Alphabet of the Unicorns

[SasQ 1,376]

Hello.

I'm trying to figure out what language and writing system is used by the ponies in Equestria, because I plan to use some of these informations in a fanfic I'm preparing to make.

From this snapshot from S01E01 "Mare in the Moon" we can get some informations about the language and writing:

I recreated it below as a vector graphics without any perspective to improve the clarity:

Below the book there is a transcript of what is supposedly written there in English. I mean, we hear Twilight speaking English in the series, but I consider it just an English dubbing replacing the original Equine language  This text couldn't be written in English, because there's lot more letters in it than is visible in the above book page. So the original language must be different, and written more compactly than just plain English when written in Latin alphabet. Besides, why should ponies speak English in the first place instead of some other language of their own?  And this is exactly what I'm trying to figure out: what language they use, how does it work, and how is it written.

We can see some interesting observations here:

1. Words are separated by spaces.
2. Text is aligned in horizontal lines.
3. The writing system seems to be syllabic (that is, an abjad, like Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese or Ancient Egyptian), because words are quite short: 3 glyphs on average, usually 1...4 glyphs, longer words are rare. In syllabic writing systems words tend to be short, because only consonants are written down, and vowels are default, or known from context, or marked up with additional diacritics. In writing system where vowels are written explicitly, words are usually longer.
4. The alphabet consists probably of only 10 glyphs (see the table below). There may be more, but only these 10 are visible in this particular book page. If you know about any more, please tell me in which episode you've seen them, with time stamp.
5. The writing system seems to be hieroglyphic, similar to Ancient Egyptian or Paleo Hebrew. I suspect these glyphs could have started as ideograms (that is, each one represented only one idea, as a whole). But later on ancient ponies figured out that they can join those ideograms together to make composite words, joining the meanings of the particular ideograms together. And for these words to be possible to pronounce, they read the first syllables of the subsequent glyphs of a word. (I'll explain it further in a minute...)
6. One of the glyphs seems to be some kind of a prefix (or suffix): the Pony Tail glyph. It is often attached to the rump of a Horse glyph, but both these glyphs can also be used alone. In one place it's also attached to a Star glyph, making a "comet".
   
   If it's really some kind of a prefix/suffix, it should correspond to a sound which is easily joined to any other sound, like "H", for example. But, maybe it's just a coincidence...  
7. I don't know which direction it should be read: left-to-right, or right-to-left, or interleaved. But if it resembles Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in any way, then maybe the direction can be figured out from the glyphs themselves: In Ancient Egyptian one reads a line of glyphs in a way to "meet" subsequent glyphs "from their fronts". For example, if some figure looks to the right, you need to approach it from right to left to "meet it face-to-face". So one could read Egyptian hieroglyphs in both directions, according to the direction of "looking" of these glyphs.
   In pony alphabet, horse figures are looking to the right, so it is probably read right-to-left, as in Hebrew. But maybe other directions are also possible (when the figures are mirror-imaged and look to the left). There's some evidence for it. For example, when Spike writes his notes in Episode 1, the bump in the papyrus under his feather seem to move right-to-left and left-to-right interchangeably. So it's possible that the direction is switched on line-by-line basis.
   Also, when Twilight looks through her books in Episode 1, you can clearly see that she always flips pages from right to left (that is, starting from the last page and going "back" to the first page of the book). This may suggest that books are written from the last page to the first, from right to left line/page.
8. I don't know what sounds should be pronounced for those glyphs, but I tried to figure out the sound from the ideograms themselves. For example, I thought the best sound for the Horseshoe glyph would be the clopping "K" sound made by horse hooves clopping on the ground. For the glyph depicting Snake (at least I see a snake there, but it might also be a rope) could correspond to the hissing sound, like "S" or "Sh". The Thunder Bolt glyph could be related to some violent, "bursting" sounds, like "B", "D", or maybe electrical buzzing sound, like "Z". But I really have no clue what sounds these should be. Any ideas?

In the following table, I show the whole alphabet:

Beside the original hieroglyphs, I also added my own ideas of their corresponding hieratic versions, that is, for quick hand writing purposes. They're simpler and easier to scribble by pen.

For each glyph, I also tried to match some sounds (in the Transliteration column). If you have any ideas how these glyphs should be pronounced and you can justify it in some way, feel free to tell me in this post. I hope for some interesting discussion here. Maybe together we can crack this code 

I also wrote in the table what (in my opinion) any of these glyphs depict (I have some troubles with the 0'th one, so if anypony has some idea, please tell me). Below, I wrote some possible meanings encoded in that particular glyph.

Composite words can be formed by joining these glyphs and their meanings together. I've tried some examples below:

Some of them are actually there in the fragment of the book shown in the screenshot, so this may be the right track.

Now how to read those words?

Suppose that the Horn and Crescent glyphs represent sounds for "N" and "M" respectively (I don't know this for sure, this is just a guess, for the sake of the example). So their combination might sound like MaNa, which is really the name for magical energy in many other fantasy worlds!   I wonder if the similar trick could be done with the glyphs representing Bright Magic to get the word PraNa, which is also a name for bright life-giving energy in Eastern cultures. Then we'd have "mana" and "prana" for Dark Magic and Bright Magic  But this could be possible only if the Star glyph were pronounced as "Pr" sound (which is not so strange for a language of horses  you know, this snorting sound horses make sometimes). What other sounds do you think of for the Star glyph to make some interesting word for Bright Magic? Maybe you have some better ideas of how those glyphs should be mapped to sounds?

In the table, there are also numerical values assigned to the glyphs. For now, they're just for ordering and reference purposes (let's call them PEGASCII codes  though probably UniCode would be a better name for Unicorn's code ), because I don't know anything about what number systems are used by ponies (but I have some guesses; I'll get back to this). But I tried to correlate them on some logical basis. For example, glyph number 4 is the Horse glyph, because the horse has 4 legs. I used the Horn glyph to represent 1, because it's simple, just one straight slash. It's good for tally marks & stuff like that. I used the Star glyph for number 5, because it is a 5-pointed star. The number 3 is Thunder, because it has 3 lines (but this is not necessary). I took the Crescent glyph for number 6, because I wanted it to be just after the Star glyph, but it will probably be better for number 2 (two horns of the crescent). Other glyphs are assigned quite arbitrarily. But there is some interesting pattern, that all glyphs related to Unicorns are distributed in powers of two. More on this later. Also, I wondered if it wouldn't be better to use the Tail glyph as last, and Head glyph as first, but this breaks the pattern a little bit, and the Head is less useful for number 1, because its shape is too much complicated.

As to the number system used by ponies, I suspect some place value system or additive system at least, because just plain unary is too limited. And it would be obvious to notice by lots of repeating glyphs for number one. I haven't seen anything like that in any of pony books.

If it's place-value system (that is, a small number of digits, reused in different positions representing greater and greater powers of the base), then it could be in base 4 instead of base 10, because ponies don't have fingers to count (with the only exception of Pinkie Pie, as usual  ), but they only count their whole legs (4 of them). This is related to that "powers of two" pattern above: 1, 2, 4, 8 (one leg/horn, two legs each front or back or side, foul legs in a pony, eight legs in two ponies etc.). Also, if they were to use base 10 place value system, it could be easily spotted from the first screenshot: we should have some glyph repeated thrice in a row, representing those three zeros in "1000th year". But there isn't any. So either ponies don't use base 10, but some other base (in base 4, 1000 is 33220, but we also don't see any two subsequent pairs of glyphs there), or they use just additive system, which adds values of some glyphs together. But then, we either need many glyphs to depict a number, or we need some bigger values for the glyphs (for example, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000) to write down the number 1000 used in the Transcript. And we need some way to find out which glyphs represent numbers instead of words. But such a system, on the other hand, is more for encoding meanings, like Gematria in the Jewish Kaballah system: you can then count up a value of any word to express some interesting patterns, like similar words having similar numerical values, etc. This is still an open subject, so any ideas are welcome.

