#language village

[langvillage]

hello language learners! new this month in the language village, a chill way to practice a little bit every day: the one sentence club! as the title suggests, the idea is to write one sentence in your target language(s) every day. for an extra challenge, especially if your target language uses a different script, try handwriting the sentence too!

join the language village discord server to receive daily reminder pings, get inspiration from a daily question prompt, and participate alongside other one sentence club members!

feel free to tag #langvillage if you post your sentences on tumblr ✨

[themintman]

Jesse: wow it sure is a shame Jack isn't here to translate, but I'm sure that won't be a problem! Right, Nurm?

Nurm, sending his response via telepathy:

[feroluce]

On Sampo's name (ALL of his names!)

I feel like everyone who's a fan knows the meaning of Sampo's full name by now- the sampo was a legendary item that could magically make endless supplies of gold, flour, and salt, all priceless items at the time! So it works perfectly for a scammer businessman like Sampo. ☆

"Koski" is the Finnish word for "water rapids" which might seem kinda random but actually makes sense for him, since Aha and the Masked Fools are also referred to with water terms:

This kind of analogy isn't specific to only Aha and the Masked Fools, but it does still tie them together. So water rapids fits perfectly! Sampo wants to stir the pot! He likes to shake things around and spice things up! He's taking that stagnant pool and turning it into water rapids! It would actually explain his ridiculous hair color, too; a dark blue wave tipped with white foam haha

EDIT: an amazing contribution from @ricochetlovebombs, who heard it from hoyolab user Rattaboy. If you interpret his first and last name together, instead of separately like I did, you would get something like "money river."

In other words, Sampo's name literally means CASH FLOW SKXJMDMDMD

What I really wanted to talk about is his drag alias name, though, Brughel Poisson, because to me that's where it gets really interesting.

So like in the English version, Sampo goes by Brughel Poisson when he's in disguise. Searching for just "Brughel" itself doesn't seem to get you much at first: a Flemish and Dutch Renaissance painter named Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who was famous for his landscapes and peasant scenery, especially Hunters in the Snow and The Blue Cloak.

He's referred to as "the Elder" because he had a son also named Pieter Brueghel (the Younger), and he began a long line of painters, all named Brueghel. Some of them did original work, and many of them created reproductions of the Elder's art to sell. The Elder was also famous as a printmaker. All of this is hilarious when you remember that Sampo is an infamous counterfeiter and has sold a relic called the Parallel Universe Printer JSKZJSMD

There is also something called Brueghel's Syndrome, named after one of Brueghel's paintings called De Gaper, which pictured a man yawning widely. It's a condition that causes the mouth to open and gape uncontrollably, twisting a person's countenance into a distorted mask of their usual face.

Tumblr doesn't have a way of censoring pics like twitter, so for the sake of the medically squeamish, I'm just showing De Gaper here. But if you look up Brueghel's Syndrome, you can find pictures of actual patients, some of whom really do make faces resembling Aha's comedy and tragedy masks!

In the Chinese and Japanese versions, his alias last name is a lot more silly- In those, "Sampo" is phonetically written as "san-bo" and "san-po." And in disguise, his last names are phonetically written as... "Bo-san" and "Po-san." The Chinese version uses different tones, but still. This smug asshole seriously just decided to write his own name backwards and called it a day NDMKXMDMD

In the English version, Poisson itself is kind of a reused Hoyo asset- it's also the name of Navia's fishing village in Genshin Impact. Which is a really silly name for a village, because it literally just means "fish" in French smzjxkdkdk but!

Again, more water imagery. And in English, if something is suspicious, we say that it's "fishy," which is perhaps the most fitting association yet for someone as shady as Sampo ☆

And for a good while I thought that was the only connection. But then. My beloved @hydrachea, who is an actual native French speaker, dropped this on me right after April Fool's Day:

Poisson is literally the word you use to pull an April Fool's prank.

[4tsukiiim1rai]

Now I think it's not funny...

[retrogamingblog2]

[alanide-arts]

some MHR shenanigans feat. my hammergirl, Gin

[ddeck]

long lived sw races must be so extra about their hobbies. imagine you live for thousand years and a century of that time you decide to dedicate to making a single big af carpet

[ruthariandbluecookies]

Ethari on a bench: Reading

*Muffled noises and a crowd in the distance*

Ethari: *turns a page* not my circus, not my monkeys

Random elf: Oh mY GoD, she BiT mE

Another Random Elf: MoOn sAvE uS, he has a BLADE BOW THINGYYY!!!!

