#phonemic transcription

[vikinglanguage]

Using both Dania and IPA for transcription in my thesis is slowly driving me crazy. As a rule, I write all my papers in Doulos SIL because it is perfectly readable and supports IPA. HOWEVER, using the Danish transcription system Dania, which is developed, and therefore very good, for Danish requires me to either use the Dania font or give up every Dania symbol not supported by unicode, which is A LOT of them.

[for example hwalp 'puppy' compared to hwal''p 'puppies']

So here I am, changing the font of almost every transcription I do, which goes directly against the reason I even downloaded Doulos SIL in the first place. But at least it's quite entertaining to be writing things in Dania before changing the font.

[for example hwa½p 'puppy' comapred to hwa½ZZp 'puppies']

[lady-inkyrius]

I think there's a sense in which /jə mʌm/ and /jɚ mɑˑm/ have like completely different vibes but I'm unsure how much of it is because of the sounds themselves and how much is just the differing humour of each associated country.

[best-polish-words]

chrzęst - /xʂɛ̃st/

pwn | follow for more Polish words!

[official-linguistics-post]

(Please accept my apologies if you have already answered this)

Can you explain us the difference between phonetic and phonemic? I'm a linguistics student and no matter how many times they explain it to me, I don't get it. And Google explains it awfully.

Maybe I'm a nerd or something, but I bet people have asked themselves the same thing!

i use a goofy little mnemonic for it: phonemic is in the mind and phonetic is on the tongue. (i'd love to hear suggestions for updating that to include signed languages...)

a phonemic transcription is intended to get at the underlying conceptual construct, the phone, aka how we mentally class the sound/sign in relation to the language we're using.

a phonetic transcription is intended to represent the actual articulation of the sound/sign and may include additional notation on length, place, etc.

[tanadrin]

I'm conflicted on whether I should comment on your response to the English spelling reform anon because on one hand doing so on anon when each part would need a pages-long essay would be exceedingly difficult (and propably not even worth it for something originally said in jest), but on the other people-are-wrong-on-the-internet instinct is difficult to resist, and you were quite wrong

Fortunately I am not wrong. Did you read the linked Mark Rosenfelder essay? I am only persuaded by his arguments, and he has empirical analysis on his side.

People who think spelling should be purely phonological transcription miss what written language is *for.* It’s not a perfect transcription system for spoken language. It can’t be. It’s meant to encode salient facts *about* spoken language, only one of which is phonemic structure (yes, even in alphabetic scripts), and it has to balance competing ends in order to facilitate its primary purpose, which is communication. Languages with deep orthographies have simply chosen to balance different factors than languages with shallow orthographies, usually because they have a long literary history whose continuity they are trying to some extent to preserve. It’s no coincidence that some of the languages with the deepest orthographies (Irish, French, Tibetan) also have long literary histories!

[some-teeth-in-a-trench-coat]

Alright help me decide. More details below poll.

For the most of you who don't know Hebrew, here's Wiktionary's IPA transcription: /bʁaˈχa/

For the other most of you who don't know IPA, here's a video of someone pronouncing it:

Yes I know they transliterate it right there but you might have heard about how there's no correct way to spell "Khanuka" well the same thing applies here, but I obviously want to spell the character's name consistently so here we are.

Personally I dislike using <ch> for this sound in English because that digraph already has a phoneme that speakers will associate with it, which is unintuitive and can lead to misunderstandings (also it being everybody's default has led me to mispronounce "chai" as חי so many times). I much prefer using <kh> which tells people this is not a sound English uses, but I understand that it could also be intimidating. So I'm asking the "fandom" to help me decide

[max1461]

Something astute readers of my blog with notice is that I stick very closely to the following conventions in writing, even when I eschew standard capitalization and so on:

Individual words in an object language are italicized: a stone is a particular type of object you might find on the ground, whereas stone is the English word referring to such.

Of course, phonemic transcriptions are given in slashes /stoʊn/, while phonetic transcriptions (relatively broad or very narrow) are given in square brackets [stõʊ̯̃n̥].

References to orthographic characters or sequences of such are given in angle brackets: stone is spelled , which starts with the letter .

Loan phrases and non-nativized loanwords are italicized: per se, à la, de facto.

Diacritics are maintained in such, and in some nativized loans.

Diacritics are maintained in foreign names, except when there is a standard Anglicization of the name, in which case that form is used.