If you know about any other evidence of pony alphabets, please tell me about where you've found it (what episode, what timestamp). The more cryptograms the better. But for now, my only Rosetta Stone is this single book page from the first screenshot. I hope that this will start an interesting discussion about linguistics of the Ponydom 

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ
Corrected a dead link

[Concord 1,982]

Hello!

 

That's loads and loads of information you've written here! I couldn't read through all of it, so sorry

 

Personally, about the first picture, somehow i'm just getting a feeling that what the producers did, was type random symbols to make it seem like something is written. Otherwise, they do resemble hyroglifics.

 

Another thing is, i don't see twilight writing with that alphabet when she writes letters... It seems like plain text (Even though it's just squiggly lines).

Edited January 12, 2013 by Concord

[SasQ 1,376]

On 1/12/2013 at 12:44 PM, Concord said:

Personally, about the first picture, somehow i'm just getting a feeling that what the producers did, was type random symbols to make it seem like something is written.

This is one of possibilities, of course. But I decided to check it, because the producers already incorporated many symbols from occult, esoterics, ancient knowledge, and science, and even real physical formulas! (yeah, I see how every little girl can't wait to spot an error in time dilation formulas from Special Relativity  ). I described that in this forum about Sacred Geometry, unfortunately only in Polish, so you can only check out the screenshots; maybe I'll repost a translation of it someday here. {Edit: I did.} But this is whole another story...

So, if they could make so much effort to hide all those formulas and patterns there, they could also hire some linguists to create an actual language and alphabet for ponies. If they didn't care, they could simply put there some squiggly lines just resembling writing, like they do in many other places. But there are some details there which suggest that it might be an actual encoded message instead of just a random bunch of symbols. That's why I created this topic: to involve other people into brainstorming over this code. Maybe together we'll find out some more.

On 1/12/2013 at 12:44 PM, Concord said:

Another thing is, i don't see twilight writing with that alphabet when she writes letters... It seems like plain text (Even though it's just squiggly lines).

Yes, that's what I'm talking about above: When they don't care, they just put squiggly lines. But when there's something important, they use the actual alphabet.

Also, this book is "from olden pony times"  It was probably written by some Ancient Ponies. It's similar to beautifully caligraphed books from medieval times in our world, or Egyptian hieroglyphs. But for day-to-day purposes, this is too much work. For quick hand writing, the simplified version of such alfabets is usually used, which is called "cursive" (for Latin alphabet) or "hieratic" (for ancient hieroglyphs). I've shown an example of how such simplified versions of glyphs could look like. They're better fit for hand writing, because they're simpler and more accustomed for drawing continuous lines by a pen. I could prepare an example of how can it look like for some hand-written text, if only I knew what to write  I don't know pony language yet, so I could only connect some random glyphs together. Well, maybe I'll try and post it here later...

For a while, I've found another example of this alphabet used in S01E18 "Show Stoppers" (7:45), on a poster presented by Miss Cheerilee:

No new glyphs though. Still the same 10 glyphs from the table in my first post.

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ
Corrected the formatting

[Concord 1,982]

No new glyphs though. Still the same 10 glyphs from the table in my first post.

 

Then maybe you could translate this with the help of the table? That should show if it's actualy coded... 

 

It's interesting really, but the idea is hard for me to follow. Not being a specialist in this, i can't really give any advice

 

Good luck with your work tho! hope to see good results!

[SasQ 1,376]

Here's an example of the above message rewritten in hand writing hieratic script:

Sorry for bad calligraphy, I'm still learning how to hold my pen and manipulate it with Magic  But you should get the idea...

On 1/12/2013 at 2:18 PM, Concord said:

It's interesting really, but the idea is hard for me to follow. Not being a specialist in this, i can't really give any advice

No problem. Maybe other people (or ponies) could be able to help me.

Hmm... I've just noticed that this text on the poster is exactly the same as at the bottom of the first page of the book about Mare in the Moon  So either they put advertisements in books, or legends on posters   or it's really a random gibberish  Need more evidence...

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ
Corrected the formatting

[CrystalRose 636]

This is a really fascinating idea, and I love the thought you've applied to this. I was really starting to hope there might be a translation there of some description.

Unfortunately, when you noticed that its the same text used again in a totally different scenario that points towards it just being nonsense to look pretty.

Oh buck.

[SasQ 1,376]

Well, if a world doesn't look the way you want it, try to make a change yourself 

I, too, hoped that this is another encoded message, since I've found plenty of them already. The repetition of the same text on the poster might suggest the otherwise, or it might also be a one-time blooper (just someone of the artists taking the easy path) or a deliberate misguide. More evidence is needed.

 

But even if this is really just a gibberish (well, there's no Tolkien in Hasbro crew anyway... -_-), it's not so much a problem, because we can still use our imagination to do better than the original producers   and make some better use of these ideas (which I'm already planning to do in my fanfic; but this probably won't fit into this section of the forum, so I just shut up for now  ). Investigating pony language is still fun anyway (for me at least), so feel free to join this game and try your own 

Edited January 12, 2013 by SasQ

[akita-ken 581]

i cracked up at the PEGASCII and UniCode puns, those were just pure gold. You seem to have a knack for linguistics/crossover-cryptography, it's rare to find such people nowadays

[Threetrees 14]

What I think is better than trying to crack the alphabet already present, which I think is just random, is making one based off of this. You've already done so much work, and it would be a shame if it turned out not to mean anything.

[SOHCAHTOA 51]

So... awesome!

 

VBDSOUIGBSOFJISDHBGNOIHBVBAILGUGIBBERISHFVMA.BVWSKHF.WSE BFVHVLRGBCJHF

 

This is so epic awesome! You're awesome dude! I wish I could help, but I'm no cryptographer. But you're doing an awesome work, keep at it!

 

Also, I'm a little surprised. Not that you are doing this, just that it took someone so long to try to decode the symbols that appear in the first shot of the first episode. I mean, The Legend Of Zelda fans cracked the Skyward Sword Hylian so fast, one would think us bronies would have done it faster. And that's what I love about the brony community: there's people of all kinds here. For every sport, there is a brony athlete, for every science a brony scientist, for every art a brony artist. Which is why, if the fandom is together, we can do anything.

 

And I think we can discard the poster to the Talent Show as an animator being lazy. It doesn't mean the symbols are gibberish.

 

One last thing: a language made for a piece of fiction is called a constructed language, or conlang for short. People who make conlangs are called conlangers, like Marc Okrand (Klingon) and Paul Frommer (Na'vi).

 

EDIT:

 

 

What I think is better than trying to crack the alphabet already present, which I think is just random, is making one based off of this. You've already done so much work, and it would be a shame if it turned out not to mean anything.

 

This. I agree completely. Although we're not sure yet if it is just gibberish, so you should keep trying to decode it

 

Although it seems to be so little material to help you decode it. Gibberish or not, maybe you should just make a language.

Edited January 12, 2013 by SOHCAHTOA

[H.P. Lance 138]

This is an impressive analysis. How long did it take you to analyse the glyphs and decide on what each symbol might (vaguely) represent?

 

What I find interesting is that in the original image of the book, the one telling the 'Mare in the Moon' tale, the actual illustration of the Mare in the Moon (the top right corner of the book) contains a couple of identical symbols to the ones used in the text. There are four stars, one in each corner of the illustration, and the crescent moon is shining (which, by your own interpretations of each symbol, would give the impression that the picture is trying to portray a scene of a 'dark heaven', an accurate translation of the nature of the story).