Ethari, gets up: *internally* shit shit shit, my circus my monkeys, my circus my monkeys

Ethari, running towards the crowd: I cAn'T have OnE day of PeAcE, CaN I?!?!?

Runaan and Rayla: *strange sense of foreboding* Fu- Ethari!!!

[the-nettle-knight]

To other English people, stop saying "England has no culture", it is actively harming us. There is a reason the Tories defunded the arts and heritage sectors whilst scapegoating immigrants. The fear that immigrants will come and destroy Englishness is only working as the government is literally trying to actively wipe it out. If we a) recognise the things that are distinctly cultural (eg architecture styles) and b) actively participate in the traditions you're always told are silly (Morris and Molly dancing, scarecrow competitions and folk songs), it will actually make us better as a country and more difficult to divide via classism, racism and xenophobia

[loregoddess]

Ancient Beastling Deciphered (literally)

So when I played Octo2, I saw the phrase "Ghormf" ef "thanks" and thought it sort of looked like a simple substitution cipher. This has haunted me long enough that I sat down last night and gave deciphering Ancient Beastling a try and lo, in the English localization it is indeed a simple substitution cipher.

Here's the cipher that's being used in the game:

Using this, we can "translate" the dialogue for the "Ghormf!" side quest:

The quest starts after speaking to the beastling in the Nameless Village (henceforth referred to as NVB, since he doesn't have a name).

NVB:

E'da taar jaolrern huzor fpaach jogajy. I've been learning human speech lately. Tug e bir'g mris his gi foy "ghormf". But I don't know how to say "thanks". His bi yiu foy "ghormf"? E zufg mris! How do you say "thanks"? I must know!

After traveling to Beasting Village, you can speak with the beastling there (henceforth BVB, as he also lacks a name).

BVB: E'da taar jaolrern orcearg fpaach jogajy. I've been learning ancient speech lately. E jaolrab his gi foy "ghormf"! I learned how to say "thanks"!

After the player guides BVB back to the Nameless Village and speaks with NVB, a cutscene plays out.

NVB: E'da taar jaolrern huzor fpaach jogajy. I've been learning human speech lately. BVB: E'da taar jaolrern orcearg fpaach jogajy. I've been learning ancient speech lately. NVB: Ih. Bi yiu mris his gi foy "ghormf"? Oh. Do you know how to say "thanks"? BVB: "Ghormf" ef "thanks". "Thanks" is "<thanks>". NVB: Ih! "Ghormf ef "thanks"! Oh! "Thanks" is "<thanks>"! Sohoho! E jaolrab fizaghern ras giboy! Wahaha! I learned something new today! "Thanks" daly zuch! "<Thanks>" very much!

Afterwards, BVB remains in the Nameless Village near NVB. If the player speaks to them, this is what they say.

NVB: Jaolrern huzor fpaach ef wur! Sohoho! Learning human speech is fun! Wahaha! BVB: Ancient speech... Very hard. But... Jaolrern eg ef wur! Ohoho! Learning it is fun! Ahaha!

And, that's the Ancient Beastling speech translated! Well, almost. As you can see in the cipher images, there's 4 missing letter substitutions. I could only find the guide dialogue for Temenos's guide from a video tutorial for the quest, where BVB says, "All right. Jaob gha soy." ("All right. Lead the way."), but I wasn't going to try and scour every video that's ever been uploaded in hopes of capturing unique dialogue for other path actions.

Despite a few cursory searches, I haven't been able to find dialogue script for all of the potential path actions, which might fill in the missing letters on the cipher. Since both files I currently have in Octo2 are already 100% completed, I also can't go and see what these two NPCs say when I use path actions aside from guide on them to grab the text for myself, nor have I been able to find a text dump to scour.

(If nothing else, I might end up trying to grab screenshots for myself on my next playthrough, whenever that may be. But! If anyone happens to have screenshots or a video or the text handy of the path actions for these two NPCs, I'd love to take a look).

Some more notes on my process, and guesses for the letters missing from the cipher, below the cut.

Deciphering the cipher wasn't really that hard, since we're given the key that "ghormf" = "thanks", so I was able to write out the alphabet, and then start writing in the substitution letters above their corresponding letters (I handwrote everything while working through this, but I don't have pics handy, so no process images this time sorry).

