the NSA knew he was a problem.
TLDR: I think Bob was (one of many) monitoring Gamma Jack, at least during the Glory Days.
notes about him cuz i’m getting really fond of them….
they are NOT good with animals but a hard worker on that front so the animals begrudgingly accept him. specializes in monster slaying but is picking up the farming trade as best he can! vested interest in blacksmithing if you know what i mean... experienced a major trauma right before going to mistria. grew up with rich but abusively distant parents, violently separated from them around 13 years old, and moved to mistria at 23-24. sautéed vegetables and hand cut sushi are the extent of their cooking ability. uhh yeah my little guy #myguy