 

This seems too perfect to be coincidental, since our equivalent would be scrawling a seemingly random letter of the alphabet in the corners of an image, which would likely never make any sense to us.

 

I agree in that the pages of the book might be set out 'back to front' (so the beginning is our back page), seeing as the text underneath the illustration on the right-hand page would be an appropriate place to write the title or summary of the story. This would be either 'The Mare in the Moon' or 'Myth from olden pony times'. However, like you said, it's difficult to tell if text itself is written left to right or vice-versa.

 

As for the number issue, wherein the number 1000 should be represented by three identical symbols in a row but isn't, perhaps it is simply written out longhand (like 'thousandth').

 

Futile attempts at understanding this aside, I think that using this or something similar in your fanfic is an excellent idea. Just make sure that if a translation of your version of the language is ever given, offer at least some sort of simplified explanation for how the characters translated it. If you're really talented, perhaps you could weave this explanation into the actual story instead of giving it as an author's note. But not everyone will be an enthusiast of this subject, so don't let it become boring!

 

I'm not going to allow myself to be sucked into analysing this in any more detail because otherwise the issue will bug me, but in any case I wish you (and anypony else who has a go) good luck in deciphering the language!

 

If it isn't total gibberish, of course... 

 

 

[almozayaf 72]

please sir stop the wory and have fun with the show

they made it for little kid

 

it not star trek it just a kid show , have fun

 

why all the fandom over think the small parts

 

the resen we love the show is who simple it is

 

it just random image to look like horse talks

[Veylon 255]

Anyone who's interested in the hieroglyphics may want a look at Matthew White's White-o-glyphics:  http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/hiero/index.htm. He tackles a lot of the same issues of how to combine symbols to make new concepts as we're looking at here. It's worth checking into if you want to pick up some ideas for how this script might work in a more practical way.

 

Edit:

Just as an minor example, Nightmare Moon:

The symbols are "Fear Thought Sleep Name" on the left and "Moon (Literally) Name" on the right. Which roughly tells us we've got someone named both Nightmare and Moon. Luna's name would just be the right-hand portion (as Luna means Moon).

 

Aside: The (Literally) upside-down t indicates that we're talking about the actual moon and not using it to symbolize night. The (X___) indicates naming. 

Edited January 12, 2013 by Veylon

[SOHCAHTOA 51]

please sir stop the wory and have fun with the show

they made it for little kid

 

it not star trek it just a kid show , have fun

 

why all the fandom over think the small parts

 

the resen we love the show is who simple it is

 

it just random image to look like horse talks

 

Dude. Just... don't. He understands it's just a show. We all do. He's no trying ro crack some secret code that will reveal the ark of the covenant, he's just doing this because he likes doing it. If the show producers really did make a conlang, then why not decode? And please, tell me why it's worth translating Klingon but not Equestrian? Really, that's some poor faith in bronies, and a disrespect to the show.

 

We overthink the small parts because it's fun. Simple as that. If you don't like it, instead of telling others to stop having fun just ignore it.

 

And please, type properly. This is not msn or facebook, typing like that only makes you look like a fool.

[Fhaolan 4,483]

Due to the topic of the book, and the nature of the poster, that duplicated phrase may be the equivalent of a quote from a fairy tale. Having had friend with children in the same general age bracket as the talent show, I've seen similar stuff on their school's adverts.

[Bonevelous 12]

Pretty cool work here; it'd be interesting to find out what the mystery letters represent, and what the end result would sound like. In any case, it's a fun looking project

[SasQ 1,376]

Sorry for long time without answers, I didn't have enough time. But now I have, so I can answer you all.

On 1/12/2013 at 2:54 PM, CrystalRose said:

Unfortunately, when you noticed that its the same text used again in a totally different scenario that points towards it just being nonsense to look pretty. Oh buck.

Well, there are some possibilities of how to explain it. Some of them have been already mentioned.

• The fragment from the book about Mare in the Moon has been used on the poster as a quotation of a known pony legend. Which is quite plausible for a talents contest, where there could be many poets, story tellers etc.
• Another interesting option is that this exact same text could be read in different directions to make two different meanings (though maybe related somehow). Similar to a palindrome, that is, a text which could be read left-to-right and right-to-left and have the same meaning. But this time it would have different meanings depending on the direction.
  In English there are plenty of words, too, which can be read two ways and have different meanings: drawer|reward, mined|denim, tool|loot, desserts|stressed etc. One can even try to build some short sentences from them, which have different meanings when read in different directions. Here are some of my tries: "part a ton" | "not a trap", "I saw Snips live" | "Evil spins was I?". Not so gramatically correct, though Unfortunately, English is not a good language for such tricks because of lots of letter combinations which doesn't pair up well in both directions (like th, ght) and lots of short words which cannot be meaningfully reversed (like in, at, of, an, it; however there are some interesting ones, like are|era, on|no, but|tub, me | 'em, he | eh?, "I did" | "did I?", "I saw" | "was I?", etc.).
  There is one more option here: that letters in words doesn't have to be reversed, just the order of whole words. Then in English we have an example of that: "Hope is what defines man" | "Man defines what is hope". But the Unicorn Language could be better suited for this job because it uses syllabic alphabet and the words are shorter.
  I very like this idea, because it is related to the idea of Bright Magic vs. Dark Magic being opposites of each other (or mirror images), and the idea of reversing spells. What could be a better idea to reverse a spell (from Bright into Dark, or vice versa), than by reversing the text? ;-)
• Or, it can be just a blooper or deliberate misguide ;-) Like the inscription in the Great Pyramid in Giza suggesting that it has been built by Cheops (Chufu, to be exact), and which later turned out to be just a forgery of its discoverer who wanted to be famous, but the name "Cheops Pyramid" sticked already and now everyone thinks about Cheops as its builder, even it it's plain wrong ;-J (the pyramids stood there already in the Chufu times). In this case we can just ignore it as being a blooper/misguide and go over it.

On 1/12/2013 at 3:41 PM, akita-ken said:

i cracked up at the PEGASCII and UniCode puns, those were just pure gold.

On 1/12/2013 at 3:41 PM, akita-ken said:

You seem to have a knack for linguistics/crossover-cryptography

Well, I have a knack for many things like that. Not only linguistics. I love to solve mysteries and crack codes in many different areas of science (math, physics, biology, musics etc.).

But as we speak about cryptography, this Unicorn Code is similar to a puzzle I once saw in a Donald Duck comic book when I was a kid. There was an encoded message written in strange symbols (probably Dingbats or Wingdings font). There was a hint about the name of the sender and that vowels are most frequent letters in written text. This was enough information for me. I counted the symbols and there was two options for the vowel glyph, so I tested both, and one of them fit. Then I saw that I can match the name of the sender in one place and this way I figured out some other symbols which, when substituted in other parts of the message, revealed some other words, and step by step I decoded the whole message.