Conjunctions without a comma associate more strongly than conjunctions with a comma, thus "he was a writer, a painter, and a sculptor" brackets (semantically) as [ he was a [ a writer ] [ a painter ] [ and a sculptor ] ], where as "he was a writer, a painter and a sculptor" brackets as [he was [ a writer ] [ a painter and a sculptor ] ].

Multi-word phrases used in an attributive role are connected with dashes: I have object-level concerns are about the object level.

Punctuation in quotes is completely separate from punctuation outside of quotes, and a sentence ending in a quote will use both: the man asked "am I a fish?". This is widely regarded as looking ugly, but it is logically correct.

Similarly, block quotes, code fragments, display equations (or facsimiles of such produced using tumblr's formatting capabilities) and other similar things are embedded within a sentence and thus do not automatically require capitalization on the following line:

It has been said before that

All men are created equal

and I think this is true.

Block quotes and code fragments automatically induce a deletion of an immediately following external punctuation mark, but display equations do not. Thus a display equation at the end of a sentence should be followed by a period, and so on.

There may be more. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, these conventions are Correct and should be used as widely as possible.

[helleniclanguageboy]

Greek Transliteration of Slavic

The legacy of the Slavic languages being represented by the Greek alphabet go back very far. Traditionally Cyril and Methodius are given the attribution of inventing the Slavonic scripts to represent the languages instead of Greek which ill-represented the phonemes of Slavonic. Even so, there is a long history of Slavonic languages (mainly South Slavic) being represented by the Greek script. There are early examples of this (none that I have been able to find), but the more contemporary examples are well attested. Here, we will explore 3 scripts: the Konikovo Gospel, the Kulakiya Gospel, and the Pomak alphabet.

Konikovo Gospel (1852)

Ωἰτ Ιωάννα. Οὐτ πέρβȣ μπέσ̮ει ρὲτζ̮τα, ἡ ῥέτζ̮τα μπέσ̮ει σῶς Μπόγα, ἡ Μπὸγ μπέσ̮ε ῥέτζ̮τα· Βόα μπέσ̮ε ȣ̓τ πέρβȣ σῶς Μπόγα. Σῆτε ραμπώτη ζαρδὶ νεῖζ λακαρδίατα σὰ τζ̮εινήα, ἡ μπεῖζ νέγȣ νέ σα τζεινὴ νήκȣε ȣ̓τ κόλκȣ σὰ τζ̮εινία. (my transcription, I uploaded it onto wikipedia bc the previous version was not good) От Иоа́нна. Ут пе́рву бе́ши ре́чта, и ре́чта бе́ши со̂с Бо́га, и Бо́г бе́ше ре́чта. Во́а бе́ше утпе́рву со̂с Бо́га. Сѝте рабо́ти зарди́ нѝз лакарди́ата са́ чини́а, и бѝз не́гу не́ са чини́ ни́куе ут ко́лку са́ чини́а. (Source)

This document largely maintains how Greek is written, the main phonological difference is with /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ which are represented by a breve underneath the letter σ or ζ (σ̮ and .

Kulakiya Gospel (1863)

The transcription of this manuscript features a different type of transliteration, however. The author, Efstathios Kypriades, choses to represent sounds with different accents. Whereas the other manuscript uses μπ for /b/, Kypriades chose to represent it with π̈. Interestingly, the former represents /g/ and /d/ as γ and δ, but Kypriades makes a distinction between the Greek letters and the plosives of Slavonic (γ̈ and δ̈). The one similarity lies in the representation of /ʃ/ which uses the breve beneath. However, it is also used to represent palatalization (κ̮ for k'). The only other accent is a macron above the letter which represents the following /i/ sound becoming /i̥/.

Γ̈οσποδ̈νοβο ὶ σφετάγο Εὐαγγέλιο νὰ Π̈όγα νάσ̮αγο γ̈όλεμα Τσίκφα Χριστι̮άνοφ, ἰσκάρενο νὰ π̈ούγαρτσκο ἰζίκ̮, τουβάσ̮νο ζπόρ νὰ Βαρδ̈αρία, ζὰ οὐφ νεδ̈έλ̄ιτε σάτι, ζὰ γ̈ουδ̈ίνατα, ἰ ζὰ σάτι πραζν̄ίτσ̄ιτι γ̈ολέμιτε, ζὰ τσέλα γ̈οδ̈ίνα ζὰ λ̄ειτουργ̈ίατα. Σὰ πισάλο ὀυτ Ευστάθιο Κυπριάδη οὐφ σέλοτο Κολακία. Νὰ 30 Νοέμβριῳ μέσιτς 1863. Господново и сфетаго евангелио на бога нашаго голема црикфа христианоф, искарено на бугарцко изик тувашно збор на Вардариа за уф неделите сати за гудината и за сати празницити големите за цела година за литургиата. Са писало ут Евстатио Киприади уф селото Колакиа на 30 ноемврио месиц 1863.

