A handful of folks have lamented me not doing all of my manual-studying on camera in past episodes, and I imagine they’ll feel similarly bummed this time, so to address some of those questions in advance: *Why not include all this language-deciphering work in the episodes themselves?* Because batching 7ish hours of deciphering time into regular 30-60 minute Tunic releases would mean like 2 weeks of Tunic episodes spent quietly staring at a few manual pages, which would not be enjoyable viewing for most people and completely kill the pacing of the playthrough. *Then why not edit all of the deciphering work down into one episode?* Because editing 7ish hours of puzzle solving down to an hour or so would require a TON of extra editing work for Carrie on top of all the other PlayFrame editing she has to do (and because the resulting video still wouldn’t be that fun to watch for reasons I’ll get to shortly). *Why not just record it and post the whole thing unedited for the folks who DO want to watch it?* For a LOT of reasons. Recording the deciphering process would have made the work take even longer, because recording a Let’s Play splits your focus and makes it harder to concentrate your full attention on a puzzle. Not recording the process meant we didn’t have to worry about vocalizing our thought processes or being entertaining, allowing us to focus our full attention on cracking the code. As a result, even if we HAD recorded our time studying the manual, the result wouldn’t have been that enjoyable to watch (because we weren’t saying very much). And it wouldn’t have been practical for us to record anyhow. We keep all of the footage we record for PlayFrame as a general policy to ensure we can re-render and re-upload any episode in the future if needed (not doing so has bitten us before). So recording all 7ish hours of our deciphering would have meant capturing and storing somewhere between 60-100 gigabytes of video and audio data, 95% of which would have consisted of silence and page flipping. That’d be a LOT of storage space spent for something which (let’s face it) very few people would actually be interested in watching. These are the same reasons I had for studying the manual off-camera sometimes over the course of the playthrough; it allowed me to review manual pages without my attention being split, adding work for Carrie or wasting tons of storage space on useless footage. But on top of all that, we didn’t record it because it meant Carrie and I could just relax and ENJOY the process. I was quite sick and exhausted at the time, my voice was still gone, and we had zero certainty that we even COULD crack the language when we started. We just wanted to chill for a while, and we ended up having a wonderful time together just quietly puzzling on this doozy of a language. Today’s summary video is our best effort at sharing a recreation of that journey in a way that is practical for us and and fun to watch for as many people as possible. I know it’s not the same as hearing realizations happen in real time, but it’s the best we’re realistically able to provide (and honestly I’m quite proud of how it turned out).
Thank you for the big write-up and your reasoning, I still (only slightly) disagree but I can also see that it's not a decision you made without much due consideration! * I also wanted to apologise if any of our nagging about recording got annoying at any point! I've absolutely loved this series so far in any case 💜 *(Edit: just finished the episode, I think this was a very good way to do the language decoding stuff, I still think showing notes for some of the holy cross puzzles would be good but this is more than satisfactory for this bit of the game)
I think this video was perfect and hopefully nobody is upset that they didn't see you studying and working on the writing system. Having gone through that process myself, I fully understand you not recording it and it would not have made for good videos. You did a great job explaining how y'all solved it, and then how it works. Also interesting to see your process and how it differed from mine! I got the same first words "a", "the", and "to" and guessed on "button" as well, but I also got "this" from the story page and focused on trying to read those pages rather than the tutorial pages. Figuring out "press and hold the button" was a great idea! Also, loved the playframe logo written in trunic at the beginning :)
The video is perfect! The extra editing work by Carrie is absolutely amazing, and this write-up makes complete and total sense. Honestly, the world doesn't deserve you two.
This makes total sense. I for one appreciate the effort you put in to make sharing the story of this fun and engaging for us. It makes me smile to imagine you and Carrie, chilling on the couch, pen and pad in hand, having a chill time while you recuperate. You guys are entirely too cute for your own good. Finally, congrats on the accomplishment. I may dip in and out, for nudges in the right direction, but I'm not sure I want to spoil this entirely for myself. Dan Floyd is good at games. Let none say otherwise.
Get you a partner who will decode cryptic video game languages with you. Thank you for putting this video together Floyds! Your hard work is appreciated!
Carrie remains a hero and a treasure. Those Tunic Language 101 frames were the only thing that made this fully parsable for me. It was like college linguistics all over again.
Absolutely helped me to understand. Those visual cues then aided by audio cues go a long way. I could not have figured out that it's phonetic based language by myself.
I think this is one of my favorite editing jobs Carrie has ever done, I'm floored by how awesome the set up is for the language tackling -- I thought it was a livestream setup for a hot second :0
@@techstuff9198you are correct. It is actually based on the isometric wire frame of a cube (or really mostly a rectangular prisim, but there are a few instances in the manual where the text is cube shaped, and understanding that is important because some of the glyphs look slightly different as a cube).
I already love the fact that you're dedicating a whole episode for teaching and showing us how you guys have learned to read the script. But then the visuals at 5:40 came into view and I just had to pause and compliment you guys right here with the amount of dedication and extra work you put in these videos!!! Both the let's play and the editing! Great video to start the year with!!!
@@linuxstreamer8910 hahaha I had not - thanks for pointing it out! Obviously easier now with front files available, but further shows the level of polish these two do 💚
Having scoured TH-cam previously for this kind of explanation I can safely say this is the most clear and helpful one by a country mile (no offence to previous folks' efforts but they lacked a Carrie to bring the production values.)
Congratulations to Carrie on an absolutely AMAZING editing job on this, making it honestly one of the most easily understandable guides on this language that I've seen! Also, the graphics in the corners were just fantastic. Not sure who made them, but I'm glad that they're there. Carrie smiling big with her coffee is adorable.
4:27 btw the reason THAT symbol is circled is because that's the symbol for the "Ayr" sound. In most contexts, that is used to refer to the character, and final boss, The Heir. But in this specific sentence, it means "air," so they were confused because "what do you mean it's 'in The Heir?'"
Bless you Carrie! I can't imagine how much extra work went into editing this video. I doubt I could have followed along half as well without the circle pointers and key notes on the side.
may of the fox ghosts are actually there to help teach the language as well. One of the characters does the same thing. The one lying on the floor. Zzzzzzzzzz
My favorite one is the guy by the well going “well, well, well…” I never learned the language during my play through, but that never stopped me from knowing what he was saying.
Let me add some (okay, maybe a lot) extra flavor to all the stuff mentioned here: Starting with writing systems, writing systems come into essentially five flavors. Generally, the first one developed (writing was developed several times) is a logography--each symbol corresponds to roughly a word [1]: Chinese is the most well-known such writing system. This tends to evolve into what's known as a syllabary, where each word corresponds to a "syllable." Here, Japanese hiragana and katakana are probably the most well-known of this category. The last three writing systems are collectively alphabets, where each symbol corresponds roughly to an individual phoneme. This development appears to have only happened twice in world history: once in Proto-Canaanite (whence almost all such scripts derive from), and Hangul (the main exception). There are three kinds of alphabets, based on how vowels are handled. The first alphabet was an abjad like Arabic, where vowels are marked with diacritics or not at all. Some scripts turned the abjad into an abugida, where vowels are indicated by systematically altering the shape of the consonant--Canadian Syllabic is probably the clearest manifestation of this, where you rotate the letter in different directions to indicate the vowel. The final set is true alphabets, which all (except Hangul) derive ultimately from the Greek, who added in full letters for vowel sounds. (By the way, all of the names for these come from taking the first few letters in various languages: alphabet from Greek, abjad from Arabic, abugida from Ge'ez, an Ethiopian language). I'd be tempted to classify Tunic script as an abugida, but you can make a case for it being a true alphabet instead [2]. So earlier I put "syllable" in quotes, and it's worth expanding on that more, because it relates to Tunic script as well. As is noted from the history of writing, breaking the speech of natural languages into phonemes is not the tendency of most people; no, speech is usually thought of in syllables instead. Syllables generally consist of a vowel sound with some consonants before and after it, and most languages tend to end up with a consonant-vowel (CV) or consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern for the primary syllable pattern. This means that, in writing, syllables generally end up being treated as CV units, with CVC or more complex syllables having a variety of fun constructions to represent it. You can see this in Tunic: each basic letter is a CV unit, with a diacritic to indicate that it's to be read as VC instead. English is a relatively complex language in letting you string together lots of consonants into a syllable: the sadly non-existent word "strangsts" is phonologically allowed by English and crowds 8 consonants into a single syllable. [1] It's more complicated than this, but I want to to keep this short...er. [2] My understanding is that the main diagnostic criterion for an abugida is whether or not there a symbol not marked with a vowel has a default vowel sound, which would classify Tunic as a true alphabet.