There was also a cardboard device for encoding/decoding secret messages in this comic book. It was a dial with holes in it, which could be turned into one of four different positions in such a way that all these holes covered the whole square grid of letters. One person could write her message letter by letter into these holes and rotating the dial after filling them all, and the other person could decode it by doing the same in reverse. But it was quite difficult to decode the message by mere looking at the sheet of paper with all those letters mangled (without having the decoder). So my friend was bragging that I won't be able to crack his secret messages. But I did ;-) It was just a simple scrambling cipher after all ;-)

There's an interesting puzzle of that kind, called "SETI Puzzle". It was sent by some geek to the newsgroups about astronomy and cryptography, as an example of a potential "alien signal" which could come to our Earth from space one day. It was supposed to be a test for people discussing there if they would be able to decode such a message (a "cosmic pigeon"). When I found this puzzle, I tried to decode it myself. It was very interesting and learning experience ;-) You can try it yourself if you want. Here it is: http://www.martincmartin.com/SETIPuzzle.html

On 1/12/2013 at 3:41 PM, akita-ken said:

it's rare to find such people nowadays

Yeah... Sometimes It's even rare to find intelligent people nowadays :-/ If humanity will remain on this track, the artificial intelligence will become real soon -- not because we will invent such powerful computers, but because computers doing nothing special will turn out to be smarter than people getting dumber and dumber. Of course this is not always a fault of people. It's a whole process of education and other "mass control" (like stupid television programs) which make people dumb. Fortunately, this process is reversible, and I'm going to make some steps in this direction. But this is for another discussion. Let's get back to the subject of this thread...

On 1/12/2013 at 4:32 PM, Threetrees said:

What I think is better than trying to crack the alphabet already present, which I think is just random, is making one based off of this. You've already done so much work, and it would be a shame if it turned out not to mean anything.

This is exactly my "plan B", and I probably mentioned it already in some of my previous posts. If I won't find what I need, I'll try to create it myself.

On 1/12/2013 at 4:35 PM, SOHCAHTOA said:

VBDSOUIGBSOFJISDHBGNOIHBVBAILGUGIBBERISHFVMA.BVWSKHF.WSE BFVHVLRGBCJHF

Is this some real encoded message, or you're just trolling me? Heheh ;-)

On 1/12/2013 at 4:35 PM, SOHCAHTOA said:

Also, I'm a little surprised. Not that you are doing this, just that it took someone so long to try to decode the symbols that appear in the first shot of the first episode. I mean, The Legend Of Zelda fans cracked the Skyward Sword Hylian so fast, one would think us bronies would have done it faster.

Well said.
Thanks for mentioning "The Legend of Zelda". I didn't knew about it, because I've never played this game. But from what I see, this message wasn't so hard to crack. It was just English language written with different alphabet substituting the Latin alphabet. And they say that there were hints in the game with all this alphabet written in sequence. Easy-peasy ;-)

But I read that there was also some other alphabets used in other parts of this series, which was also syllabic, like our Unicorn Alphabet above. It turned out to be just Japanese using a modified version of Katakana alphabet (the same which was used in "The Matrix" movie for those "falling letters" ;-) ). This one could be harder to crack, at least for people not fluent enough in Japanese.

On 1/12/2013 at 4:35 PM, SOHCAHTOA said:

And that's what I love about the brony community: there's people of all kinds here. For every sport, there is a brony athlete, for every science a brony scientist

Oh, you can bet me on this one, because that's exactly what I'm going to do with my fanfic ;-) I lifted a curtain a little bit at the bottom of this post (search phrase: "hidden purpose").

On 1/12/2013 at 4:35 PM, SOHCAHTOA said:

for every art a brony artist. Which is why, if the fandom is together, we can do anything.

Yes. It's very interesting phenomenon that this show resulted in such a huge burst of creativity in people. They make remixes of music from the show, or make their own music related to the show. They make graphics, comics, short animations, and even there's a first fan-made whole episode being made! (on this website, there are also great tutorial about animating ponies which I recommend). Why is this show so much inspiring? How does it work? I wish I could know this secret...

On 1/12/2013 at 4:35 PM, SOHCAHTOA said:

And I think we can discard the poster to the Talent Show as an animator being lazy. It doesn't mean the symbols are gibberish.

You may be right. But we need more evidence to be sure.

On 1/12/2013 at 4:35 PM, SOHCAHTOA said:

One last thing: a language made for a piece of fiction is called a constructed language, or conlang for short. People who make conlangs are called conlangers, like Marc Okrand (Klingon) and Paul Frommer (Na'vi).

No need to tell me ;-) This is one of my interests too ;-)
Speaking of which...

On 1/12/2013 at 7:22 PM, Veylon said:

Anyone who's interested in the hieroglyphics may want a look at Matthew White's White-o-glyphics: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/hiero/index.htm. He tackles a lot of the same issues of how to combine symbols to make new concepts as we're looking at here. It's worth checking into if you want to pick up some ideas for how this script might work in a more practical way.
Just as an minor example, Nightmare Moon:

The symbols are "Fear Thought Sleep Name" on the left and "Moon (Literally) Name" on the right. Which roughly tells us we've got someone named both Nightmare and Moon. Luna's name would just be the right-hand portion (as Luna means Moon).
Aside: The (Literally) upside-down t indicates that we're talking about the actual moon and not using it to symbolize night. The (X___) indicates naming.

Thanks, I didn't know this one. But I did know something similar, called Pentateuch. It's an artificial hieroglyphic language made by Patrick Woodroffe for the novel "Second Earth" by Dave Greenslade. You can see many uses of it on that website. Check it out, it's very similar to what you've presented in your post. The whole website is interesting though; it's about the possibilities for the future language for the mankind.

I also like this idea here:

On 1/12/2013 at 5:34 PM, Hiddenpairer said:

What I find interesting is that in the original image of the book, the one telling the 'Mare in the Moon' tale, the actual illustration of the Mare in the Moon (the top right corner of the book) contains a couple of identical symbols to the ones used in the text. There are four stars, one in each corner of the illustration, and the crescent moon is shining (which, by your own interpretations of each symbol, would give the impression that the picture is trying to portray a scene of a 'dark heaven', an accurate translation of the nature of the story).

Wow, this might really be something! :->
They really are the glyphs ideograms: four stars, one crescent moon, and a head of a unicorn placed there in a way that doesn't seem natural for a real picture. Hmm... Dark Heaven + head... it might be "Master (head) of the Night (Dark Heavens)" = "Nightmare Moon". I surely need to investigate this more.

On 1/12/2013 at 5:34 PM, Hiddenpairer said:

This seems too perfect to be coincidental, since our equivalent would be scrawling a seemingly random letter of the alphabet in the corners of an image, which would likely never make any sense to us.

Yes, I second that. Good points you are making here.

On 1/12/2013 at 5:34 PM, Hiddenpairer said:

I agree in that the pages of the book might be set out 'back to front' (so the beginning is our back page), seeing as the text underneath the illustration on the right-hand page would be an appropriate place to write the title or summary of the story. This would be either 'The Mare in the Moon' or 'Myth from olden pony times'. However, like you said, it's difficult to tell if text itself is written left to right or vice-versa.

Yes. I've checked the direction of page flipping in other episodes, and it's consistent for the whole first season so far. I'll need to check the other two when I find some more time.

On 1/12/2013 at 5:34 PM, Hiddenpairer said:

As for the number issue, wherein the number 1000 should be represented by three identical symbols in a row but isn't, perhaps it is simply written out longhand (like 'thousandth').

Yes, I thought about that too. This way of writing numbers is quite inefficient for a book of such intelligent creatures like Ancient Unicorns ;-) And this way of writing numbers also has some repeating patterns and structure in it, which should be seen in the text. These names for numbers aren't random. But of course you may be right, and I need to investigate it more when I will know more about the structure of this text.