Interesting side note, the use of σ̮ is interesting as σ̈ is a character used in Arvanite Albanian to represent /ʃ/ at the same time (source). I'm not sure if this was a conscious choice, but I wanted to make note of it nonetheless.

Pomak Language

For a modern example, the Pomak language used in Greece is sometimes attested with the Greek alphabet. There are different methodologies behind the representation of this, however. Some attestations use additional accents and others don't. For example, the word жаба /ʒaba/ could be written Ζζέμπα or Ζ̌έμπα. Other variations used are: /ʃ/ could be σσ or σ̌, /tʃ/ could be τσσ or τσ̌, /dʒ/ could be τζζ or τζ̌.

Ουτσίλνικετ μόϊ γιε γιάτσε χούμπαφ. Ίμα αλτΐ ουνταγιέ. Μόγιενα ουνταγιό γιε γκουλα̈́μα. Ίμα τσσέτρι γκουλια̈́μι πέντζζουρε. Ράχλενε μι σα γιάτσε τσίστι. Ι χότζζιντα μάτσα γιε γιάτσε τσίστα. Ι ιζουτσσίλνικ ίμα γιεντίν σσιρόκ χαρέμ. Φαφ χαρέμαν ίμα ντβα βρίσε ι ντβε γκόρμιγιε. Ουτσσίλνκαν μόϊ γιε γιάτσε χούμπαφ. Για ουτσσίλνικεν, χότζζενε ι αρκαντάσσενε γκι γιάτσε μίλβαμ. (Source)

[juney-blues]

90% of youtube poop sentence mixing is just looking through episode transcriptions for words with the phonemes you want to use in them

[tragedykery]

[ID: the prophecy from percy jackson and the lightning thief transcribed into tengwar, tolkien’s elvish script. the prophecy reads:

you shall go west and face the god who has turned / you shall find what was stolen and see it safely returned / you shall be betrayed by one who calls you [a] friend / and you shall fail to save what matters most in the end.

/end ID]

ipa transcription + rambling under the cut!

this was originally practice for my phonemic english tengwar mode with inherent vowel schwa but it got. a bit out of hand lol. tenchnically the mode’s still under construction but that’s mostly bc I’m running into issues with the guide I wrote for it (mainly font & accessibility issues)

both the ipa and the tengwar transcripts are based on how I personally would pronounce the prophecy if I were to read it aloud slowly & carefully. which is to say I don’t sound that much like a stuck up ass irl lmao. the ipa is mostly based on geoff lindsey’s transcription guidelines for standard southern british, with a few adjustments. also I didn’t use stress markers in monosyllabic words bc I’m lazy

ipa (so warning for screenreaders):

jʉw ʃal gəw wɛst and fejs ðə gɔd hʉw has təːnd | jʉw ʃal fɑjnd wɔt wɔs stə́wlən and sij ɪt séjflij rɪtə́ːnd | jʉw ʃal bij bətréjd bɑj wʌn hʉw koːlz jʉw frɛnd | and jʉw ʃal fejl tʉw sejv wɔt mátəz məwst ɪn ðij ɛnd

[vikinglanguage]

ALSO while im ranting about Dania why the FUCK are þ ṛ, ɫ (thorn, english ɹ and velarized l, from Dania) supported by unicode, but not characters I need to transcribe a literal Danish dialect?? hello??? unicode wake up please. i need my dania.

[visualtaehyun]

Hey, I just wanna know from where did you start learning thai? Also, what advice do you give to those who wanna start learning it

Hiya anon ✨

I'm not sure how much help I can be, considering I'm not doing a course or following an app or anything people usually do for language learning 🥴 I've been learning mostly by immersion tbh - I've been almost exclusively watching Thai series for over a year now, plus interviews, variety shows, youtube content, songs, so many songs lol, tweets, etc.