Let's move on from writing systems in general to Tunic itself in particular, and start by looking at English phonology. The moment you recognize that it's not a cipher for Latin script (what we normally write English in), you probably should have shifted to using IPA immediately [3], because English spelling is pretty damn atrocious thanks to the Great Vowel Shift [4]. If you're not familiar with phonology in general, Wikipedia's page on English phonology is a pretty good introduction for figuring out how you might transcribe English speech. English has 24 consonants, written in IPA [5] as /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ (the 'n' as in 'sing'), /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /tʃ/ ('ch'), /dʒ/ ('dg' like 'fudge'), /f/, /v/, /θ/ ('th' as in 'thin'), /ð/ ('th' as in 'this'), /s/, /z/, /ʃ/ ('sh'), /ʒ/ ('s' in 'vision'), /h/, /l/, /r/, /j/ ('y'), /w/. This list isn't arbitrary, actually. Consonants have a structure to them: there's the kind of action you're doing (forcing air through noise, briefly stopping the airflow, hissing around your tongue, or... it's complicated); where your tongue is (ordered here from lips to the back of your mouth); and whether or not you're vibrating your vocal cords as you do it (known as voice) [6]. I've sorted them by these characteristics. If you're designing a writing system from scratch, it would make some sense to make consonants that have some relation to each other display some sort of relation in written script. Does Tunic do that? Well, most consonants have a voiced-voiceless pair: /p/ versus /b/, or /θ/ versus /ð/, for example. In Tunic, each of these pairs turn out to be mirror images of each other, so /p/ is upside-down /b/, /f/ upside-down /v/, etc. Another feature is that the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ look rather like it should be /t/ + /ʃ/ or /d/ + /ʒ/ (phonetically, you're shifting from one to the other sound in smooth motion). If you look at the script... it's a missed opportunity. The character /ʃ/ looks tantalizingly close to /tʃ/ + /s/, but it just doesn't work out. There's also a correlation between the stops and fricatives in the same place of articulation: /f/ is /p/ with a little line to the lower left that is the same addition you use to get /s/ from /t/. There's not enough pairs in English to tell me if this alteration was intentional or not. I don't see any other patterns. I will also note that the manual's "alphabet" at the end uses an ordering very nearly the ordering I used, although /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are clearly in the wrong order [7]. On to vowels. Vowels in English are... complicated, especially because even the major dialects merge them in inconsistent ways, and Latin is poorly equipped to handle them. At a basic level, English has 5 main vowel sounds in "short" and "long" form. The short vowel sounds (drop them in "b*t"), in IPA [8], are /æ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /ɒ/, /ʌ/, and the long vowels (use "b*te") are /eɪ/, /i/, /ai/, /oʊ/, /ju/ (the 'y' sound creeps in there in long vowel form). The short vowels are all monophthongs (your mouth stays the same shape), while most of the long vowels are diphthongs (you shift from one vowel position to the other). In addition to these 10 basic vowels, we have an additional basic monophthong (/ʊ/--like "foot"), an optional additional monophthong between a and o (/ɔ/ as in "caught" if you *don't* have the cot-caught merger), /ə/ (schwa, I'll get back here in a second) and two more diphthongs (/ɔɪ/ like "boil" and /aʊ/ like "how"). There's also several "r-colored vowels", as several dialects don't pronounce an /r/ sound here anymore (known as a non-rhotic accent), which I usually don't count as separate vowels but are distinct in Tunic's script. If you're going to make it distinct, you need 6 different /Vr/ sounds, as in "far", "fair", "fear", "fir", "fore", "fury" (sorry, "fure" isn't a word) are distinct sounds [9]. If you tot everything up, you should need 20 or 21 vowel sounds in Tunic, and realistically, you'd want to do 21 to preserve cot-caught distinction for those dialects where it matters. Look back at our table, however, and there's only 18. The missing sounds are /ʊr/ (as in "cure") and /ɔ/, while /ə/ and /ʌ/ have been merged. I have a pretty big issue with how Tunic phonetically transcribes English, and it centers on the /ə/~/ʌ/ merger. If you look at a chart of where vowels are pronounced, /ə/ is the vowel that sits in the dead center. Consequently, it's kind of a neutral vowel. In English, vowels in unstressed syllables tend to end up neutralized and shift into an /ə/ from their original pronunciation (this is called "schwa reduction"). There are some words where certain syllables are never stressed, even when the word is, and the vowel sounds in those positions are routinely identified as being purely /ə/. The canonical example is "about"--pronounced /ə.baʊt/). It's not really possible to stress a syllable with /ə/ in English. When you have words that are usually pronounced unstressed--"a" and "the" are good examples--when you do stress them, you usually change the pronunciation entirely to match. "a" is /eɪ/ when stressed and /ə/ unstressed, while "the" is usually /ði/ when stressed and /ðə/ unstressed. (The unstressed/stressed distinction was noticeable when you were going through the description of "a" being written as /ə/). I can see why the developers would prefer to transcribe words that are usually unstressed in their unstressed pronunciation, though it does feel weird to me. The problem is when you go from the word "a" to "button". "Button" is an interesting word because of its second syllable, which consists of, um, /n/. By itself. Kind of. Sometimes, there's a tendency to give the second syllable a little bit of a vowel, which is of course would be the standard unstressed vowel. So you'd expect to see "button" transcribed as /bʌt.n/ or /bʌt.ən/. Tunic transcribed it as... /bətɪn/, which is quite different instead [10]. My guess is that /ə/ and /ʌ/ were merged because most people would tend to transcribe those sounds as both "UH", but given that the game preserved the /θ/ and /ð/ distinction (both would be transcribed as "TH" and I can think of only one minimal pair where the distinction actually matters--"thy" versus "thigh"), and that it also distinguishes /ŋ/ from /n/ where /ŋ/ only appears where /n/ would appear before /g/, why it didn't go to the same length to preserve /ə/ and /ʌ/. [3] English does seem to be unusually averse to using IPA. In the dictionaries you read in other languages, pronunciation is almost always given via IPA symbols, whereas English dictionaries seem to tend to prefer ad-hoc phonetic spelling instead. [4] To make a long story short, we write English according to how it was pronounced roughly 500 years ago. Then almost all of the vowels ended up shifting pronunciation so that it makes very little sense, but the spelling of written words didn't change. [5] To clarify, anything I have in brackets like this: /p/ is meant to be IPA rather than English text. [6] There are other things you can do, but they don't distinguish between different phonemes in English, so I'm not getting into them here. [7] If you need help seeing it, the pattern is that voiceless comes immediately before voiced in every pair, *except* for /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. [8] I'm using General American as the basis for IPA transcription here. [9] Strictly speaking, for General American, you need an extra vowel sound that only crops up before the /r/ to distinguish these sounds. [10] It is worth pointing out that unstressed vowels can reduce to a sound somewhere in the /i/ or /ɪ/ region as well too, so it's not entirely crazy. But it's worth noting that dictionary convention for syllabic consonants is to use ə if a vowel is prescribed, and I would expect a different vowel to be pretty strongly pronounced.
so, I had looked it up myself when I played, so didn't have the discovery then, but when Dan got to "a" and "the" I had the click feeling, "wait, summon forth the schwa!"
Carrie, your editing SAVED this from being utterly incomprehensible. You did AMAZING! And congrats to both of you for figuring this all out! I've played through most of the Myst series w/ my mom and we did a ton of stuff like this, just brainstorming for hours. It's SUPER rewarding once you get there. Congrats again!
Something I like about the language is how the symbols for a lot of the consonants resemble their latin counterpart, and a lot of the similar consonant pairs (j-ch, t-d, f-v, k-g...) have mirrored symbols so they can be memorized easier.
it helped me to remember certain sounds to glyph thanks to some of them kinda-sorta resembling the english letter. Maybe not intentionally. But like the Kkk sound kinda looks like a K and the S sound swivles a bit to kinda seem like an S. That's how my brain helped remember it haha. Rrr was also kinda similar to the r shape, lll by far the easiest as it's just a straigh line, like a lower case L is.
When I realized that the mirroring was a pattern, it helped me figure out the rest so much easier. I will admit I had a bit of spoilage on the fact that it was phonetic and which parts were vowels/consonants, but once I found that out, I determined to sort out all the sounds on my own with no further hints. And I did. :3
Wow, such dedication! Once I finished the game I searched online for how to read the Tunic language, and couldn't fathom how one could possibly decipher this by their on. I applaud your efforts! This was fascinating to watch. Following all your deductions unfold was captivating. And the incredible editing makes this perfect! I might actually recommend this video as a single-one about the Tunic language. If anything, it's a reminder on how much this game is incredible.
This was one of the most interesting videos on any let's play I've ever watched. The progression of the story of how it was all done combined with the editing had me focused from start to finish. Great job you both!
Coming back to this almost a year later, but it's really cool puzzle design to have the same clue be both inciting incident for a solve process, and the insight which completes the picture. Brings it full-circle.
They give you a freebie with "Controls" in the table of contents, and then on the page its in Trunic. From there I was able to slowly start picking things apart. There was also a spirit snoring ("zzzzz"), and one looking down a well who says "well well well", those were great little clues. This game is amazing.
"sorry we didn't actually play tunic" - pretty sure you just played one of the best parts of discovery! Amazing video, thanks for going into that detail, showing the cheat sheet, and showing it's use in practice!
That leap to the concept of it being phonetic is the leap that most people NEVER MAKE when trying to solve t-runic. Whatever one of you two said it first, have an extra gummy shark or something.
True from my personal experience. However the hindrance for me was me thinking that could not be the solution, since it would be dependent on English as a second language (me being a non-native English speaker made that seem illogical, since I assumed it to work language independent) - well apparently the dev's did not consider / disregarded that... 😅
Omg Carrie, color coding the inner geometry and outer shell components both in the sidebar thing and in some cases of circling what we were looking at was so clever and helpful!