I once found an interesting idea of attempts in creating a "philosophical language". When Rene Descartes first heard about Indo-Arabic decimal place-value system for writing numbers, he was very astonished by its properties. He wrote that by learning this "language of ciphers" one can name any number in the Universe, however long, up to the infinity, by using just 10 different "letters" (decimal digits) for writing their "names" or "words" (decimal notations), because it is done in a systematic way. So he started to wonder if such a language could be invented for philosophical terms: that every word would be its own definition, encoded in the letters making that word in the same way a number is defined by the values of digits it consists of. This could be possible if each letter would have its own primitive meaning, and then joining these letters into words would join these meanings into more complex meanings. Unfortunately this couldn't be done with Latin, because it was encoding both consonants and vowels. Such artificial words sounded very odd.

But this is exactly how these ancient languages were built! Like Ancient Hebrew, Arabic, or Sanskrit and its alphabet Devanagari! These languages are syllabic, so you can mix glyphs in more different combinations without problems with bad sounding, because there are always vowels in between them by default, which don't have to be written explicitly. If you're interested in how it works, I can elaborate a bit more about it some day.

I suspect that such intelligent creatures like Ancient Unicorns would construct their language in a similar manner, because it would allow them for better structuring the knowledge written in this language itself.

On 1/12/2013 at 5:34 PM, Hiddenpairer said:

Futile attempts at understanding this aside, I think that using this or something similar in your fanfic is an excellent idea. Just make sure that if a translation of your version of the language is ever given, offer at least some sort of simplified explanation for how the characters translated it. If you're really talented, perhaps you could weave this explanation into the actual story instead of giving it as an author's note. But not everyone will be an enthusiast of this subject, so don't let it become boring!

Don't worry ;-) I'm not going to make it a boring lecture of linguistic, but (as you guessed it right), involve it as a part of the story, and it will be rather simple use, not distracting from the main point. Actually, the thing I needed the most is the way they write numbers, because comparing their number system with ours could be a good lesson in how we, people, write numbers ourselves, how it all works, and how to understand it well enough to make better use of it. But I don't want to lift a curtain too much yet. You'll see it when it will be ready ;-)

On 1/12/2013 at 5:34 PM, Hiddenpairer said:

This is an impressive analysis. How long did it take you to analyse the glyphs and decide on what each symbol might (vaguely) represent?

Not long enough, I guess ;-) since I still don't know what sounds are used for the glyphs, and (what's more important) if this is a real language at all, and not just a random gibberish ;-)
When I first posted it, it took me around several hours of initial investigation. But now I see I need to make some deeper statistical analysis of this piece of text to see if it will tell me anything about its randomness.

Edit:
I've just found some more evidence. In the 10th episode "Swarm of the Century" (02:41) they seem to use Latin alphabet to write English text, which goes "Welcome Princess Celest". This might be just another "translation inserted into a movie" (like some fansubbers of Japanese anime sometimes do with Japanese inscriptions: they substitute them into English texts to make them understandable for English-speaking people). But still...

The other option is that they actually use English language, Latin alphabet and Indo-Arabic digits. This is seen in 16th episode ("Sonic Rainboom", where they wear numbers in the contest), or 13th episode ("Fall weather friends", score board), or 48th episode ("Hurricane Fluttershy", speed measures).

But Twilight's books are definitely not written in English language using Latin alphabet, but they're written in Ancient Unicorns language written in hieroglyphs, which are not commonly used by Ponyville folks. This is a "Language of Magic" which only scholars (like Twilight) can read and understand. They're similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs in our world, or Ancient Greek & Latin in those very old dusty books which most average people in our times also don't understand at all.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any more examples of the Unicorn Alphabet in other episodes from Season 1 :-/ Too bad...

Also I found this link:
http://ponyfictionarchive.net/viewstory.php?sid=99
where someone is thinking on the same things we do in this thread ;-) It's not much based on the actual show, just a fan fiction (though very interesting one! ;-) ).

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ
Corrected broken formatting

[Phoenix237 353]

*claps slowly by sher awesomeness*

 

Wow

Just Wow

 

I congratulate you. You are figuring this out all by yourself and it would have taken me years to do what you have done.

For the record hopefully you can eventually give us a way to translate everything that is written. Would be pretty cool to be able to read or at least get an idea of what is being written. Also would help in fan-fics.

[kain17 88]

awesome stuff. crazy that you have figured all this out but its cool all the same. i just passed it off as gibberish and didn't care but this is  just cool. i still dont understand much of it tho

[Veylon 255]

 

Thanks, I didn't know this one. But I did know something similar, called Pentateuch. It's an artificial hieroglyphic language made by Patrick Woodroffe for the novel "Second Earth" by Dave Greenslade. You can see many uses of it on that website. Check it out, it's very similar to what you've presented in your post. The whole website is interesting though; it's about the possibilities for the future language for the mankind.

I had a shot at transliterating "Nightmare Moon" into Pentateuch as well and here is what I got:

Roughly, from top to bottom, it goes,

Make: The Bar with the widget on top

Of: The Vertical Bar

Fear-Dream: The blunted stick going into the cloud.

Moon: The Upside down shell thing.

 

The only downside is that there doesn't appear to be any way to indicate what kind of word this is meant to be. Sure, we know that it's a name of a person, but it might be a thing that makes scary dreams (related to the moon somehow), a process for making scary dreams (also related to the moon somehow), or maybe some state of mind where you're scared of the moon. Lunaphobia.

 

It doesn't help that the cloud also represents falsehood and clouds (duh!), so the interpretation could go even farther afield without context if "Fear+Cloud" doesn't automatically mean Nightmare.

 

Once again, Luna's name would be the "Moon" symbol on the bottom and Celestia (whose name means "sky") would have a simple rainbow-like arc. Twilight would have to be some sort of clunky "The Light of Dawn and Dusk" and I'm not sure how to do Sparkle. "Small Lights Rising and Falling", maybe?

[Scootalove 10,689]

Your right about the alphabet of the Unicorns being hieroglyphics. I can definitely tell from the symbolism of the Moon. nice job

[SasQ 1,376]

A new evidence from the latest 11th episode from 3rd season ("Just for Sidekicks", 00:16 - 00:34):

Doesn't seem to be exactly the same hieroglyphics as in the book about Nightmare Moon. But some of the glyphs seem to be similar to my own invented hieratic (hand-written) version of it. (Hmm... I wonder if my message about this thread I've sent to Lauren Faust could have some to do with it... ;-J Unfortunately she didn't answer me yet.). For example, there are straight lines similar to the unicorn's horn glyph; curved arcs similar to the crescent moon glyph; a zig-zag similar to the thunder bolt glyph. There's also a swirly glyph similar to the snake/rope glyph, and the one looking like number 2, which is quite similar to the unicorn's head glyph. Here are these similarities summarized in one picture:

   Above are the glyphs from the book, below my own hieratic glyphs.

Some of them seem to be mirror flipped or upside down, or with some additional strokes (I marked them with blue pen), but still, the overall shapes look very similar ;-J  Unfortunately, this time we don't have any transcript of what's written there. It is supposed to be some gem cake recipe, so the ingredients we see on the table should be somehow described there.

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ

[SasQ 1,376]

To liven up this thread, let me describe you today a little bit of Unicorn Math ;-)

Warning: This is not based on the show, just my own ideas.

The Science of Algebra

Here's how Unicorns write the word "algebra" in their language:
Actually, this word doesn't mean "algebra" literally, because this word is Human invention. But they use a Unicorn counterpart of this word, which has a similar meaning. So what exactly this word means?

Well, let's decode the symbols. It all starts from the root word which means "balance". Literally it is "bright and dark together" ("bright" is symbolized by the star glyph, and "dark" is symbolized by the crescent glyph). These are the opposites in perfect equilibrium. When we attach to it the horn glyph, which means "Magic", we get , that is, "the balance of Magic". Now we only need to prefix it with a head glyph, which symbolizes "idea" or "wisdom" or "science", and we get our original word, which we can now decode as "the science of balancing Magic" :-)

Why such a name and what does it have to do with "algebra"?
Well, to answer that, we need to understand that our Human name "algebra" is not just some proper name of a branch of mathematics. The origin of this word is in Arabic language, which can be understood when we decode the title of a book by ancient Persian scholar, Muhammad ben Musa al-Khwarizmi ("Muhammad, son of Moses, from the city of Khwarizm"), which in Europe is called the father of Algebra, because all our knowledge about this branch of mathematics came from his book.

The book was titled "al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala", which is now often translated as just "The Compendious Book on Calculation, Algebra and Solving Equations", which doesn't say us anything about what this "algebra" really is. But if we translate it literally from Arabic, it will be: "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing"! That's right: "al-jabr" literally means "(the) completion", and "al-muqabala" means "(the) balancing". Those "the" articles ("al-" in Arabic) indicate that those are not just some arbitrary operations, but the special operations which this book is all about.

Also note how the word "al-muqabala" is similar to the Hebrew name "Qabala" for the secret knowledge of Jewish mysticism. This is not a coincidence! This mathematical knowledge we now call "Algebra" is really a part of this ancient knowledge, which was all about balance of the opposites. It can be applied to Mathematics, but it can be also applied to many other branches of Science as well, like electricity, pressure, thermodynamics, wave motion etc., because the whole inner workings of the Universe is all based on the very same mathematical principles.

Do you see the connection now? :->
Unicorn word for Algebra tells us about balancing the opposite sides of Magic: Bright Magic and Dark Magic, since they know that this knowledge can be applied not only to Mathemagic, but to all Magic in general.

Knowing this, we can now continue to the "nuts and bolts" of Unicorn mathematics.

Unicorn's mathematical notation

Here is a table of mathematical notation used by Unicorns. Below the table I explain my choices for all these symbols.



Zero

First of all, I used the round-shaped glyph (which I still don't know what it depicts) for zero, because this shape was the most similar to our human 0. It's round, and it has a little hole/dot in the middle, which could be related to the Ancient Greek notion of monad. It was something similar to a point, but not having any particular place in space; just a point, without any dimensions or other internal parts. It is "all contained in nothing".

Positive and negative

The star symbol has been used for positive numbers, because they are the "bright side" of Number Magic. In our Human world, the word "positive" is related to the word "position", and it's derived from a Latin word "positio", which meant "a place". So "positive numbers" are the numbers which "take some place" (or "exist", are "real").

This star symbol can be omitted if it's obvious from the context, because numbers are positive by default. But it is often prefixed to avoid numbers in a sum to mix with each other.

The crescent symbol has been used for negative numbers, because they are the "dark side" of Number Magic, the opposite for "bright" positive numbers. In our Human world, the word "negative" is from Latin "negare", which means "to deny", because these numbers were denied for millennia as non-existent, "defying common sense", since they were "less than nothing", which was considered impossible. Although nowadays most people can understand these numbers when applied to debts, or temperatures below zero, they still have problems with them when it comes to negative lengths, areas, volumes, frequencies, masses etc. But this is whole another story. For now, just note how Unicorns use these symbols for opposites (star and crescent) to designate numbers opposite to each other.

The crescent symbol cannot be omitted, because it is the only way to inform that the number is opposite to the "default" positive.

These two symbols can be also used for addition and subtraction. Actually, this is the origin of these symbols: Every number is constructed by adding or subtracting to/from zero. It was the case also with our Human number system, but probably nobody remembers that nowadays. For example, +1 is a shorthand notation for 0+1, and -1 is a shorthand for 0-1. The zero was being omitted, because it was default, and with time, people forgot about that. It could be found only in very old dusty books by curious truth seekers.

Fractions

Next, we need some method for denoting fractions, or parts of a whole. I chose the horn symbol for these, from several reasons.

First, because it reminds me our Human slash sign "/" used for division and constructing fractions. But notice how I used it just as a prefix for a number to show that it's an inverse number: there's no number required before it, as we Humans write for example "1/2" to mean a half. It's enough to write something like "/2", because the unit in the numerator is default. If you need a different numerator, then you just prefix the horn glyph with a proper number. For example, if "/2" means "one half", then writing "3/2" means "three halves" (three times the half "/2"). This is similar to how Ancient Egyptians were writing their fractions: they put a mouth glyph above a number to show that this number means the number of parts in a whole. But when such a "part" is prefixed by some other number (the numerator), then this number is meant to be the whole, which of the other number (the denominator) is a part. So this symbol can be used also for division, because it can show into what number of parts you want to divide some other number.

Second, because the horn glyph represents Magic, and Magic is often used to change one things into others. In this case, it changes a number into its inverse. Spells can be used both ways (if you know both sides of Magic, of course), so when you inverse something twice, you're back where you started. And this is how fractions work in our World too: when you invert a number twice, you'll get the original number back unchanged. Also, there's another connection to Magic in the use of this glyph for division: magical energy is produced by "dividing the vacuum" and separating the opposites.

I haven't chosen any symbol for multiplication, because it can be written by just preceding a symbol with a number of times it has to be repeated. Like in our Human world we write "2n" to mean "two ens" (or "two times en"), or "xy" to mean "eks times why". The only problem with this approach is when you need to multiply two literal numbers, because then you need something to separate them, to avoid blending their digits. For now, let's just say that we can separate them by a space. But if it turns out that this isn't enough, I'll try to find some symbol for multiplication.

Powers and exponents

I used a thunder bolt glyph for making powers, since from the very beginning I decided that this glyph symbolizes strength and power. I append one thunder bolt after a number to square it, and two thunder bolts to cube it. For higher powers, I append just one thunder bolt and follow it with a number which is meant to be the exponent of the power (this tells how much the number needs to be multiplied with itself to make the power). Single and double thunder bolts are just a shorthand notation for this, because these two powers are most commonly used in Geometry (since there are some "technical difficulties" with imagining more dimensions than three ;-J ). When you see one thunder bolt, and no exponent after it, just assume that the exponent is 2.

Roots, bloody roots... :-P

In our Human world, we use a special symbol to denote roots. Most people don't know that this symbol evolved from the small letter "r" which has been put before (and over) a number to mean that this number is a "root". In Latin it was called "radix", which also means "root". But why "root"? Because those clever Ancients used geometry to describe numbers. And they had a hierarchy of "species" of numbers, associated with their subsequent geometrical dimensions: the "root" was just "x" (the first power of x), associated with a line, or base. Then there was "square", which was just "x²" or "xx" (the second power of x), associated with an actual square, a two-dimensional figure. Next there was the "cube", which is "x³" or "xxx" (the third power of x), associated with an actual cube, a three-dimensional figure. So the "root" was the actual "root" of their geometrical system: the place where it all grew from, the basis for all these higher-dimensional figures.

But Unicorns don't have any special symbol for roots, because they know that it is just a fractional power of some other number. For example, when they have a number representing the area of a square, and they want to know the length of its side (or its square root), they also know that the square is a two-dimensional figure, and its side is one-dimensional, which is just half the dimension of the square. And they know how exponents are related to dimensions. So they use a fractional exponent of one-half to mean the square root. You can see it in my table, where after the thunder bolt glyph representing power, there is a horn glyph which is used for "magically inverting" numbers and turning them into fractions. Those two together mean the fractional power, which is a root. By default, it's just a square root (the exponent of one half).

Logarithms

I reserved also the snake glyph for logarithms, because it reminds me a logarithmic spiral. For now, it is used only for natural logarithms. I didn't figured out yet how to use it for other bases.