My personal learning approach is pretty loose and chaotic lmao but here goes:

1) The biggest hurdle for me was the script. Apart from already having started to notice recurring words being said in the Thai BLs I was watching at the time, I also wanted to be able to read people's tweets! In the end, it was a combination of 1) an app I happened to find (Pocket Thai Master for Android, it's free on the Play store!) and 2) the Wikipedia article on the Thai script that both helped me to understand and start reading and writing. Coming from a non-tonal mother tongue, learning the script early on really helps to understand the tones in Thai so it's something I would for sure recommend!

2) I started keeping a lil vocabulary notebook (you know those two-column ones?) shortly before my Bangkok vacation earlier this year. It not only helped with new vocabulary but also kept me practicing writing! Anytime I encounter a new word, I look it up on either or all of the following online dictionaries: thai-language.com, thai2english, Longdo Dictionary (which I literally just now realized can be set to English in the upper right corner, I've just been using it in Thai ever since I found it djsjdh), Wiktionary in Thai, or if all else fails I google it and might find an old forum entry or maybe an article if it's a slang word or idiom. I recall having dinner in a Bonchon in Bangkok and brokenly asking the waitress for chopsticks so, while waiting, I looked up and took down the word's spelling and pronunciation and when she came back and saw me copying all the info into my little notebook liKE A NERD she laughed and complimented me for the effort haha

3) If I hear a Thai word I'm unfamiliar with that I can't look up because I don't know the spelling, there's a few approaches. If I have context for its meaning, for example subtitles, then I look up the translation instead and hope I find it. If I don't, then there's the option of using thai-language.com's Reverse Phonemic Transcription function (this site in general is my holy grail tbh, it's why I mostly stick to its romanization style for any of my #local woman harps on about linguistics posts). Another option is using the papago app's speech-to-text function. Yes, you read that right. A Korean translation app, that I previously used when I was learning Korean and thus still had on my phone, proved to be useful for me to make sense of the spelling or pronunciation of Thai words. At the beginning, I only used it to read me homonyms out loud so I could parse the difference in tones lol but then I realized it wasn't half bad at rendering an accurate transcription! Sometimes I use that feature to check my own pronunciation or remind myself of the spelling of a word.

4) I always like to recommend @lurkingteapot's comprehensive Thai language learning resources post (it's far more coherent than my post here lol). And shoutout to @recentadultburnout for posting about Thai language and culture as a native speaker (both on tumblr and on ao3)! 🙏

5) This might be minor or self-evident but ya know- install the Thai keyboard for your devices! You're gonna need it sooner or later anyway if you wanna actually use the language. And if you're a keycap and keyboard nerd like me and happen to fall in love with a keyboard in a Siam Discovery store ehem then I do recommend getting a Thai layout keyboard (or keyboard stickers!) because that has proven to help me a lot in terms of ease of learning on desktop and familiarizing myself with letters I don't often encounter. Throwback to that one time I was on the train, revising consonants and their tone classes, and indignantly texted a very confused yet amused family member a photo of my hand-written copy of the Thai consonant table, asking how I'm ever supposed to differentiate between ฎ and ฏ!! Even now, I have to lean in and squint like an old lady to see the difference on desktop. 😭

I hope at least some of this proves to be helpful in your quest to learn Thai! In any case, you're not alone on tumblr or in our little BL/GL/QL fandom bubble - I know of several users who are learning Thai, like @airenyah and @philologique and the aforementioned @lurkingteapot, just to name a few I personally follow and who I'm sure all have their own advice to give if you shoot them an ask~

สู้ ๆ นะ :) /suu suu na/

[philologique]

perpetually fascinated by how the thai series i've watched tend to translate vulgar intensifiers,¹ and specifically thinking about โคตร,² which i'm just gonna write as "kho:t" for the rest of this post (pronounced with an aspirated k or the 'ch' in 'loch' and an unreleased t at the end; the colon just makes the o long)

heads up that i don't actually speak thai and i'm not any kind of translator! just an english speaker with a pretty good ear who spends approximately two-thirds of all waking hours thinking about language. footnotes and stream of consciousness thoughts on ongoing phonological change(!!) in footnotes under the cut.

anyway! kho:t literally means ancestry, clan, descent, or lineage,⁷ but is used an intensifier that wiktionary describes as "slang, sometimes considered vulgar." ⁸

i think about thai intensifiers—and specifically kho:t—all the time in the context of episode 5 of bad buddy. pat's "it was so depressingly lonely for me" is the last pin you can hear drop before the dam breaks, but what he says is แม่งโคตรเหงาเลยเว่ย, (maeng kho:t ngao loey woey). which is a bit rawer? cruder? three of those five words (แม่ง,โคตร,เว่ย) are sometimes are translated as "damn," including just a few sentences earlier when pat says "while you were away, my life was so damn happy."

when i first watched bad buddy i didn't know a single sentence in thai, and i have no idea how any other choice might have hit me in that moment. but at least twice a week i wonder whether and how that translation choice might have affected the english-language bad buddy fandom. damn, it was so lonely. so damn lonely. so freaking lonely. so desperately lonely. so depressingly lonely.

of course, it was all of those things.