Thank you Dan for doing this episode. I managed to figure it out between episodes on my own time too. I was hoping to see how you got it. Turns out, we figured it out almost the same way. Thank you for the excellent editing Carrie.
I couldn't even start until i had a couple hints that cemented the idea in me that it was even possible to decode. One, that despite everyone's use of the word, this isn't technically a new language, but just english under a fancy writing system, and two, the runes represent phenomes, not letters. Even with that much, it still took about 7 hours to get most of my characters down, i haven't even gotten them all. Well done you guys!
amazing job and the explanation + visuals are really clear.I loved the short accelerated process on how you all figured it out. sometimes (like between a and the) I figured out the connection a few episodes back. it was nice to see that thought confirmed
very interesting how you figured out the fox + sword last! i did those first when figuring out the language. i got a hint telling me that yes, those two words translated to fox and sword and not, like, "hero" and "weapon". so after that i was wondering "hmm why is sword shorter than fox?" and then i realized that the language is phonetic, and they both shared the ss sound. and then i figured it out from there.
I got to a point where I understood that the inner lines were consonant, and the dot meant that the vowels came first instead of the consonant, I got a couple words but I looked it up before I figured out all the sounds of each thing.
I loved the editing at 2:07 where the music comes in and the tunic script pops up as Dan welcomes the remaining viewers, but then it just got better from there. It's so good, thanks Carrie!
As someone who works as an interpreter (Spanish-English) and studied to be an English teacher: any language or dialect or tongue is fascinating. You can understand so much more of how things are seen from a different mindset just due to vocabulary and the way people say the exact same word, it's mind boggling.
I just finished deciphering this myself and eagerly went looking for someone to talk through their process to compare notes. I found your video and it was delightful! Great work! (And the editing was on point!)
Thanks so much. This gave me the explanation for the language I needed without skipping out on the context and experience for how I could have solved it on my own (if I wasn’t so lazy). Your graphic sheet for all the glyphs is also superbly clean, it’s gonna be my go to for translating more pages!
Recently played this game and basically resigned myself to never understand how people figured this out… appreciate you going through the process how you did. Fascinating! Thank you. Much more interesting than just finding the cypher online.
I really appreciate you doing this! This wasn't something I put the effort into when I did my playthrough, I just looked it up. But hearing how it happens was super satisfying! Congrats on the effort and the puzzle solving!!
On rewatch - it's not that I didn't know how much work Carrie puts into editing but WOW, Carrie puts so much work into editing! It adds so much to all this stream's videos, not just this one, although it's very evident here.
For a fun easter egg related to the language: 1) Translate the runes behind/around "Tunic" on the title screen 2) alt-tab out of the game and mouseover it's icon on the task bar (definitely make sure to do them in that order :D)
great video! i'm currently playing the game and got stuck, then decided to try reading the language for maybe finding some hints in the manual but i was really confused (since i'm not a native english speaker) and just gave up, not searching in the internet because i was afraid of getting spoilers. then, your video popped in my yt feed, i tried to give it a shot and since you explained it so well in the beggining i tried again in my own, and got it! thanks a lot ❤ after beating the game i'll make sure watching all this series in your channel :)
Speaking as exactly the kind of language nerd this kind of puzzle is aimed at (I would have tried it myself, but I simply do Not have the time lately), this summary is outstanding, and both the makers of this game and the two of you deserve all the plaudits you get for it 💜 Also, love seeing the differences between how I would render some of these vowels/write them in IPA versus how you did, both in the accent differences and seeing it through the eyes of someone who didn't spend far too much of their life studying linguistics.
I love the feeling of deciphering English in a writing system clearly not designed for it. This has been delightful, and the overlays were massively helpful.
Omg 33:22 i wanted to try it myself with what I’m learning from you (never played tunic btw, just love this LP), and i figured out “I’m Stuck” IT FEELS SO SATISFYING even when i didn’t crack the original code 😂
Congratulations! I find it very interesting to see your journey to decode the language here, because it's so different from my own. I focused my efforts on the "story" pages, since they had a lot of text, so I could do a bit of frequency analysis. I started by looking for the most common word and assuming that it was "the", then from there I worked out other common short words like "of", "a", "to" and "how" (confirming in other parts of the manual through context clues). The breakthrough moment for me was when I managed to fairly confidently identify the words "to", "do" and "go". The first two had the same outer shell, but the third had a slightly different one, which is what tipped me off to the fact that this is a phonetic cypher.
My favorite part about the script is that you can tell the accent that the writer had based on how they use certain sounds - i would say a word like "dream" with a "j" sound (and Dan did this subconsciously at 42:00 lol), but it's written like "dr" because that's how the writer says the word (I presume) It's really interesting to me thinking about how something so subtle and personal made it into the game, probably completely unintentionally too
Indeed, the dev is from Halifax and sometimes it shows in the way Trunic is written. Thankfully it's only really an issue when trying to figure out what each symbol means, because you're often trying to compare two words which may sound the same to you and trying to find the symbol they have in common, but they don't have any because they don't sound the same to him. But when you're just trying to read you can usually skip a vowel that sounds weird to you (a vs eh for instance) and it still makes sense.
As a linguist (and ESL) this tripped me up a bit at first but once I realized there was a slight accent to the script it made i so much cuter. But also a bit harder to decipher, of course.
@@ICountFrom0 it ends up sounding really similar in context, so it’s barely noticeable. (At risk of looking silly in public) try whispering the word to yourself with the different sounds instead of fully speaking them. Whispering makes your brain really look for context clues and you’ll see how weirdly similar the two phonemes can be in a similar context
sorry, but I just can't find anything that you can swap with a J, in the word dream, that sounds even remotely like english. If there's a particularly movie, or radio show episode, or famous youtuber who has that accessnt..
That was incredibly fun to watch broken down! Excellent visuals to help follow along. Thank goodness I picked up Tunic over the holidays. One neat detail, you can interpret the glyph lines as edges of a rectangular prism. This is shown in the trailer at one point, it's not useful for understanding anything but it looks cool! --- I deciphered it in a similar way, but before I could get the memo page. Personally, I started with the compass directions like Dan, then moved on to words I could infer from the text. After a while, I went for similar/rhyming words to start whittling down individual glyphs. I got "bell" and "well" from the location text, as well as "run", "gun", and "roll" from the manual and item descriptions. (I actually used this playthrough to look at certain text better.) One other key piece was translating the text around the title logo, which I correctly guessed had its translation visible at all times while the game was open. From there, I could roughly figure out R, G, L, and E corresponded to certain strokes, but it all properly made sense later when I was reading the description of the stick. I"m still a bit fuzzy on the vowel sounds, but I can also read it now! Never thought I'd need to crack something like this for a game.
I took notes on the language from the very start of the game, and thus cracked it relatively early. It's been so fun and interesting to see how the game feels without being able to read, and how much you can still piece together from everything else in the manual. And seeing your process for solving the language has been a delight. Onto further puzzles!
Half expecting someone to come out with a bunch of children's language books (like "See Spot run") in Tunic language, so they can raise their kids in it. I KNOW it's happened to Klingon and Na'vi
Gosh I'm so happy you decided to decode the language and what's more, share with us your process~! Seriously, you both did a hecking awesome job and I love all of Carrie's editing to help with the visual follow along. I'm glad you two ultimately found a way to enjoy the process that works for you. Because figuring out this language really was an awesome thing~ I only wish I could forget it so I could re-learn it with a friend and have a similar experience you and Carrie did~! It's amazing how each person goes about figuring this out~ For me I started trying to decode the language about 2 bosses in. It was a rough and tough experience because I was stuck with how the language worked for a long while. I was able to pick out the more common small words. Like A and Too and You (those two are drawn similarly so I got confused on them a bit) And after a bit I could could sorta get a few chunks of a sentence going not even knowing the language was phonetic. Simply by using small words I was sure of and context clues. For the longest time as I tried to figure out how to spell the language, I too was thinking the middle line through was apart of it, and maybe you had to consider the top portion before the bottom portion or vice versa. It wasn't till that last big clue page did my entire thinking get blown out of the water~! It was an amazing "OOOOHHHHHH, I had this wrong the whole time! AWESOME!" You guys, interestingly enough, didn't seem to use the Fox and sword bit as a starting point. When I saw that page, It was the first thing I honed in on... and made me realize the pieces of the symbols were outer shells and inner lines. Something else I realized, which I don't know if you guys have, is the language shapes are made in such a way that everything is isometric! It's a hecking hexagon prism like many of the other shapes in tunic. Utterly brilliant design. But ya, once I figured out Fox and Sword were connected by the Sss sound I realized it was a sound/phonetic language and not a simple alphabet swap one. Then ya, everything fell into place. I did slip up some on certain sounds. Even though english IS my first language I still don't know the specifics of all the language and being a Southern upbringing... certain sounds are definitely pronounced very different from how they should be XD (I'm still confused by the two Th sounds somehow being different ways to make the Thhhh ) But ya, this opened up the whole book and even BIGGER mysteries to solve
Having recently figured out how to translate this language myself, it was super interesting to see how different our approaches were! I also have to give y'all partial credit bc I had started watching y'all's playthrough during my endgame hours of Tunic, and seeing Dan first discover that first hints page with the pen notes about the circle and having that fresh in my mind again really helped me in my own decoding journey. So thank y'all for that little push!
Fascinating discussion! Great job by Editor Carrie with the visuals (having recently finished watching the Cult of the Lamb VODs, I very much appreciated the T-shirt in the corner). I would say that Dan's example of "tah vs. aht" to illustrate the effect of the "little circle" diacritic was not as good as the example that he was already talking about at the time: "mai vs. aim" (both of which read as legitimate words, "my vs. I'm"). Excellent job, though, both in solving the puzzle and walking us through it.
This video was a great breakdown of the language. You and Carrie did an amazing job not only figuring this out but making it easily understandable for people unfamiliar with it. Even knowing the system in advance, I loved watching it. Your Tunic videos have all been great and it's been so much fun following along. I'm getting into your other playthrough videos too and you're an interesting and entertaining gamer to watch. Thanks for the videos! The first message I took the time to decipher after learning the language (lol well, learning it with constant references to my cheat sheet, I never got to the point of memorizing it) was the ghost Librarian in the Library. He completely reams you for your actions lol. It was a lot of fun. Tunic is the only game I've put this much work in, from learning the language to scouring every inch of every map to find secrets and track down fairies. It was such a delightful game. The satisfaction and excitement when I figured out each secret and the way my mind felt blown when I realized the Golden Path secret (especially the save file one) was unforgettable. I genuinely envy people who are playing through for the first time. I'd love to be able to re-experience it fresh. I guess that is why I keep watching reactions of people playing it, lol.
I am still working on it, but decided I had come far enough to check out this video, and I think it's super funny that the thing that made me start deciphering it was guessing that the description of the stick was "It's a stick" and going from there
Thanks for making this little detour video, the Tunic language has always been interesting to me but I didn't have the attention span for a 7 hour deep dive into it. And big props to Carrie for the editing work on this one, it made the lesson very easy to follow, but I know it must have been time consuming.
Dan, I knew from the moment I saw that code and recognized it as text that one day I'd claim to have understood it immediately. And that day is today. I can't BELIEVE it took you so long! I got it right away!
You and Carrie are much, much smarter than I had the patience to be. I was able to solve most of the game on my own; but when I started getting to puzzles that required me to be able to read, looking up a language cypher was one of the only things I gave up on and googled.
I guessed "press", got a headache and stopped right there... Thank you very much for, well, ALL of this! I actually started to be able to read a bunch of stuff while you explained! My brain has been EXPANDED!!! Edit: Fascinating! Definitely FASCINATING
That was so amazing. I wish I had the time to puzzle out the language like that but I would have gotten so lost on the step of realizing they were all noises. Congratulations to both of you on figuring it out and for fantastic editing. Now that there is a key for it I'm actually even more interested in getting a copy of Tunic for myself just so I can play through and translate everything I see.
One interesting memorisation trick that I’ve discovered for the Tunic language is that voiced/unvoiced pairs of consonant forms are always vertically flipped - so, T and D have flipped glyphs, so do TH and DH, CH and J, K and G, S and Z, etc. Also, a lot of the consonants look vaguely like their relevant latin character (T, S, Z, K, M, Y etc)
This was my favorite episode. I've watched so many people play but no one has taken the time to crack the language. I love languages and I'm so glad you eventually picked up on the fact they were phonemes instead of letters! Thank you, Carrie, for putting together that easily followable graphic as well!
Also chiming in with my own praise for the editing job: great work. Seeing "Play Frame" in Tunic-script made me smile. I had been semi-following the videos while playing: I played for a bit, found that Dan had some some videos, watched, he caught up to where I was, I stopped watching, played some more, rinse, repeat. Then he got a little ahead of me and found that "Rosetta Stone" page. I paused right there, grabbed the page myself and started working on decoding the language (I'd already started with "button" etc). This was New Year's Eve. The next day, I was reading... well enough. To Dan: after watching a speed-run, I suggest you do not return to the Heir until you have collected all the pages. Also, decode the script in the title: it's very appropriate to the game.
The way it blends different shapes reminds me of the Cistervian Monks written numbering system. Any number between 1-9999 can be written with one symbol.
Awesome video! My path to learning the language was almost identical to yours, but I didn't have page 54 yet. I did it fairly early on, but the buttons page was absolutely critical to figuring the language out. The "press and hold", "to", and "the" were massively helpful. Eventually i conceptualized the "s" consonant as a pair of teeth meeting but in symbol form, which made me think of the inner construction as a consonant and the outer as a mouth shape. In some ways this really does work, although not 100%, but nonetheless it cracked the code for me and i just sat there awestruck while things fell into place. Absolutely one of the most fun experiences I've had solving a puzzle in a game!
I have to say I am glad they give you the ability to just complete this game without collecting all pages and cracking the code to read the script. In the realm of games that are overly complicated for no absolute reason whatsoever, this one takes the cake! Although enjoyable for some pastime and in depth ability grabs, I would highly recommend to play this game literally and abandon any possibility of trying to translate, Go to the regions, fight the people, get the gems, ignore the fairies, and 12 additional items that are collected. Cheers for cracking the code after getting this far into these videos I'm happy someone did.
thank you for the video! i've been looking for some videos about how not to just read the tunic but how to understand the reading principles, and this video is just what i wanted!
24:07 I see it now! The "Hold" and likely "Roll" symbols, you can sus out the "Ho" and "Ro" (both ending in "o") followed by the "l" sound (vertical bar symbol). I love this explanation through all this. I never wanted to try learning it myself (seemed way too daunting) but still found it fascinating and hearing it explained it is starting to click how it works like in this spot!
as soon as you went back to page 13 12:00 from the bit that separated inside and outside parts it clicked for me, its phonetic and the outside bits are vowel sounds. from there it was just plugging in the letters i could know for sure from "press and hold to run" and the compass directions to find the rest. i knew the diacritic immediately though, sindarin uses the same kinda thing with vowels stuck onto consonants and uses a symbol to stick the vowel before just like tunics language.
Man, this was so cool! From a glance it definitely felt like some kind of Kana structure thing. The details are countless and pretty obscure, but the whole episode was _so_ cool to watch ❤️
This video is awesome. It's more interesting than seeing the whole 7 hours, imo, but also I would have been disappointed with just a "I figured out the language now let's move on." This was a perfect middle ground. And thanks Carrie for the helpful editing!
This was an awesome addition to your Tunic playthrough and extra props to Carrie for the lovely clarifying notes on screen! 10/10 will watch again. And I actually paused one or two steps in because I got all invested and wanted to see if I could figure it out myself too- so thank you for that! Finished cracking the code today so have just finished the video finally :D
I'm way late to the party on watching this series, but this... this was outstanding work. Mad props to you and Carrie, this was educational and interesting and all very understandable thanks to the excellent way things were presented!
Watching this particular episode is the closest I've come to recapturing the feeling of playing through for the first time. The brain cache dump near the end in particularwas very relatable. Can't believe the number of time I'd have forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time I'd worked my way to the end.
This isn't "free engagement." You heckin' EARNED this comment with all the hard work you two put into making this episode, and making it parsable and enjoyable. Excellent work!
Great explanation and was really fun to follow, i was pretty sure on the "North south east west" page this is actually a lenguage, but you went further and got this awesome video explaining for us, thank you!
![ลองสุ่มไอโฟน 990 โกงมั้ย? [ โกงมั้ยครับ ep.101 ] | DOM](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bfsWe0j492k/mqdefault.jpg)
A handful of folks have lamented me not doing all of my manual-studying on camera in past episodes, and I imagine they’ll feel similarly bummed this time, so to address some of those questions in advance:
*Why not include all this language-deciphering work in the episodes themselves?*
Because batching 7ish hours of deciphering time into regular 30-60 minute Tunic releases would mean like 2 weeks of Tunic episodes spent quietly staring at a few manual pages, which would not be enjoyable viewing for most people and completely kill the pacing of the playthrough.
*Then why not edit all of the deciphering work down into one episode?*
Because editing 7ish hours of puzzle solving down to an hour or so would require a TON of extra editing work for Carrie on top of all the other PlayFrame editing she has to do (and because the resulting video still wouldn’t be that fun to watch for reasons I’ll get to shortly).
*Why not just record it and post the whole thing unedited for the folks who DO want to watch it?*
For a LOT of reasons. Recording the deciphering process would have made the work take even longer, because recording a Let’s Play splits your focus and makes it harder to concentrate your full attention on a puzzle. Not recording the process meant we didn’t have to worry about vocalizing our thought processes or being entertaining, allowing us to focus our full attention on cracking the code. As a result, even if we HAD recorded our time studying the manual, the result wouldn’t have been that enjoyable to watch (because we weren’t saying very much).
And it wouldn’t have been practical for us to record anyhow. We keep all of the footage we record for PlayFrame as a general policy to ensure we can re-render and re-upload any episode in the future if needed (not doing so has bitten us before). So recording all 7ish hours of our deciphering would have meant capturing and storing somewhere between 60-100 gigabytes of video and audio data, 95% of which would have consisted of silence and page flipping. That’d be a LOT of storage space spent for something which (let’s face it) very few people would actually be interested in watching.
These are the same reasons I had for studying the manual off-camera sometimes over the course of the playthrough; it allowed me to review manual pages without my attention being split, adding work for Carrie or wasting tons of storage space on useless footage.
But on top of all that, we didn’t record it because it meant Carrie and I could just relax and ENJOY the process. I was quite sick and exhausted at the time, my voice was still gone, and we had zero certainty that we even COULD crack the language when we started. We just wanted to chill for a while, and we ended up having a wonderful time together just quietly puzzling on this doozy of a language.
Today’s summary video is our best effort at sharing a recreation of that journey in a way that is practical for us and and fun to watch for as many people as possible. I know it’s not the same as hearing realizations happen in real time, but it’s the best we’re realistically able to provide (and honestly I’m quite proud of how it turned out).
Thank you for the big write-up and your reasoning, I still (only slightly) disagree but I can also see that it's not a decision you made without much due consideration! * I also wanted to apologise if any of our nagging about recording got annoying at any point! I've absolutely loved this series so far in any case 💜
*(Edit: just finished the episode, I think this was a very good way to do the language decoding stuff, I still think showing notes for some of the holy cross puzzles would be good but this is more than satisfactory for this bit of the game)
I think this video was perfect and hopefully nobody is upset that they didn't see you studying and working on the writing system. Having gone through that process myself, I fully understand you not recording it and it would not have made for good videos.
You did a great job explaining how y'all solved it, and then how it works. Also interesting to see your process and how it differed from mine! I got the same first words "a", "the", and "to" and guessed on "button" as well, but I also got "this" from the story page and focused on trying to read those pages rather than the tutorial pages. Figuring out "press and hold the button" was a great idea!
Also, loved the playframe logo written in trunic at the beginning :)
The video is perfect! The extra editing work by Carrie is absolutely amazing, and this write-up makes complete and total sense. Honestly, the world doesn't deserve you two.
This makes total sense. I for one appreciate the effort you put in to make sharing the story of this fun and engaging for us.
It makes me smile to imagine you and Carrie, chilling on the couch, pen and pad in hand, having a chill time while you recuperate. You guys are entirely too cute for your own good.
Finally, congrats on the accomplishment. I may dip in and out, for nudges in the right direction, but I'm not sure I want to spoil this entirely for myself.
Dan Floyd is good at games. Let none say otherwise.
Asking for that full seven hours of figuring it out remind me of when people wanted the full Castlevania Bestiary Unraveled.
Get you a partner who will decode cryptic video game languages with you. Thank you for putting this video together Floyds! Your hard work is appreciated!
Carrie remains a hero and a treasure. Those Tunic Language 101 frames were the only thing that made this fully parsable for me. It was like college linguistics all over again.
Absolutely helped me to understand. Those visual cues then aided by audio cues go a long way. I could not have figured out that it's phonetic based language by myself.
I think this is one of my favorite editing jobs Carrie has ever done, I'm floored by how awesome the set up is for the language tackling -- I thought it was a livestream setup for a hot second :0
When Dan said “welcome to playframe” and the logo popped up in Trunic, I knew I was in for a good episode
it's so fun to write in this language once you get a good grasp of it~!
Where does it pop up in trunic? Huh?
@@Blubbpaule 2:08
@@rocovailo2862 My brain me tells it's the wireframe of a cube as viewed from a corner.
@@techstuff9198you are correct. It is actually based on the isometric wire frame of a cube (or really mostly a rectangular prisim, but there are a few instances in the manual where the text is cube shaped, and understanding that is important because some of the glyphs look slightly different as a cube).
I already love the fact that you're dedicating a whole episode for teaching and showing us how you guys have learned to read the script.
But then the visuals at 5:40 came into view and I just had to pause and compliment you guys right here with the amount of dedication and extra work you put in these videos!!! Both the let's play and the editing! Great video to start the year with!!!
did you see the playframe logo at 2:09
@@linuxstreamer8910 yes! That was such a lovely touch
@@linuxstreamer8910 hahaha I had not - thanks for pointing it out! Obviously easier now with front files available, but further shows the level of polish these two do 💚
Based on how the episode went, that overlay was mostly Carrie's doing, so lets all say "Thankyou Carrie!"
A thousand props to Carrie for this editing; that cannot have been easy but it's so polished and MAKES this entire episode.
Having scoured TH-cam previously for this kind of explanation I can safely say this is the most clear and helpful one by a country mile (no offence to previous folks' efforts but they lacked a Carrie to bring the production values.)
Congratulations to Carrie on an absolutely AMAZING editing job on this, making it honestly one of the most easily understandable guides on this language that I've seen!
Also, the graphics in the corners were just fantastic. Not sure who made them, but I'm glad that they're there. Carrie smiling big with her coffee is adorable.
This is unironically peak entertainment! - Also, I'd very much consider what you did this episode "playing Tunic". This is how one plays Tunic!
4:27
btw the reason THAT symbol is circled is because that's the symbol for the "Ayr" sound.
In most contexts, that is used to refer to the character, and final boss, The Heir. But in this specific sentence, it means "air," so they were confused because "what do you mean it's 'in The Heir?'"
Bless you Carrie! I can't imagine how much extra work went into editing this video. I doubt I could have followed along half as well without the circle pointers and key notes on the side.
I love how the square with the bed has the symbol for "z" in it like a cartoon snore.
may of the fox ghosts are actually there to help teach the language as well. One of the characters does the same thing. The one lying on the floor. Zzzzzzzzzz
Another fun one is the fire bomb description. The second line of it is just "ow ow ow ow ow" lol
My favorite one is the guy by the well going “well, well, well…” I never learned the language during my play through, but that never stopped me from knowing what he was saying.
Adding my voice to the chorus of those thanking Carrie for the intuitive graphic and visual aids augmenting Dan's explanations.
Let me add some (okay, maybe a lot) extra flavor to all the stuff mentioned here:
Starting with writing systems, writing systems come into essentially five flavors. Generally, the first one developed (writing was developed several times) is a logography--each symbol corresponds to roughly a word [1]: Chinese is the most well-known such writing system. This tends to evolve into what's known as a syllabary, where each word corresponds to a "syllable." Here, Japanese hiragana and katakana are probably the most well-known of this category. The last three writing systems are collectively alphabets, where each symbol corresponds roughly to an individual phoneme. This development appears to have only happened twice in world history: once in Proto-Canaanite (whence almost all such scripts derive from), and Hangul (the main exception).
There are three kinds of alphabets, based on how vowels are handled. The first alphabet was an abjad like Arabic, where vowels are marked with diacritics or not at all. Some scripts turned the abjad into an abugida, where vowels are indicated by systematically altering the shape of the consonant--Canadian Syllabic is probably the clearest manifestation of this, where you rotate the letter in different directions to indicate the vowel. The final set is true alphabets, which all (except Hangul) derive ultimately from the Greek, who added in full letters for vowel sounds. (By the way, all of the names for these come from taking the first few letters in various languages: alphabet from Greek, abjad from Arabic, abugida from Ge'ez, an Ethiopian language). I'd be tempted to classify Tunic script as an abugida, but you can make a case for it being a true alphabet instead [2].
So earlier I put "syllable" in quotes, and it's worth expanding on that more, because it relates to Tunic script as well. As is noted from the history of writing, breaking the speech of natural languages into phonemes is not the tendency of most people; no, speech is usually thought of in syllables instead. Syllables generally consist of a vowel sound with some consonants before and after it, and most languages tend to end up with a consonant-vowel (CV) or consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern for the primary syllable pattern. This means that, in writing, syllables generally end up being treated as CV units, with CVC or more complex syllables having a variety of fun constructions to represent it. You can see this in Tunic: each basic letter is a CV unit, with a diacritic to indicate that it's to be read as VC instead. English is a relatively complex language in letting you string together lots of consonants into a syllable: the sadly non-existent word "strangsts" is phonologically allowed by English and crowds 8 consonants into a single syllable.
[1] It's more complicated than this, but I want to to keep this short...er.
[2] My understanding is that the main diagnostic criterion for an abugida is whether or not there a symbol not marked with a vowel has a default vowel sound, which would classify Tunic as a true alphabet.
Let's move on from writing systems in general to Tunic itself in particular, and start by looking at English phonology. The moment you recognize that it's not a cipher for Latin script (what we normally write English in), you probably should have shifted to using IPA immediately [3], because English spelling is pretty damn atrocious thanks to the Great Vowel Shift [4]. If you're not familiar with phonology in general, Wikipedia's page on English phonology is a pretty good introduction for figuring out how you might transcribe English speech.
English has 24 consonants, written in IPA [5] as /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ (the 'n' as in 'sing'), /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /tʃ/ ('ch'), /dʒ/ ('dg' like 'fudge'), /f/, /v/, /θ/ ('th' as in 'thin'), /ð/ ('th' as in 'this'), /s/, /z/, /ʃ/ ('sh'), /ʒ/ ('s' in 'vision'), /h/, /l/, /r/, /j/ ('y'), /w/. This list isn't arbitrary, actually. Consonants have a structure to them: there's the kind of action you're doing (forcing air through noise, briefly stopping the airflow, hissing around your tongue, or... it's complicated); where your tongue is (ordered here from lips to the back of your mouth); and whether or not you're vibrating your vocal cords as you do it (known as voice) [6]. I've sorted them by these characteristics. If you're designing a writing system from scratch, it would make some sense to make consonants that have some relation to each other display some sort of relation in written script.
Does Tunic do that? Well, most consonants have a voiced-voiceless pair: /p/ versus /b/, or /θ/ versus /ð/, for example. In Tunic, each of these pairs turn out to be mirror images of each other, so /p/ is upside-down /b/, /f/ upside-down /v/, etc. Another feature is that the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ look rather like it should be /t/ + /ʃ/ or /d/ + /ʒ/ (phonetically, you're shifting from one to the other sound in smooth motion). If you look at the script... it's a missed opportunity. The character /ʃ/ looks tantalizingly close to /tʃ/ + /s/, but it just doesn't work out. There's also a correlation between the stops and fricatives in the same place of articulation: /f/ is /p/ with a little line to the lower left that is the same addition you use to get /s/ from /t/. There's not enough pairs in English to tell me if this alteration was intentional or not. I don't see any other patterns. I will also note that the manual's "alphabet" at the end uses an ordering very nearly the ordering I used, although /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are clearly in the wrong order [7].
On to vowels. Vowels in English are... complicated, especially because even the major dialects merge them in inconsistent ways, and Latin is poorly equipped to handle them. At a basic level, English has 5 main vowel sounds in "short" and "long" form. The short vowel sounds (drop them in "b*t"), in IPA [8], are /æ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /ɒ/, /ʌ/, and the long vowels (use "b*te") are /eɪ/, /i/, /ai/, /oʊ/, /ju/ (the 'y' sound creeps in there in long vowel form). The short vowels are all monophthongs (your mouth stays the same shape), while most of the long vowels are diphthongs (you shift from one vowel position to the other). In addition to these 10 basic vowels, we have an additional basic monophthong (/ʊ/--like "foot"), an optional additional monophthong between a and o (/ɔ/ as in "caught" if you *don't* have the cot-caught merger), /ə/ (schwa, I'll get back here in a second) and two more diphthongs (/ɔɪ/ like "boil" and /aʊ/ like "how"). There's also several "r-colored vowels", as several dialects don't pronounce an /r/ sound here anymore (known as a non-rhotic accent), which I usually don't count as separate vowels but are distinct in Tunic's script. If you're going to make it distinct, you need 6 different /Vr/ sounds, as in "far", "fair", "fear", "fir", "fore", "fury" (sorry, "fure" isn't a word) are distinct sounds [9]. If you tot everything up, you should need 20 or 21 vowel sounds in Tunic, and realistically, you'd want to do 21 to preserve cot-caught distinction for those dialects where it matters. Look back at our table, however, and there's only 18. The missing sounds are /ʊr/ (as in "cure") and /ɔ/, while /ə/ and /ʌ/ have been merged.
I have a pretty big issue with how Tunic phonetically transcribes English, and it centers on the /ə/~/ʌ/ merger. If you look at a chart of where vowels are pronounced, /ə/ is the vowel that sits in the dead center. Consequently, it's kind of a neutral vowel. In English, vowels in unstressed syllables tend to end up neutralized and shift into an /ə/ from their original pronunciation (this is called "schwa reduction"). There are some words where certain syllables are never stressed, even when the word is, and the vowel sounds in those positions are routinely identified as being purely /ə/. The canonical example is "about"--pronounced /ə.baʊt/). It's not really possible to stress a syllable with /ə/ in English. When you have words that are usually pronounced unstressed--"a" and "the" are good examples--when you do stress them, you usually change the pronunciation entirely to match. "a" is /eɪ/ when stressed and /ə/ unstressed, while "the" is usually /ði/ when stressed and /ðə/ unstressed. (The unstressed/stressed distinction was noticeable when you were going through the description of "a" being written as /ə/).
I can see why the developers would prefer to transcribe words that are usually unstressed in their unstressed pronunciation, though it does feel weird to me. The problem is when you go from the word "a" to "button". "Button" is an interesting word because of its second syllable, which consists of, um, /n/. By itself. Kind of. Sometimes, there's a tendency to give the second syllable a little bit of a vowel, which is of course would be the standard unstressed vowel. So you'd expect to see "button" transcribed as /bʌt.n/ or /bʌt.ən/. Tunic transcribed it as... /bətɪn/, which is quite different instead [10]. My guess is that /ə/ and /ʌ/ were merged because most people would tend to transcribe those sounds as both "UH", but given that the game preserved the /θ/ and /ð/ distinction (both would be transcribed as "TH" and I can think of only one minimal pair where the distinction actually matters--"thy" versus "thigh"), and that it also distinguishes /ŋ/ from /n/ where /ŋ/ only appears where /n/ would appear before /g/, why it didn't go to the same length to preserve /ə/ and /ʌ/.
[3] English does seem to be unusually averse to using IPA. In the dictionaries you read in other languages, pronunciation is almost always given via IPA symbols, whereas English dictionaries seem to tend to prefer ad-hoc phonetic spelling instead.
[4] To make a long story short, we write English according to how it was pronounced roughly 500 years ago. Then almost all of the vowels ended up shifting pronunciation so that it makes very little sense, but the spelling of written words didn't change.
[5] To clarify, anything I have in brackets like this: /p/ is meant to be IPA rather than English text.
[6] There are other things you can do, but they don't distinguish between different phonemes in English, so I'm not getting into them here.
[7] If you need help seeing it, the pattern is that voiceless comes immediately before voiced in every pair, *except* for /tʃ/ and /dʒ/.
[8] I'm using General American as the basis for IPA transcription here.
[9] Strictly speaking, for General American, you need an extra vowel sound that only crops up before the /r/ to distinguish these sounds.
[10] It is worth pointing out that unstressed vowels can reduce to a sound somewhere in the /i/ or /ɪ/ region as well too, so it's not entirely crazy. But it's worth noting that dictionary convention for syllabic consonants is to use ə if a vowel is prescribed, and I would expect a different vowel to be pretty strongly pronounced.
@@joshuacranmer4093 This was a very interesting write-up. Thanks for writing this!
so, I had looked it up myself when I played, so didn't have the discovery then, but when Dan got to "a" and "the" I had the click feeling, "wait, summon forth the schwa!"
Oh wow, this might be the most impressive bit of puzzle solving they've pulled off to date. (Though, some of those baba puzzles...)
Carrie, your editing SAVED this from being utterly incomprehensible. You did AMAZING! And congrats to both of you for figuring this all out! I've played through most of the Myst series w/ my mom and we did a ton of stuff like this, just brainstorming for hours. It's SUPER rewarding once you get there. Congrats again!
Something I like about the language is how the symbols for a lot of the consonants resemble their latin counterpart, and a lot of the similar consonant pairs (j-ch, t-d, f-v, k-g...) have mirrored symbols so they can be memorized easier.
yes i love that! makes it easy to remember.. the vowels always trip me up
it helped me to remember certain sounds to glyph thanks to some of them kinda-sorta resembling the english letter. Maybe not intentionally. But like the Kkk sound kinda looks like a K and the S sound swivles a bit to kinda seem like an S. That's how my brain helped remember it haha. Rrr was also kinda similar to the r shape, lll by far the easiest as it's just a straigh line, like a lower case L is.
@@Phoeniiix A trick with the vowels: The symbols for 〈eer, ere, ore〉 are just the symbols of 〈ee, eh, oh〉 with the bottom left segment removed
When I realized that the mirroring was a pattern, it helped me figure out the rest so much easier. I will admit I had a bit of spoilage on the fact that it was phonetic and which parts were vowels/consonants, but once I found that out, I determined to sort out all the sounds on my own with no further hints. And I did. :3
Wow, such dedication! Once I finished the game I searched online for how to read the Tunic language, and couldn't fathom how one could possibly decipher this by their on. I applaud your efforts!
This was fascinating to watch. Following all your deductions unfold was captivating. And the incredible editing makes this perfect! I might actually recommend this video as a single-one about the Tunic language. If anything, it's a reminder on how much this game is incredible.
As a linguistic guy, I loved this episode so much haha
This was one of the most interesting videos on any let's play I've ever watched. The progression of the story of how it was all done combined with the editing had me focused from start to finish. Great job you both!
Coming back to this almost a year later, but it's really cool puzzle design to have the same clue be both inciting incident for a solve process, and the insight which completes the picture. Brings it full-circle.
The intense and arduous journey of learning to decipher what does the fox say
Bravo
They give you a freebie with "Controls" in the table of contents, and then on the page its in Trunic. From there I was able to slowly start picking things apart. There was also a spirit snoring ("zzzzz"), and one looking down a well who says "well well well", those were great little clues. This game is amazing.
This may wind up being my favorite PlayFrame episode of all time, and seeing the PlayFrame logo pop up in the corner in Trunic is sheer delight.
"sorry we didn't actually play tunic" - pretty sure you just played one of the best parts of discovery! Amazing video, thanks for going into that detail, showing the cheat sheet, and showing it's use in practice!
That leap to the concept of it being phonetic is the leap that most people NEVER MAKE when trying to solve t-runic. Whatever one of you two said it first, have an extra gummy shark or something.
True from my personal experience. However the hindrance for me was me thinking that could not be the solution, since it would be dependent on English as a second language (me being a non-native English speaker made that seem illogical, since I assumed it to work language independent) - well apparently the dev's did not consider / disregarded that... 😅
Omg Carrie, color coding the inner geometry and outer shell components both in the sidebar thing and in some cases of circling what we were looking at was so clever and helpful!
Absolutely hats off for both the puzzle solving and ESPECIALLY the editing work in this episode!! This was so much fun to watch you put together
Thank you Dan for doing this episode. I managed to figure it out between episodes on my own time too. I was hoping to see how you got it. Turns out, we figured it out almost the same way. Thank you for the excellent editing Carrie.
I couldn't even start until i had a couple hints that cemented the idea in me that it was even possible to decode. One, that despite everyone's use of the word, this isn't technically a new language, but just english under a fancy writing system, and two, the runes represent phenomes, not letters. Even with that much, it still took about 7 hours to get most of my characters down, i haven't even gotten them all. Well done you guys!
amazing job and the explanation + visuals are really clear.I loved the short accelerated process on how you all figured it out. sometimes (like between a and the) I figured out the connection a few episodes back. it was nice to see that thought confirmed
THIS IS SO COOL I’m LEARNING A LANGUAGE holy crap kudos to both of you, tunic language 101 is so fun
23:40
yes carrie, you are! a lot!
very interesting how you figured out the fox + sword last! i did those first when figuring out the language.
i got a hint telling me that yes, those two words translated to fox and sword and not, like, "hero" and "weapon". so after that i was wondering "hmm why is sword shorter than fox?" and then i realized that the language is phonetic, and they both shared the ss sound. and then i figured it out from there.
I got to a point where I understood that the inner lines were consonant, and the dot meant that the vowels came first instead of the consonant, I got a couple words but I looked it up before I figured out all the sounds of each thing.
I loved the editing at 2:07 where the music comes in and the tunic script pops up as Dan welcomes the remaining viewers, but then it just got better from there. It's so good, thanks Carrie!
As someone who works as an interpreter (Spanish-English) and studied to be an English teacher: any language or dialect or tongue is fascinating.
You can understand so much more of how things are seen from a different mindset just due to vocabulary and the way people say the exact same word, it's mind boggling.
I just finished deciphering this myself and eagerly went looking for someone to talk through their process to compare notes. I found your video and it was delightful! Great work! (And the editing was on point!)
It took me so long to understand how to read the script, but I got “to,” “the”, and “and” first before I knew how to parse the symbols.
Thanks so much. This gave me the explanation for the language I needed without skipping out on the context and experience for how I could have solved it on my own (if I wasn’t so lazy). Your graphic sheet for all the glyphs is also superbly clean, it’s gonna be my go to for translating more pages!
Recently played this game and basically resigned myself to never understand how people figured this out… appreciate you going through the process how you did. Fascinating!
Thank you. Much more interesting than just finding the cypher online.
I really appreciate you doing this! This wasn't something I put the effort into when I did my playthrough, I just looked it up. But hearing how it happens was super satisfying! Congrats on the effort and the puzzle solving!!
On rewatch - it's not that I didn't know how much work Carrie puts into editing but WOW, Carrie puts so much work into editing! It adds so much to all this stream's videos, not just this one, although it's very evident here.
Learn to Read with Dan and Carrie. Things I never knew I needed in my Playframe experience!
As someone with her degree in linguistics, I found you decoding process fascinating.
For a fun easter egg related to the language:
1) Translate the runes behind/around "Tunic" on the title screen
2) alt-tab out of the game and mouseover it's icon on the task bar
(definitely make sure to do them in that order :D)
Speaking as a primary school teacher, that whole process was a delight.
And oh my lawd Carrie that editing job 😍
great video! i'm currently playing the game and got stuck, then decided to try reading the language for maybe finding some hints in the manual but i was really confused (since i'm not a native english speaker) and just gave up, not searching in the internet because i was afraid of getting spoilers. then, your video popped in my yt feed, i tried to give it a shot and since you explained it so well in the beggining i tried again in my own, and got it! thanks a lot ❤
after beating the game i'll make sure watching all this series in your channel :)
Speaking as exactly the kind of language nerd this kind of puzzle is aimed at (I would have tried it myself, but I simply do Not have the time lately), this summary is outstanding, and both the makers of this game and the two of you deserve all the plaudits you get for it 💜
Also, love seeing the differences between how I would render some of these vowels/write them in IPA versus how you did, both in the accent differences and seeing it through the eyes of someone who didn't spend far too much of their life studying linguistics.
This is stunning work - wow! I can see how you two would get carried (ha) away with it once you got going. Thanks for doing an episode on it!
I love the feeling of deciphering English in a writing system clearly not designed for it. This has been delightful, and the overlays were massively helpful.
Omg 33:22 i wanted to try it myself with what I’m learning from you (never played tunic btw, just love this LP), and i figured out “I’m Stuck” IT FEELS SO SATISFYING even when i didn’t crack the original code 😂
Congratulations! I find it very interesting to see your journey to decode the language here, because it's so different from my own. I focused my efforts on the "story" pages, since they had a lot of text, so I could do a bit of frequency analysis. I started by looking for the most common word and assuming that it was "the", then from there I worked out other common short words like "of", "a", "to" and "how" (confirming in other parts of the manual through context clues). The breakthrough moment for me was when I managed to fairly confidently identify the words "to", "do" and "go". The first two had the same outer shell, but the third had a slightly different one, which is what tipped me off to the fact that this is a phonetic cypher.
My favorite part about the script is that you can tell the accent that the writer had based on how they use certain sounds - i would say a word like "dream" with a "j" sound (and Dan did this subconsciously at 42:00 lol), but it's written like "dr" because that's how the writer says the word (I presume)
It's really interesting to me thinking about how something so subtle and personal made it into the game, probably completely unintentionally too
Indeed, the dev is from Halifax and sometimes it shows in the way Trunic is written. Thankfully it's only really an issue when trying to figure out what each symbol means, because you're often trying to compare two words which may sound the same to you and trying to find the symbol they have in common, but they don't have any because they don't sound the same to him. But when you're just trying to read you can usually skip a vowel that sounds weird to you (a vs eh for instance) and it still makes sense.
As a linguist (and ESL) this tripped me up a bit at first but once I realized there was a slight accent to the script it made i so much cuter. But also a bit harder to decipher, of course.
... can anybody give me even ONE example in modern media that I can google down of "DREAM" being said with a J in it?
@@ICountFrom0 it ends up sounding really similar in context, so it’s barely noticeable. (At risk of looking silly in public) try whispering the word to yourself with the different sounds instead of fully speaking them. Whispering makes your brain really look for context clues and you’ll see how weirdly similar the two phonemes can be in a similar context
sorry, but I just can't find anything that you can swap with a J, in the word dream, that sounds even remotely like english.
If there's a particularly movie, or radio show episode, or famous youtuber who has that accessnt..
Holy smokes! That's some great editing, Carrie!
That was incredibly fun to watch broken down! Excellent visuals to help follow along. Thank goodness I picked up Tunic over the holidays.
One neat detail, you can interpret the glyph lines as edges of a rectangular prism. This is shown in the trailer at one point, it's not useful for understanding anything but it looks cool!
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I deciphered it in a similar way, but before I could get the memo page.
Personally, I started with the compass directions like Dan, then moved on to words I could infer from the text.
After a while, I went for similar/rhyming words to start whittling down individual glyphs. I got "bell" and "well" from the location text, as well as "run", "gun", and "roll" from the manual and item descriptions. (I actually used this playthrough to look at certain text better.) One other key piece was translating the text around the title logo, which I correctly guessed had its translation visible at all times while the game was open.
From there, I could roughly figure out R, G, L, and E corresponded to certain strokes, but it all properly made sense later when I was reading the description of the stick.
I"m still a bit fuzzy on the vowel sounds, but I can also read it now! Never thought I'd need to crack something like this for a game.
I took notes on the language from the very start of the game, and thus cracked it relatively early. It's been so fun and interesting to see how the game feels without being able to read, and how much you can still piece together from everything else in the manual. And seeing your process for solving the language has been a delight. Onto further puzzles!
Half expecting someone to come out with a bunch of children's language books (like "See Spot run") in Tunic language, so they can raise their kids in it.
I KNOW it's happened to Klingon and Na'vi
Gosh I'm so happy you decided to decode the language and what's more, share with us your process~!
Seriously, you both did a hecking awesome job and I love all of Carrie's editing to help with the visual follow along.
I'm glad you two ultimately found a way to enjoy the process that works for you. Because figuring out this language really was an awesome thing~ I only wish I could forget it so I could re-learn it with a friend and have a similar experience you and Carrie did~!
It's amazing how each person goes about figuring this out~
For me I started trying to decode the language about 2 bosses in. It was a rough and tough experience because I was stuck with how the language worked for a long while. I was able to pick out the more common small words. Like A and Too and You (those two are drawn similarly so I got confused on them a bit)
And after a bit I could could sorta get a few chunks of a sentence going not even knowing the language was phonetic. Simply by using small words I was sure of and context clues. For the longest time as I tried to figure out how to spell the language, I too was thinking the middle line through was apart of it, and maybe you had to consider the top portion before the bottom portion or vice versa.
It wasn't till that last big clue page did my entire thinking get blown out of the water~! It was an amazing "OOOOHHHHHH, I had this wrong the whole time! AWESOME!"
You guys, interestingly enough, didn't seem to use the Fox and sword bit as a starting point. When I saw that page, It was the first thing I honed in on... and made me realize the pieces of the symbols were outer shells and inner lines.