And so much for the arithmetic operations and different kinds of numbers.
But there are still some symbols left in my table, so let me describe them now.

Equality and inequality

I've made use of two head symbols to symbolize equal sign. It was pretty obvious for me: Head symbolizes an "idea". So when you put two such ideas side-by-side (in the same way you put these head glyphs), you are comparing these ideas.

And now, when these heads are turned towards each other (they're looking into each other's eyes, or meet face-to-face), they "agree" with each other, so this is a sign for equality of these ideas; they are the same, as mirror images of each other. And they are really mirror images in the equation: the same idea, when placed on the other side of the equation, changes into its own opposite.

But when these heads are turned away from each other, this means "disagreement", that is, inequality. It means that these two ideas are separate from each other, they have nothing in common. It can be used to mean a contradiction.

I still need to think about representing "greater", "smaller", "greater or equal" and "smaller or equal", though.

Parentheses

I chose the horse and tail glyphs for parenthesis, because they naturally come together: When you see a tail, you should look for a horse, because there's rarely a tail without a horse attached to it somewhere ;-) So horses and their tails must match up with each other. And the more tails you encounter, the more horses you should expect to balance them. Just like parentheses work in our Human world ;-)

Infinity

And the last symbol is two horses in a row. I chose this one to mean infinity, because I imagined that this horse is walking. And two such walking horses can be interpreted as "walking and walking...", without end, up to infinity. But it can also mean an unfinished process, like an infinite series, or infinite digital expansion of a number, "and so on..." (pun intended).

And this is it for now.
If you have some other ideas of how to extend this system, feel free to tell me about it ;-)

So let us now take a look of how these symbols could be used to make some actual formulas.

A bunch of formulas

Here are some examples of formulas made of these symbols. You can try your own with decoding them now ;-)
The first one is this:



And the second one is this:



Can you recognize them? :->
I'll show you the answers soon so you could compare your guesses with mine ;-)
You can also try to build your own formulas to see how these symbols work in practice.

Edited February 27, 2013 by SasQ

[Starswirl the Trixie 975]

To liven up this thread, let me describe you today a little bit of Unicorn Math ;-)

 

Warning: This is not based on the show, just my own ideas.

 

The Science of Algebra

 

Here's how Unicorns write the word "algebra" in their language:

Actually, this word doesn't mean "algebra" literally, because this word is Human invention. But they use a Unicorn counterpart of this word, which has a similar meaning. So what exactly this word means?

 

Well, let's decode the symbols. It all starts from the root word which means "balance". Literally it is "bright and dark together" ("bright" is symbolized by the star glyph, and "dark" is symbolized by the crescent glyph). These are the opposites in perfect equilibrium. When we attach to it the horn glyph, which means "Magic", we get , that is, "the balance of Magic". Now we only need to prefix it with a head glyph, which symbolizes "idea" or "wisdom" or "science", and we get our original word, which we can now decode as "the science of balancing Magic" :-)

 

Why such a name and what does it have to do with "algebra"?

Well, to answer that, we need to understand that our Human name "algebra" is not just some proper name of a branch of mathematics. The origin of this word is in Arabic language, which can be understood when we decode the title of a book by ancient Persian scholar, Muhammad ben Musa al-Khwarizmi ("Muhammad, son of Moses, from the city of Khwarizm"), which in Europe is called the father of Algebra, because all our knowledge about this branch of mathematics came from his book.

 

The book was titled "al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala", which is now often translated as just "The Compendious Book on Calculation, Algebra and Solving Equations", which doesn't say us anything about what this "algebra" really is. But if we translate it literally from Arabic, it will be: "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing"! That's right: "al-jabr" literally means "(the) completion", and "al-muqabala" means "(the) balancing". Those "the" articles ("al-" in Arabic) indicate that those are not just some arbitrary operations, but the special operations which this book is all about.

 

Also note how the word "al-muqabala" is similar to the Hebrew name "Qabala" for the secret knowledge of Jewish mysticism. This is not a coincidence! This mathematical knowledge we now call "Algebra" is really a part of this ancient knowledge, which was all about balance of the opposites. It can be applied to Mathematics, but it can be also applied to many other branches of Science as well, like electricity, pressure, thermodynamics, wave motion etc., because the whole inner workings of the Universe is all based on the very same mathematical principles.

 

Do you see the connection now? :->

Unicorn word for Algebra tells us about balancing the opposite sides of Magic: Bright Magic and Dark Magic, since they know that this knowledge can be applied not only to Mathemagic, but to all Magic in general.

 

Knowing this, we can now continue to the "nuts and bolts" of Unicorn mathematics.

 

Unicorn's mathematical notation

 

Here is a table of mathematical notation used by Unicorns. Below the table I explain my choices for all these symbols.

 

 

Zero

 

First of all, I used the round-shaped glyph (which I still don't know what it depicts) for zero, because this shape was the most similar to our human 0. It's round, and it has a little hole/dot in the middle, which could be related to the Ancient Greek notion of monad. It was something similar to a point, but not having any particular place in space; just a point, without any dimensions or other internal parts. It is "all contained in nothing".

 

Positive and negative

 

The star symbol has been used for positive numbers, because they are the "bright side" of Number Magic. In our Human world, the word "positive" is related to the word "position", and it's derived from a Latin word "positio", which meant "a place". So "positive numbers" are the numbers which "take some place" (or "exist", are "real").

 

This star symbol can be omitted if it's obvious from the context, because numbers are positive by default. But it is often prefixed to avoid numbers in a sum to mix with each other.

 

The crescent symbol has been used for negative numbers, because they are the "dark side" of Number Magic, the opposite for "bright" positive numbers. In our Human world, the word "negative" is from Latin "negare", which means "to deny", because these numbers were denied for millennia as non-existent, "defying common sense", since they were "less than nothing", which was considered impossible. Although nowadays most people can understand these numbers when applied to debts, or temperatures below zero, they still have problems with them when it comes to negative lengths, areas, volumes, frequencies, masses etc. But this is whole another story. For now, just note how Unicorns use these symbols for opposites (star and crescent) to designate numbers opposite to each other.

 

The crescent symbol cannot be omitted, because it is the only way to inform that the number is opposite to the "default" positive.

 

These two symbols can be also used for addition and subtraction. Actually, this is the origin of these symbols: Every number is constructed by adding or subtracting to/from zero. It was the case also with our Human number system, but probably nobody remembers that nowadays. For example, +1 is a shorthand notation for 0+1, and -1 is a shorthand for 0-1. The zero was being omitted, because it was default, and with time, people forgot about that. It could be found only in very old dusty books by curious truth seekers.

 

Fractions

 

Next, we need some method for denoting fractions, or parts of a whole. I chose the horn symbol for these, from several reasons.

 

First, because it reminds me our Human slash sign "/" used for division and constructing fractions. But notice how I used it just as a prefix for a number to show that it's an inverse number: there's no number required before it, as we Humans write for example "1/2" to mean a half. It's enough to write something like "/2", because the unit in the numerator is default. If you need a different numerator, then you just prefix the horn glyph with a proper number. For example, if "/2" means "one half", then writing "3/2" means "three halves" (three times the half "/2"). This is similar to how Ancient Egyptians were writing their fractions: they put a mouth glyph above a number to show that this number means the number of parts in a whole. But when such a "part" is prefixed by some other number (the numerator), then this number is meant to be the whole, which of the other number (the denominator) is a part. So this symbol can be used also for division, because it can show into what number of parts you want to divide some other number.