¹ Shout out to Methawee Yuttapongtada for their article, "Intensifier as Changed from the Impolite Word in Thai," without which it would have taken last-year-me months longer to tell what pat was saying. i was playing the audio of this scene on a loop in my brain and assumed that the velar fricative was a /kʰ/, but there are so many spelling options for word initial /kʰ/ and word final /t/ that i gave up experimenting with spellings and looked for english-language linguistic literature on thai intensifiers.

² Theoretically pronounced /kʰôːt/ but often (usually?) realized by young speakers in contemporary thai as [xôːt] or [χôːt], which is a whole other thing (that is vastly more interesting to me personally).³ ⁴ i feel like (at least gen z) speakers use a velar or uvular fricative in more or less free variation with an aspirated k, but i haven't come across any literature on it other than in descriptive studies of northern thai.⁴ ⁵ Either way kʰôːt rhymes with the "tô:t" in the thai word for sorry, which you'll probably recognize if you've watched anything in thai!

³ I know this is rough IPA lol. the unreleased diacritic looked weird on tumblr and struck me as unnecessary for phonemic transcription given that all word-final stops are unreleased. also i'm fine with just using the most commonly used latin-script tone diacritics for standard central thai. to me IPA's value is in precision and facilitating common understanding; i don't feel like any of that's lost by not using IPA tones here.

⁴ PHONETICS THOUGHTS re /kʰ/

I kinda think [kʰ], [x], and [χ] are in more or less free variation phonologically among most speakers today in all environments except before close/high front vowels—คิด is pretty much always [kʰit], and from watching a bunch of cooking shows 'salty' (เค็ม) seems to be not-quite-invariably pronounced with a [kʰ].

...but then i think boom used a fricative (possibly [ç]) when saying คิดอะไร at one point in last weekend's hidden agenda?? and 'okay' (โอเค) seems to have a fricative at least half the time i hear it. i would hazard a guess that if you did several hours of (ideally) informal linguistic interviews with central thai speakers of different ages: (1) everyone would have some velar or uvular fricatives, (2) the fricative /kʰ/ would be more common among younger speakers (vs older speakers) in all (syllable-initial) phonetic environments, (3) individual speakers would be most likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as a fricative before more open/low and back vowels and in true consonant clusters, (4) individual speakers would be least likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as a fricative before closer/higher front vowels, particularly /i/, and (5) speakers would be more likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as [kʰ] when they're paying attention to their speech, e.g. reading off a list of words in isolation—which takes us to:

SOCIOLINGUISTICS-ish THOUGHTS re /kʰ/:

I know i just talked about the phonological constraints and possible ongoing sound change for the phoneme /kʰ/ but i think it's super NOT free variation in practice, even before a vowel like /a/. this is just based on observation from contemporary dramas/cooking shows/interviews/songs (which is another thing i have Thoughts about), but i feel like at the moment it's largely a register thing that maps imperfectly onto levels of formality (and also friendliness? one hyper-specific almost-baseless hypothesis i'd like to test is that you'll hear more fricative /kʰ/ in constructions with the particle 'na' (นะ)). i would also guess that if there are any attitudinal studies on the pronunciation, they would reveal that most speakers view an aspirated stop as the "proper" way to pronounce syllable-initial /kʰ/.

i would love to look at whether /kʰ/ is realized as a fricative more or less often in constructions with certain particles, as an easy proxy for certain kinds of register. (i would also want to look at this with different first- and second-person pronouns, although so many of them are roughly gendered or would correspond to the relative age of the speaker and listener that it would almost certainly skew the results and might just tell us more about the demographics that are leading this phonological change! which is also useful!) ANYWAY if i win the lottery maybe i'll go back to linguistics for real bc i miss it desperately and want an excuse to study this 😭

re attitudinal research, I would really want to poll and have linguistic interviews with thai speakers of central thai as well as bilingual speakers of central thai and northern thai, isan/lao, and other tai and non-tai minority languages in thailand. i'm interested in questions about possible interference from those languages vs the extent to which speakers might emphasize differences between their respective minority languages and central thai (even where they may not exist) for the sake of maintaining regional/cultural identity through language (or something?? this is really poorly articulated but as an example i'm thinking about how my dialect of swiss german uses the same construction as standard german for the verb "to hurt" (Weh tun/Weh tue), but swiss german speakers think of "Weh tue" as a uniquely alemannic construction and instead use the word "schmerzen" when speaking/writing swiss standard german, effectively inventing a "german" construction that the local language can be in opposition to. see also fn 5 and 6 on northern thai below.)