Something else I realized, which I don't know if you guys have, is the language shapes are made in such a way that everything is isometric! It's a hecking hexagon prism like many of the other shapes in tunic. Utterly brilliant design.
But ya, once I figured out Fox and Sword were connected by the Sss sound I realized it was a sound/phonetic language and not a simple alphabet swap one. Then ya, everything fell into place.
I did slip up some on certain sounds. Even though english IS my first language I still don't know the specifics of all the language and being a Southern upbringing... certain sounds are definitely pronounced very different from how they should be XD
(I'm still confused by the two Th sounds somehow being different ways to make the Thhhh )
But ya, this opened up the whole book and even BIGGER mysteries to solve
Having recently figured out how to translate this language myself, it was super interesting to see how different our approaches were! I also have to give y'all partial credit bc I had started watching y'all's playthrough during my endgame hours of Tunic, and seeing Dan first discover that first hints page with the pen notes about the circle and having that fresh in my mind again really helped me in my own decoding journey. So thank y'all for that little push!
Fascinating discussion! Great job by Editor Carrie with the visuals (having recently finished watching the Cult of the Lamb VODs, I very much appreciated the T-shirt in the corner). I would say that Dan's example of "tah vs. aht" to illustrate the effect of the "little circle" diacritic was not as good as the example that he was already talking about at the time: "mai vs. aim" (both of which read as legitimate words, "my vs. I'm"). Excellent job, though, both in solving the puzzle and walking us through it.
This video was a great breakdown of the language. You and Carrie did an amazing job not only figuring this out but making it easily understandable for people unfamiliar with it. Even knowing the system in advance, I loved watching it. Your Tunic videos have all been great and it's been so much fun following along. I'm getting into your other playthrough videos too and you're an interesting and entertaining gamer to watch. Thanks for the videos!
The first message I took the time to decipher after learning the language (lol well, learning it with constant references to my cheat sheet, I never got to the point of memorizing it) was the ghost Librarian in the Library. He completely reams you for your actions lol. It was a lot of fun. Tunic is the only game I've put this much work in, from learning the language to scouring every inch of every map to find secrets and track down fairies. It was such a delightful game. The satisfaction and excitement when I figured out each secret and the way my mind felt blown when I realized the Golden Path secret (especially the save file one) was unforgettable. I genuinely envy people who are playing through for the first time. I'd love to be able to re-experience it fresh. I guess that is why I keep watching reactions of people playing it, lol.
I am still working on it, but decided I had come far enough to check out this video, and I think it's super funny that the thing that made me start deciphering it was guessing that the description of the stick was "It's a stick" and going from there
Thanks for making this little detour video, the Tunic language has always been interesting to me but I didn't have the attention span for a 7 hour deep dive into it. And big props to Carrie for the editing work on this one, it made the lesson very easy to follow, but I know it must have been time consuming.
Absolutely stunning editing work by Carrie this episode!
Dan, I knew from the moment I saw that code and recognized it as text that one day I'd claim to have understood it immediately. And that day is today. I can't BELIEVE it took you so long! I got it right away!
You and Carrie are much, much smarter than I had the patience to be. I was able to solve most of the game on my own; but when I started getting to puzzles that required me to be able to read, looking up a language cypher was one of the only things I gave up on and googled.
This is astonishing. You two are incredible. I don't know if I ever could have figured that out. Wow! Nice job!
I guessed "press", got a headache and stopped right there...
Thank you very much for, well, ALL of this! I actually started to be able to read a bunch of stuff while you explained! My brain has been EXPANDED!!!
Edit: Fascinating! Definitely FASCINATING
That was so amazing. I wish I had the time to puzzle out the language like that but I would have gotten so lost on the step of realizing they were all noises. Congratulations to both of you on figuring it out and for fantastic editing. Now that there is a key for it I'm actually even more interested in getting a copy of Tunic for myself just so I can play through and translate everything I see.
One interesting memorisation trick that I’ve discovered for the Tunic language is that voiced/unvoiced pairs of consonant forms are always vertically flipped - so, T and D have flipped glyphs, so do TH and DH, CH and J, K and G, S and Z, etc.
Also, a lot of the consonants look vaguely like their relevant latin character (T, S, Z, K, M, Y etc)
Is was really fun to see your thought process getting through the language! Thank you for taking the time to go into detail about it.
This was my favorite episode. I've watched so many people play but no one has taken the time to crack the language. I love languages and I'm so glad you eventually picked up on the fact they were phonemes instead of letters!
Thank you, Carrie, for putting together that easily followable graphic as well!
Also chiming in with my own praise for the editing job: great work. Seeing "Play Frame" in Tunic-script made me smile.
I had been semi-following the videos while playing: I played for a bit, found that Dan had some some videos, watched, he caught up to where I was, I stopped watching, played some more, rinse, repeat. Then he got a little ahead of me and found that "Rosetta Stone" page. I paused right there, grabbed the page myself and started working on decoding the language (I'd already started with "button" etc). This was New Year's Eve. The next day, I was reading... well enough.
To Dan: after watching a speed-run, I suggest you do not return to the Heir until you have collected all the pages. Also, decode the script in the title: it's very appropriate to the game.
Dan did an amazing job with this, but props to Carrie for the visuals, holy hell. Well done to you both for working this all out too!
I love seeing this Tunic transliteration into English. This is so cool! Thank you for sharing the process!!!
The way it blends different shapes reminds me of the Cistervian Monks written numbering system. Any number between 1-9999 can be written with one symbol.
I ultimately gave up on trying to figure this game out. And I am both amazed and grateful by the effort you two put in! Thanks!
Awesome video! My path to learning the language was almost identical to yours, but I didn't have page 54 yet. I did it fairly early on, but the buttons page was absolutely critical to figuring the language out. The "press and hold", "to", and "the" were massively helpful. Eventually i conceptualized the "s" consonant as a pair of teeth meeting but in symbol form, which made me think of the inner construction as a consonant and the outer as a mouth shape. In some ways this really does work, although not 100%, but nonetheless it cracked the code for me and i just sat there awestruck while things fell into place. Absolutely one of the most fun experiences I've had solving a puzzle in a game!
Thank you for the editing, Carrie, made it _waaay_ more manageable to follow.
I have to say I am glad they give you the ability to just complete this game without collecting all pages and cracking the code to read the script. In the realm of games that are overly complicated for no absolute reason whatsoever, this one takes the cake! Although enjoyable for some pastime and in depth ability grabs, I would highly recommend to play this game literally and abandon any possibility of trying to translate, Go to the regions, fight the people, get the gems, ignore the fairies, and 12 additional items that are collected. Cheers for cracking the code after getting this far into these videos I'm happy someone did.
thank you for the video! i've been looking for some videos about how not to just read the tunic but how to understand the reading principles, and this video is just what i wanted!
I love that you spent this time. This was fascinating!
It's super neat to see how Dan and Carrie figured it out and how similar it is to how the Rosetta stone was translated.
24:07 I see it now! The "Hold" and likely "Roll" symbols, you can sus out the "Ho" and "Ro" (both ending in "o") followed by the "l" sound (vertical bar symbol). I love this explanation through all this. I never wanted to try learning it myself (seemed way too daunting) but still found it fascinating and hearing it explained it is starting to click how it works like in this spot!
as soon as you went back to page 13 12:00 from the bit that separated inside and outside parts it clicked for me, its phonetic and the outside bits are vowel sounds. from there it was just plugging in the letters i could know for sure from "press and hold to run" and the compass directions to find the rest. i knew the diacritic immediately though, sindarin uses the same kinda thing with vowels stuck onto consonants and uses a symbol to stick the vowel before just like tunics language.
Man, this was so cool! From a glance it definitely felt like some kind of Kana structure thing. The details are countless and pretty obscure, but the whole episode was _so_ cool to watch ❤️
Loved this episode, it was so awesome going through the discovery process.
Fun Note, the fan community name for the language in TUNIC, is RUNIC.
So what I get from this is:
Somebody heard the song "What does the fox say" and made it into a game.
This has been an amazing journey, all things considered, cracking a language in hours is incredible
This episode just blew my mind !!! It must've been so cool and satisfying to slowly figure things out
As much as I wanted to learn the language myself, I don't have the time to do so watching your video helped me a lot thanks.
This video is awesome. It's more interesting than seeing the whole 7 hours, imo, but also I would have been disappointed with just a "I figured out the language now let's move on." This was a perfect middle ground. And thanks Carrie for the helpful editing!
This was an awesome addition to your Tunic playthrough and extra props to Carrie for the lovely clarifying notes on screen! 10/10 will watch again. And I actually paused one or two steps in because I got all invested and wanted to see if I could figure it out myself too- so thank you for that! Finished cracking the code today so have just finished the video finally :D
I'm way late to the party on watching this series, but this... this was outstanding work. Mad props to you and Carrie, this was educational and interesting and all very understandable thanks to the excellent way things were presented!
Watching this particular episode is the closest I've come to recapturing the feeling of playing through for the first time. The brain cache dump near the end in particularwas very relatable. Can't believe the number of time I'd have forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time I'd worked my way to the end.
This isn't "free engagement." You heckin' EARNED this comment with all the hard work you two put into making this episode, and making it parsable and enjoyable. Excellent work!
Great explanation and was really fun to follow, i was pretty sure on the "North south east west" page this is actually a lenguage, but you went further and got this awesome video explaining for us, thank you!