 

Second, because the horn glyph represents Magic, and Magic is often used to change one things into others. In this case, it changes a number into its inverse. Spells can be used both ways (if you know both sides of Magic, of course), so when you inverse something twice, you're back where you started. And this is how fractions work in our World too: when you invert a number twice, you'll get the original number back unchanged. Also, there's another connection to Magic in the use of this glyph for division: magical energy is produced by "dividing the vacuum" and separating the opposites.

 

I haven't chosen any symbol for multiplication, because it can be written by just preceding a symbol with a number of times it has to be repeated. Like in our Human world we write "2n" to mean "two ens" (or "two times en"), or "xy" to mean "eks times why". The only problem with this approach is when you need to multiply two literal numbers, because then you need something to separate them, to avoid blending their digits. For now, let's just say that we can separate them by a space. But if it turns out that this isn't enough, I'll try to find some symbol for multiplication.

 

Powers and exponents

 

I used a thunder bolt glyph for making powers, since from the very beginning I decided that this glyph symbolizes strength and power. I append one thunder bolt after a number to square it, and two thunder bolts to cube it. For higher powers, I append just one thunder bolt and follow it with a number which is meant to be the exponent of the power (this tells how much the number needs to be multiplied with itself to make the power). Single and double thunder bolts are just a shorthand notation for this, because these two powers are most commonly used in Geometry (since there are some "technical difficulties" with imagining more dimensions than three ;-J ). When you see one thunder bolt, and no exponent after it, just assume that the exponent is 2.

 

Roots, bloody roots... :-P

 

In our Human world, we use a special symbol to denote roots. Most people don't know that this symbol evolved from the small letter "r" which has been put before (and over) a number to mean that this number is a "root". In Latin it was called "radix", which also means "root". But why "root"? Because those clever Ancients used geometry to describe numbers. And they had a hierarchy of "species" of numbers, associated with their subsequent geometrical dimensions: the "root" was just "x" (the first power of x), associated with a line, or base. Then there was "square", which was just "x²" or "xx" (the second power of x), associated with an actual square, a two-dimensional figure. Next there was the "cube", which is "x³" or "xxx" (the third power of x), associated with an actual cube, a three-dimensional figure. So the "root" was the actual "root" of their geometrical system: the place where it all grew from, the basis for all these higher-dimensional figures.

 

But Unicorns don't have any special symbol for roots, because they know that it is just a fractional power of some other number. For example, when they have a number representing the area of a square, and they want to know the length of its side (or its square root), they also know that the square is a two-dimensional figure, and its side is one-dimensional, which is just half the dimension of the square. And they know how exponents are related to dimensions. So they use a fractional exponent of one-half to mean the square root. You can see it in my table, where after the thunder bolt glyph representing power, there is a horn glyph which is used for "magically inverting" numbers and turning them into fractions. Those two together mean the fractional power, which is a root. By default, it's just a square root (the exponent of one half).

 

Logarithms

 

I reserved also the snake glyph for logarithms, because it reminds me a logarithmic spiral. For now, it is used only for natural logarithms. I didn't figured out yet how to use it for other bases.

 

And so much for the arithmetic operations and different kinds of numbers.

But there are still some symbols left in my table, so let me describe them now.

 

Equality and inequality

 

I've made use of two head symbols to symbolize equal sign. It was pretty obvious for me: Head symbolizes an "idea". So when you put two such ideas side-by-side (in the same way you put these head glyphs), you are comparing these ideas.

 

And now, when these heads are turned towards each other (they're looking into each other's eyes, or meet face-to-face), they "agree" with each other, so this is a sign for equality of these ideas; they are the same, as mirror images of each other. And they are really mirror images in the equation: the same idea, when placed on the other side of the equation, changes into its own opposite.

 

But when these heads are turned away from each other, this means "disagreement", that is, inequality. It means that these two ideas are separate from each other, they have nothing in common. It can be used to mean a contradiction.

 

I still need to think about representing "greater", "smaller", "greater or equal" and "smaller or equal", though.

 

Parentheses

 

I chose the horse and tail glyphs for parenthesis, because they naturally come together: When you see a tail, you should look for a horse, because there's rarely a tail without a horse attached to it somewhere ;-) So horses and their tails must match up with each other. And the more tails you encounter, the more horses you should expect to balance them. Just like parentheses work in our Human world ;-)

 

Infinity

 

And the last symbol is two horses in a row. I chose this one to mean infinity, because I imagined that this horse is walking. And two such walking horses can be interpreted as "walking and walking...", without end, up to infinity. But it can also mean an unfinished process, like an infinite series, or infinite digital expansion of a number, "and so on..." (pun intended).

 

And this is it for now.

If you have some other ideas of how to extend this system, feel free to tell me about it ;-)

 

So let us now take a look of how these symbols could be used to make some actual formulas.

 

A bunch of formulas

 

Here are some examples of formulas made of these symbols. You can try your own with decoding them now ;-)

The first one is this:

 

 

And the second one is this:

 

 

Can you recognize them? :->

I'll show you the answers soon so you could compare your guesses with mine ;-)

You can also try to build your own formulas to see how these symbols work in practice.

Very good work. That is how math SHOULD be done in Equestria. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, it's different. The writers, rather than creating a completely different language, just used Arabic numerals and the traditional Western way of notating them.

 

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120310215917/mlp/images/c/c6/S2E20_twilight_equation.png

[SasQ 1,376]

I know that they use also Arabic numerals and Latin alphabet in Equestria. And I know that they use our Human mathematical notation too. But what if they simply use both? :-)

As I already mentioned, the Unicorn Alphabet is the writing of the Ancient Unicorn scholars. It is used in very old books in the same way as Greek or Latin has been used in our Human World. Unicorns learn how to read it in their schools of Magic, to be able to understand this ancient knowledge. But there is also a "common speech" which is used by the "non-geek" ponies.

Also, the hieroglyphic writing could have a hieratic (cursive, or hand written) counterpart, which is simpler to write with a quill. If you recall my previous table with hieroglyphs and their hieratic counterparts and rewrite my formulas using this hieratic version, you'll notice that it starts to resemble our Human way of writing maths ;-) I chosen those symbols in such a way that this evolution could be possible. For example, the star hieratic could simplify to our "+", and the crescent, after some slight changes, to our "-". The horn is our division slash "/" right away. They just need to write the numerator always explicitly. There could be some problem with powers, but if Unicorns noticed that in some situations there are some difficulties to avoid mixing symbols, they could first start to write them a little bit higher, and then drop out the thunder bolts, leaving only the exponents.

As you can see, in my formulas I used Arabic numerals and Latin letters too. But I decided to do it that way for simpler explanation of these symbols. In original Ancient Unicorns' scriptures, these numbers has been written with their original glyphs, and marked in some way to discriminate them from the actual math symbols (for example, by separating them with spaces, or little dots, or underlining... there are many possibilities). In our world, Ancient Greeks had the same problem, since they were writing their numbers as groups of letters of their alphabet, where each letter had its own numerical value. Nowadays we don't see the problem, because we use different glyphs for numbers (Arabic numerals; well, actually Hindu) and different for letters, and still different for math symbols.

Twilight Sparkle is a scholar / magician, so she can read and write mathemagic in many different forms which fit her needs. She knows Unicorns' hieroglyphs and hieratics, and common Latin scripts (if this is not just some hardsubbed transliteration of their own writing system into Latin for our Human spectators to understand ;-) ).

P.S.: You didn't have to quote my whole post in your answer, since this post is just below mine and we can guess that your answer is related to it "by default" ;-) Even if your post were way below, you still don't have to quote it all, just a little part which allows others to know what you're referring to. Such long quotes are very hard to read and make harder to find your answer. Can you edit it and delete this quote or at least trim it down? Then your own answer would be easier to find in it.

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