Then I just had to go through and start applying what letters I knew for sure to other lines of dialogue and then filling in the rest of the letters based on educated guesses (i.e. "Ghormf ef "thanks". became "Thanks" [e]s "thanks". so it was pretty obvious that "ef' was "is", which meant that Ancient Beastling e = i; also the phrase "Thanks" daly zuch! seemed to fit the phrase "Thanks" very much! and when I applied the letter substitutions for "very" and "much" to the rest of the cutscene dialogue, it made other words pop out, and so on and so forth until I had the cutscene dialogue completely translated, by which time the entire cipher was all but complete).

Obviously, there's a few missing letters: we don't have the Ancient Beastling equivalent to j, q, x, or z, since those letters weren't used in any of the dialogue I could find, and the letters k, q, x, and v weren't used, meaning they're the substitutions for j, q, x, and z but we don't know which letters they substitute for.

There's probably an official cipher, but until it's released (or if I find more letters in the path action dialogue eventually), I don't know for sure what the substitution letters would be.

I do have a guess of course, if you're into speculation.

Based on the pattern of the cipher, and the fact that Ancient Beastling looks like something I could read out loud if I wanted to, we can assume the missing letters of the cipher should still be "readable" for phrases translated to Ancient Beastling.

Therefore, my best guess is that x = x and q = q because they're weird letters, and my tentative guess is that English j = k, and English z = v.

x isn't used in English often, so keeping it as it is avoids losing the use of a more versatile letter, and also avoids the various phonetic qualities of x being lost when put through the cipher.

Keeping q as q would preserve the "qu" rule that appears in English, making encoding words with "qu" less awkward looking in Ancient Beastling: i.e. "quiet" would become "queag" which still doesn't look like English despite preserving 40% of the characters, and could still be pronounced out loud.

I'm tempted to have English j become k and z become v simply based on the phonetic qualities of the letters: z and v have a slight buzz when enunciated, and then j and k are the leftover letters. However alternately using j = v and z = k doesn't make the encoded Ancient Beastling unreadable per se.

For example:

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (using j = k, and z = v) gha quecm tlasr wix kuzpf idal gha jovy bin (compare against j = v and z = k) gha quecm tlasr wix vuzpf idal gha joky bin

Here's another:

pack my bag with five dozen liquor jugs (using j = k, and z = v) pocm zy ton segh weda bivar jequil kunf (compare against j = v and z = k) pocm zy ton segh weda bikar jequil vunf

So, I guess if you're going to use the cipher to write Ancient Beastling into a fanfic or something like that, you'll have to come up with your own headcanons for the missing letters based on your preferences. At least until either the path action dialogue that I'm missing potentially reveals the missing letters, or until we get access to the official cipher that was used.

In any case, I had a lot of fun cracking the cipher, and I hope you enjoyed reading about it as well. If you made it this far...

ghormf wil laobern!

[langvillage]

Ever wished you had a friend to write to in your target language, online or on paper? The Language Village is introducing a new activity: Language Pen Pals! Join the Discord server to participate, the first wave of pen pals will be matched at the end of next week!

[kemetic-dreams]

The 1815 Igbo conspiracy in Jamaica’s Saint Elizabeth Parish, which involved around 250 Igbo slaves, described as one of the revolts that contributed to a climate for abolition. A letter by the Governor of Manchester to Bathurst on April 13, 1816, quoted the leaders of the rebellion on trial as saying “that ‘he had all the Eboes in his hand’, meaning to insinuate that all the Negroes from that Country were under his controul”. The plot was thwarted and several slaves were executed.

The 1816 Black River rebellion plot, was according to Lewis (1834:227—28), carried out by only people of “Eboe” origin. This plot was uncovered on March 22, 1816, by a novelist and absentee planter named Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis. Lewis recorded what Hayward (1985) called a proto-Calypso revolutionary hymn, sung by a group of Igbo slaves, led by the “King of the Eboes”. They sang: Oh me Good friend, Mr. Wilberforce, make we free! God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty, make we free! Buckra in this country no make we free: What Negro for to do? What Negro for to do? Take force by force! Take force by force!

“Mr. Wilberforce” was in reference to William Wilberforce a British politician, who was a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. “Buckra” was a term introduced by Igbo and Efik slaves in Jamaica to refer to white slave masters.

[lem0nademouth]

i am in desperate need of a giggle but im also a sociology major so

[kateis-cakeis]

After rewatching S4Ep12 again, it's hilarious how Merlin both hates and loves the spell he put on Arthur. He's both like ':O amazing', and 'this issss disturbing' at the same time

[4tsukiiim1rai]

I made those for tik tok but I love it so much so I want to post it here too!!

[markscherz]

scherz is seven letters away from the korean word for joke (nongdam)

But only two characters! 농담!

해는 졌지만 적어도 개구리는 노래해요