⁵ Those studies note (if i recall correctly, this is off the top of my head lmao) that kʰr- consonant clusters in northern thai effectively drop the r and realize the k as a fricative.⁶ which. i'm not convinced this is uniquely part of northern thai so much as a productive phenomenon across central and northern thai that's just highly register-dependent in the standard language. (i would argue that at least the dropping of 'r's and 'l's from consonant clusters absolutely is just part of central thai phonology at this point. if being able to pronounce a consonant cluster—or a rolled r, for that matter—is a sign of ~good education or ~elocution rather than something that any subset of speakers learns as part of the spoken language when acquiring the language as children (which is possible, i just have not observed it), then—apart from the extent to which it conveys social meaning—i don't really think of it as a fundamental part of the language itself. this is maybe kind of a hot take lmao)

⁶ There was also a clip i watched—i think it was from the 1000 stars bts of khaotung trying to speak northern thai—where someone basically articulated that same rule to him, like "for ครบ just say /xop/"

⁷ From sanskrit, hence the silent r in the thai script.

⁸ I don't know nearly enough abt thai language or culture to meaningfully analyze the implications of that etymology or how โคตร might best be translated with minimal context. i'm guessing "damn" might be at about the right level of intensity/vulgarity as an intensifier, but it carries such explicit religious implications that i'm hesitant to use it?? i'm happy to let the translators and subtitlers make the difficult decisions while i just ponder stuff about sound change

[official-linguistics-post]

Can you explain when we are meant to represent a word in text with italics, "in quotations" /between slashes/, [inside square brackets], or <with these triangular ones>?

I'm doing a PhonPhon course next trimester at uni and I was never sure what I'm supposed to use when when I did the intro 101 class...

i can answer how i typically use them!

italics = original or latin alphabet-transliterated "quotations" = gloss (approximate translation) /slashes/ = phonemic transcription [square brackets] = phonetic transcription <angle brackets> = specifically referencing the orthography (spelling), but i use it sort of interchangeably on this blog with italics as the spirit moves me if i don't have a reason to do otherwise.

in phonphon (phonology & phonetics, for the uninitiated) you'll mostly make use of slashes and square brackets. various subfields will have additional notation norms depending on their needs.

[tanadrin]

I wish featural scripts were popular early on so we could see what millenia of use would do to them

Featural scripts, like phonetic alphabets, are fine in theory, but the fact that it's actually really useful to transcribe, like. Both diachronic and synchronic cross-dialectical phoneme groups (say, writing rhotic and non-rhotic -er endings the same in English) with the same symbols means that I think in almost every case they would rapidly cease to be used as featural or phonetic scripts.

I think phonetic or phonemic transcription is always going to be a secondary feature of written language.

[qwertystop]

Independent deciphering of Tunic

So, as @lazodiac continues to play Tunic, I continue to take notes alongside her and try to figure out the language. Yes, I know other people have figured this out by now – no spoilers, I want to do it myself.

With a great deal of her additional help in transcribing my handwritten notes to text files, I now have those attempts digitized, and I've written some code to try to parse it all.

So far:

I'm confident that the marks noted as "E" and "C", the verticals along the right edge of a hex glyph, are only meaningful as the "Q" and "Z" from the left edge of the following glyph; there are no cases of these marks being present in the last hex of a word (i.e. before whitespace).

Despite this, though, there are still 274 distinct hex glyphs present in my notes (just observations from gameplay; I have not transcribed the manual at all). This conflicts with our previous phonetic-English understanding, derived from commonalities between words currently understood as "you", "use", "guards", "guardhouse", "gun", and most recently the "zzzz" onomatopoeia.

I have one potential solution to this in mind, that being that glyphs should be split along the horizontal centerline into two consecutive phonemes. I have not yet adjusted the code to test this theory.

Code, scanned notes, and transcripts can all be found below on GitHub: