Alphabet of the Unicorns

[Stalliongrad 982]

 

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". img-1075713-2-TailSuffix.jpg 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...

 

Perhaps the tail glyph is an indicator of movement. I love that. A star plus the tail equals a comet then a horse plus the tail may indicate "to go on a journey".

[Krimson Dawn 17]

I can't help but feel idiotic reading this. I must applaud you for decoding this, something I wouldn't dare try for risk of brain explosion.

 

Honestly 'bout had that happen here 0.o, so yea. Continue the good work.

[GuerrierCosmique 146]

The tongue spoken in Equestria, me always thought about it, too.

 

Like Lord of the Rings and Dune being portrayed in English to the audience, but the "real" language used by the characters in-universe being Westron and Galach, English in FIM could be only some sort of "dubbed" version of the real pony world.

 

No guess if there is reason behind those symbols. Making up a language isn't done easy, it took Tolkien a lifetime to fully develope two Elvish tongues, Quenya and Sindarin.

 

All this would mean the characters' real names are other ones, too. Twilight Sparkle is just a translation into English, as are Pinkie Pie and Lyra Heartstrings or Spitfire. Celestia and Luna, too both are Latin. Pinkie's full name is "Pinkamena Diane Pie", maybe all other ponies have such names.... hmm... again "Pie" is an English word and Pinkamena comes from "pink".

 

Except if Equestria's daily language in fact is just plain American English, like Galactic Basic Standard in Star Wars.

[Freewave 1,145]

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

 

It likely may be but its a cool idea that there may be either a real of fake language embedded into mlp. After all Klingon is a real language used by Trekkie's that 's in part of their show and MLP is also made by adults as well who could be going the distance and having it actually make sense. Time and research will tell.

[SasQ 1,376]

I played with Unicorn alphabet a little bit, and I managed to encode a sentence you are all familiar with:

Explanation:

As I've said earlier in this thread, the meaning of a word is combined from the meanings of the particular glyphs it is made of.

First, we see two horse/pony silhouettes. Their meaning is self-explanatory. They're turned towards each other, so if they were alone, this would mean "a meeting" (noun), or "coming together".

But between them we can see a rolled rope. The rope could mean "bond" or "connection" or "link". If it were used alone, it would mean "and" (connective). But here it is used in between two other glyphs, as a part of a word, so it changes the meaning from "a meeting" into "friends", since two ponies coming together and making a bond between them surely become friends 

Then there is a Unicorn head before all those glyphs. The head alone could mean "idea" or "thought". But when it is used before a word, it changes its meaning into an abstract idea. In this case it transforms "friends" (noun) into "friendship" (abstract noun). You can think of the head prefix as an equivalent of English suffixes such as "-ship", "-ness", "-ity" etc.

In a similar way, horn symbol can be used as a prefix. Alone it means "Magic" (since Unicorns use their horns to direct their magical energy towards external objects). It can also mean "change", "transform", "make" etc. It suggests some action taking place. So when you use it before a word, it changes it from noun into a verb. For example, if you replace the head glyph in "friendship" by the horn glyph, it would change into "making friends". If head glyph means "thought", then it changes into "thinking" when prefixed with a horn. You've got the idea 

Then we have another word which consists of two Unicorn heads facing each other. Each of them alone would mean "idea" or "thought". But when they're next to each other... first, we can be sure that it would be something abstract; second, there are those ideas facing each other, which means "agreement", "accord", "consent", and also "the same", "equal". If those heads were turning backs to each other, this would mean "disagreement", "discord", "difference", "unequal", which used alone could mean "no", "not" (negation). When used before a word, it would negate its meaning (e.g. "not friends"). But here we have "equal", because they face each other. When this word is put between two other words, it means that they mean the same. One is the same idea as the other. It could be used in definitions or explanations. I also use it in Unicorn Mathematics as the equality sign, "=".

The last symbol is just a horn, which means "Magic" when used alone. (Actually, I wondered if I should have prefixed it with head symbol to distinguish it from "make", "change" etc. meanings. But let it stay this way for now.)

So we can translate it roughly as "Friendship equals Magic" which, more elegantly, will mean "Friendship is Magic" 

What do you think? Does it make sense?

Maybe try this game too and make some words yourself I'm curious about what you will get.

P.S.: Since we have seen only 10 glyphs so far, there are 10 one-glyph words, 100 two-glyph words, 1000 three-glyph words and 10000 four-glyph words possible, which makes 11110 possible words in total in the Unicornian language. Not all of them would probably make sense, though. But it's still a whole lot. So you can indulge your creativity

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ

[Kel_Grym 1,917]

This is really neat.

 

I had a conlang phase when I went through college. I never finished it, but I had like 90% of basic grammar rules done for a language tailored to a race of fire breathers...thinkin about it, I need to pick that project up again and finish it one day.

 

I thought about making a conlang for Equestrian ponies, and if I did, it'd probably include:

 

Gender inflections for different kinds of foods. Greens vs. Sweets.

 

Varying levels of plolite ness. Please and Pretty please with cherries on top, could be expressed in affixes attached to verbs.

 

Word order would probably just be SVO, and the language would be fusional. As for phonemes and phonotactics, I never got that far into it, but there's room for experimentation, especially if we want to implement 'whinneys'.

Edited April 8, 2014 by KelGrym

[SasQ 1,376]

Welp, seems to me that you're putting the carriage before the horse (pun intended ) by choosing what features of other languages to include in your conlan, instead of growing it from the grass roots. This is not how real languages evolved.

First of all, the speech comes before writing. Most real languages I know were first spoken, and only then the writing system has been invented for them to make it less volatile. When you can only speak, you can communicate with others only in person. Writing is a way around this. It allows speech to be stored and then read later.

My theory of evolution of writing is that first symbols were simply ideograms which represented the ideas directly. Then simplified a bit. Complex meanings were being formed from simple meanings by agglomerating these ideograms together. Each ideogram also represented a word of speech. When agglomerating, the first phonemes of these words has been used in short, and joined together to form a complex word.

First languages could probably use only vowels, since they're easiest to speak, but also the most difficult to distinguish. So vowels become only the "carrier wave" for other information modulated over it: the consonants, which introduce different obstacles in the voice channel to change its sound, abrupt it, or even block entirely. That's why consonants are the basis of the most ancient languages, like Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Babylonian cuneiforms. All these languages are syllabic abjads, writing down only (or mostly) consonants in a syllable, because this reflects the evolution level of speech: only consonants had any meaning; vowels were only to carry them on. It can be also observed that many ancient languages repeat the same fragment of a symbol over and over and just add some attachments to it, and this repeatedly occurring symbol usually means some generic vowel.

Today many of these languages have vowels, or some of the letters transformed from consonants to vowels with time, to accommodate for the growing complexity of modern speech, where vowels become another way to introduce slight distinctions into words' meanings, or change the meaning altogether. Now vowels are more important than earlier on. There's also another phenomenon occurring: of dropping redundant vowels instead, when the subsequent consonants can be easily distinguished without them.

No nation is creating its language in the way you described: by thinking over what features it would be nice to use. Instead, they usually start from inventing words for the most basic objects and activities they meet in their everyday lives. They name themselves, their body parts, directions in space, common places, usual objects, most frequent activities (like eating, drinking, sleeping, living, being, having, doing, walking, seeing, taking, giving...). At that level they don't think about tenses or grammar or inflexion yet. It all comes later, when they notice that they need these distinctions to be more precise.

As for the Equestrian languages, writing and numerical systems, I think one has to account for the fact that they're all horses, so this should be the main theme of their language. I like how the Unicorn Alphabet already incorporates this idea, since all its glyphs refer somehow to Equines, and Unicorns in particular. I think their number system should be base 4, since they have 4 legs. And the speech should also reflect the fact they're horses, and be horse-related. We can see some examples of that in the show, when they say "anypony" instead of "anyone", or "hooves" instead of "feet" etc. I can imagine this being a translation from the original Equine language where such phrases are natural to them.

Unicorns are the most magical and intelligent of these three kinds of Ponies, so their language and writing should reflect that. I doubt they would be happy using language which is overly complicated, with complex grammar rules and inflection. I imagine it being more structured and thought over, as ancient languages were in our world. It could even be based on the language of Ancient Alicorns, similarly as all ancient languages in our world are supposedly received from some superior God-like beings (extraterrestrials perhaps?).

OK now you know what ideas I keep in mind when designing/restoring the language of the Unicorns In case you would like to play this game too.

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ

[-Inactive- 78]

sorry if this was already mentioned but in season 1 episode 5 twilight is reading and she turns the page back so maybe that could lead to something but it is probably disproved that they read from the back of the book to the front but it should just be mentioned that she does turn the page back when reading the book normally and not searching for something in a book

[Kel_Grym 1,917]

Welp, seems to me that you're putting the carriage before the horse (pun intended ) by choosing what features of other languages to include in your conlan, instead of growing it from the grass roots. This is not how real languages evolved.

 

First of all, the speech comes before writing. Most real languages I know were first spoken, and only then the writing system has been invented for them to make it less volatile. When you can only speak, you can communicate with others only in person. Writing is a way around this. It allows speech to be stored and then read later.

 

My theory of evolution of writing is that first symbols were simply ideograms which represented the ideas directly. Then simplified a bit. Complex meanings were being formed from simple meanings by agglomerating these ideograms together. Each ideogram also represented a word of speech. When agglomerating, the first phonemes of these words has been used in short, and joined together to form a complex word.

 

First languages could probably use only vowels, since they're easiest to speak, but also the most difficult to distinguish. So vowels become only the "carrier wave" for other information modulated over it: the consonants, which introduce different obstacles in the voice channel to change its sound, abrupt it, or even block entirely. That's why consonants are the basis of the most ancient languages, like Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Babylonian cuneiforms. All these languages are syllabic abjads, writing down only (or mostly) consonants in a syllable, because this reflects the evolution level of speech: only consonants had any meaning; vowels were only to carry them on. It can be also observed that many ancient languages repeat the same fragment of a symbol over and over and just add some attachments to it, and this repeatedly occurring symbol usually means some generic vowel.

 

Today many of these languages have vowels, or some of the letters transformed from consonants to vowels with time, to accommodate for the growing complexity of modern speech, where vowels become another way to introduce slight distinctions into words' meanings, or change the meaning altogether. Now vowels are more important than earlier on. There's also another phenomenon occurring: of dropping redundant vowels instead, when the subsequent consonants can be easily distinguished without them.

 

No nation is creating its language in the way you described: by thinking over what features it would be nice to use. Instead, they usually start from inventing words for the most basic objects and activities they meet in their everyday lives. They name themselves, their body parts, directions in space, common places, usual objects, most frequent activities (like eating, drinking, sleeping, living, being, having, doing, walking, seeing, taking, giving...). At that level they don't think about tenses or grammar or inflexion yet. It all comes later, when they notice that they need these distinctions to be more precise.

 

As for the Equestrian languages, writing and numerical systems, I think one has to account for the fact that they're all horses, so this should be the main theme of their language. I like how the Unicorn Alphabet already incorporates this idea, since all its glyphs refer somehow to Equines, and Unicorns in particular. I think their number system should be base 4, since they have 4 legs. And the speech should also reflect the fact they're horses, and be horse-related. We can see some examples of that in the show, when they say "anypony" instead of "anyone", or "hooves" instead of "feet" etc. I can imagine this being a translation from the original Equine language where such phrases are natural to them.

 

Unicorns are the most magical and intelligent of these three kinds of Ponies, so their language and writing should reflect that. I doubt they would be happy using language which is overly complicated, with complex grammar rules and inflection. I imagine it being more structured and thought over, as ancient languages were in our world. It could even be based on the language of Ancient Alicorns, similarly as all ancient languages in our world are supposedly received from some superior God-like beings (extraterrestrials perhaps?).

 

OK now you know what ideas I keep in mind when designing/restoring the language of the Unicorns In case you would like to play this game too.

 

My Equestrian conlang idea was for silly fun, really.    I don't know if pony language would seperate different tasting foods into genders like that or not. It is a bit of a stretch. Gender denoting race would be more likely, however.

 

I agree with your language theory though. I imagine that pony language would have started out as simple as the language of our early ancestors. My approach to conlanging is more fantasy based though. I do take thought in how biological function affects a language, however.

 

In my language that I was making up for the Nara (my old fire breathing alien race idea) I had put a lot of thought how thier biological function would affect thier language and concluded that Gender denoting combustible, non-conbustible, and fiery nouns was appropriate.

 

I'm thinking that biological function would have impacted development of thier language too. As of right now, all Equestrians seem to speak the same language, but I imagine that in the time before the three races unified, Pegasi and Unicorn languages would have been drasticaly different.

 

Examples:

 

I threw the ball (physicaly thrown)

 

Mae ekekt vra olo

 

I threw the ball (magically thrown)

 

Mae ekeakt vra olo

 

This is just a word for word sort of translation thing I made up on the fly. Ekekt would be "throw" and inflects as ekeact to denote throwing by magical use. I choose to express this as an infix rather than a prefix or suffix. This kind of inflection could work for almost anything.

 

Walk = Terota

Walk + magical denotation = Tearota (magicaly walk could mean something akin to walking outside ones body in astral projection)

 

As time went on however, I suppose these distinctions would have been lost with more interactions with the other pony races and finally rendered obsolete in a unified pony society.

 

[Edit: Unicorn symbol + Verb, could have been used to express this kind of magical denotation in language]

Edited April 9, 2014 by KelGrym

[Serbon div 386]

@,

Maybe the writing in the first book is stylized or archaic. 

[Rockymoo 2,137]

Alright, this is downright kickass. What I've noticed a lot in the thread is the concern of the symbols not having an actual meaning, which could very well be the case. Even if that ends up being true, you've still got yourself one helluva headcanon developed there, and I love it. Rock on.

[Dainbow Rash 80]

Wow! I hope that the language is eventually decoded. I would learn it lol. It would be pretty epic if mlp had a readable language like Legend of Zelda and Star Trek.

[Guest]

This... is... BRILLIANT !

I never thought of actually to read what was written !

When I finally do my "Let's-re-watch-all-the-episodes" day, I am going to see if I can find any more equestrian writings to contribute to decrypting this mysterious language

 

For the two different alphabets... My guess is that, considering the simplicity of the first ones compared to the one in Spike's recipy book, is that they were the first invented. Similar evolutions of writing can be found in human history, and it would make sense for a book from Twilight's library retracing the history of Equestria to be written in some older language.

[SilverStarApple 849]

Someone needs to make an online translator for this language. It'd be way cooler than the Pokemon Language Translator.

[SasQ 1,376]

On 4/9/2014 at 10:54 AM, madjack2001 said:

sorry if this was already mentioned but in season 1 episode 5 twilight is reading and she turns the page back

Yes, it was: in the very first post, near the end of point 7.

But if you noticed it all by yourself, you can congratulate yourself

On 4/9/2014 at 10:54 AM, madjack2001 said:

so maybe that could lead to something but it is probably disproved that they read from the back of the book to the front but it should just be mentioned that she does turn the page back when reading the book normally and not searching for something in a book

Interestingly, in another TV show I watch recently, "Davinci's Demons", there's a scene where Davinci finds a secret book of some Jew, written in Hebrew, and when he turns its pages, he does it from back to front, exactly as Twilight do in MLP:FiM episodes. I don't know if Hebrew is really written in books from back to front, but it is written from right to left, so maybe there are some similarities.

On 4/9/2014 at 12:38 PM, KelGrym said:

I don't know if pony language would seperate different tasting foods into genders like that or not. It is a bit of a stretch.

It is simpler if gender is applied only to living things which actually have gender. I still find it quite weird that in some languages gender is used to inanimate objects. Especially that in different languages, the choice of gender for the same object can be different, which is very confusing. That's what happens when something is applied where it doesn't fit.

Hmm... but in a second thought, there can be some sense in that:

I base my philosophy of Equestria on the observation that their world is driven by the opposite types of Magic: Bright Magic and Dark Magic, which are like Yin and Yang in our Human World in some Eastern civilizations. This concept is more general, though, and it applies to everything in Nature, from math and physics to psychology and economy. In biology, gender is another manifestation of this idea of "equal opposites which complement each other". So...

Maybe this could work the other way around?

I mean, Unicorns could have some way in their language to specify these opposites (actually they have: the Sun/Star? and Crescent/Moon symbols). These symbols can be simply reused to specify gender. What do you think about this idea?

But I guess these two symbols alone could be insufficient, since they can mean negation as well. So I guess these symbols have to be joined with something else, to be understood as gender specification. Maybe with the Pony/Horse glyph?

On 4/9/2014 at 12:38 PM, KelGrym said:

As of right now, all Equestrians seem to speak the same language, but I imagine that in the time before the three races unified, Pegasi and Unicorn languages would have been drasticaly different.

Well, I had a somewhat similar idea when I first counted the glyphs in the Unicorn Alphabet. There are only 10 symbols ─ quite few; and many of them are Unicorn-specific. What's more, I can see the Moon/Crescent glyph there, but I cannot find its opposite: the Sun (unless we agree that the Star means the Sun). So I thought to myself:

What if this is not the complete alphabet yet?

What if all three races of Equines received a different subset of the true Ancient Alicorn language? :>

They have some common subset of glyphs, so they could understand each other, but there are also glyphs which are specific to each particular race. E.g. Unicorns have this Horn glyph to symbolize Magic, because only them can use Magic. They also have the Unicorn glyph (horned head), to name their own race.

But what if Pegasi have their own special extensions to the language? E.g. they can have some Wings glyph to symbolize flying, cloud symbol to symbolize... well.. the clouds, and maybe something about light-weight objects etc.

Earth Ponies, on the other hand, can have some more symbols related to Earth, such as flowers, grass, rocks, apples etc.

This could even be one of the reasons these races fought in the past: they couldn't understand each other well enough, not knowing the symbols specific to the other races, and mis-interpreting their writings.

And there could even be some ancient secret which could be revealed only when these races will join their alphabets together into one back again, to be able to read some ancient book about their common past.

Just a thought

On 4/9/2014 at 12:38 PM, KelGrym said:

 Walk = Terota Walk + magical denotation = Tearota (magicaly walk could mean something akin to walking outside ones body in astral projection)

Interesting idea!  I'll check if this can be incorporated somehow.

On 4/9/2014 at 12:49 PM, Comrade Serbon said:

Maybe the writing in the first book is stylized or archaic.

It might be. See the table in my first post about hieroglyphic and hieratic (hand-written) counterparts, and some sample of hand-written form here (or should I rather say "hoof-written"? or mouth-written? ). I have already found some evidence that this could be the case (or just the creators of the show read this forum too ).

On 4/9/2014 at 12:56 PM, Rockymoo said:

What I've noticed a lot in the thread is the concern of the symbols not having an actual meaning, which could very well be the case.

Sure! And I'm afraid this is actually the case. Up to this time, I couldn't get any answer about that from the creators of the show, and I asked many of them already :-/ But even if this is just some random gibberish, we can make it work ourselves (that's what fans are for, right? ), filling the gaps left by the creators. This can be lot of fun

On 4/15/2014 at 5:41 PM, EngiFalcon said:

For the two different alphabets...

Notice that they are not so much different  There are some similarities. Same is with Human languages and writings: One can still recognize many similarities between the Latin alphabet used by most of the Western world today, and the ancient Phoenician alphabet which Latin has been based on (not directly, though).

On 4/15/2014 at 5:41 PM, EngiFalcon said:

My guess is that, considering the simplicity of the first ones compared to the one in Spike's recipe book, is that they were the first invented. Similar evolutions of writing can be found in human history

Exactly.

On 4/15/2014 at 5:41 PM, EngiFalcon said:

and it would make sense for a book from Twilight's library retracing the history of Equestria to be written in some older language.

Seems to me as the Ancient Unicorn writing system, or at least the one used by Unicorns for their magical books.

It's also worth to consider the option that this particular book is about Nightmare Moon, so it could be that it uses only a limited subset of the true language, related to some darker stuff. This could explain why there are Crescent Moon symbols, but no Sun symbol. I would be surprised to find a Sun symbol in a text which is mostly about some darker things ;-J

On 4/15/2014 at 6:00 PM, Asquerade said:

Someone needs to make an online translator for this language. It'd be way cooler than the Pokemon Language Translator.

Sure! But we need the language first

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ

[Frith is Magick 1,471]

I just want to throw in a possibility for the development of the language. There is a possibility that the Unicorn Alphabet works in a way not dissimilar to the development of Japanese with the development of kana. Japanese started out using Chinese characters for meanings, but also for the sounds of native Japanese words, which is why Kanji have kunyomi an onyomi. The glyphs may have meanings, but they may also be used for their sounds to create words in the same way Hanzi would have been used phonetically before kana. There may be some sort of grammatical or contextual signal for which words use sounds and which use meaning, and, as you've already concluded, different orders and clusters yield different meanings.

 

We also don't know how well "words" in that language resemble words in English or other languages. If a words are a way of communicating ideas, they may communicate different ideas in different ways than humans, meaning sentences would be translated by packets of meaning rather than by units of language as we know them.

[SilverStarApple 849]

I now officially call dibs on being the first person to rickroll anyone in the Ancient Unicorn Language.

[Serbon div 386]

 

 

Phoenician

Cyrillic also reminds of the Phoenician alphabet a lot. And the Greek alphabet (eg. tet = theta). I guess Cyrillic got it from Greek. I blame Cyril and Methodius

[Kel_Grym 1,917]

It is simpler if gender is applied only to living things which actually have gender. I still find it quite weird that in some languages gender is used to inanimate objects. Especially that in different languages, the choice of gender for the same object can be different, which is very confusing. That's what happens when something is applied where it doesn't fit.

 

Aborigonese comes to mind. They have a gender assigned to "Women and dangrous things"

 

What if this is not the complete alphabet yet? What if all three races of Equines received a different subset of the true Ancient Alicorn language? :>

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a hypothetical jackpot.

 

But what if Pegasi have their own special extensions to the language? E.g. they can have some Wings glyph to symbolize flying, cloud symbol to symbolize... well.. the clouds, and maybe something about light-weight objects etc. Earth Ponies, on the other hand, can have some more symbols related to Earth, such as flowers, grass, rocks, apples etc

 

Combine said hypothetical jackpot with creative liscense, and now were on our way to some serious world building.

 

And there could even be some ancient secret which could be revealed only when these races will join their alphabets together into one back again, to be able to read some ancient book about their common past. Just a thought

 

If only I had to the time to make this a fanfic. Stashed into my idea case. [ its mine you hear me! MINE!] j/k

 

Sure! And I'm afraid this is actually the case. Up to this time, I couldn't get any answer about that from the creators of the show, and I asked many of them already :-/ But even if this is just some random gibberish, we can make it work ourselves (that's what fans are for, right? ), filling the gaps left by the creators. This can be lot of fun

 

A fairly large percentage of fan related content comes out of what the writers don't explain. I feel that there is something philosophicaly profound to be said about the productivity of gaps and empty things, but it escapes me.

 

Personally I think it's fair we can make a few assumptions about the Pony language. Considering their culture is extreamly similar to ours, we can justify by science of sociolinguitics and common sense deduction that thier language probably have similar features to ours...to a ceartain extent at least.

 

For example, colors. There is a language out there used by an African tribe that only has two color words apart form dark and light, (more or less accurate, working form memory) One is for pretty much all cool colors and one is for all warm colors.

 

Just by listening to the show, and common sense, this is obviously not the case for Ponies if they really did speak a different language.

 

But that's simple. Now for something harder. Does the Pony language have a "be" verb? Not really a silly question. Of course we hear them say "be" many times in all it's conjugated forms, but if what we are hearing is a dub, then what evidence do we have to support that were not just getting an approximate translation of what they are saying, apart from any instance where the character is saying "Be" or one of it's conjugations alone?

 

If we hear Pinkie Pie say, "I am happy!" how do we know what's being dubbed isn't the equivolent of "I feel happy?"

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

 

Imagine every argument you have ever gotten into because someone confused opinion with fact. If the English language, simply did not have the "Be" verb, I'm willing to bet every argument that ever started with "That show is dumb" would cease to exist, and there would be more specific arguments like "They wrote the show stupidly," or just simply, "I didn't like the show" which would be expressing just their experience itself without stating opinion.

 

What I'm getting at is there is more difficulty expressing a potentialy offensive opinion that "X is stupid" without a "be" verb.

 

"That show is stupid" vs "They wrote that show stupidly" (and the latter is still less offensive because it's not criticizing the whole show, just its writing)

 

More instances of argument over opinion suggest higher probability of a "be" verb at play.

 

From what I've seen of the show, I think they definately (probably) have a "be" verb, or at least an equivelent. You can get away with making an equivicating statement without using a be verb like Arabic does, by stating "Apple red" or "Show Stupid." So my logic isn't hole proof...

 

Does the pony language have tense? In Indonesia, there is no tense in thier language, and from I have heard, Indonesians seem for some reason to have more difficulty getting to work on time than most. I am not really sure if this is a false correlation or not, but I can understand the logic behind it.

 

Lets say that we grant that there is a correlation behind this phenomena and lack of tense in a language. Do we observe Ponies being late more than the cultural usual? Apart from when said lateness is just used for plot device? From what I've seen, not really.

 

Dissecting pony culture through the lense of sociolinguistics in the end only justifies that their language has a high probability of being like our own. Is there anything from what we've seen in pony culture that might suggest something else?

 

I'm not really sure, so I'll leave that up for someone else to analylize. I'm probably just grasping for straws.

 

Lets make a different deduction. Is Pony language something convoluted and complicated like English, or more pure and simple like Japanese?

 

If Equestria was an island nation, then we could safely assume, barring possibility of influence from an overseas culture, that Pony language would be pure and simple compared to English, and even make the bold deduction that phonotacticaly their language is CVCV like japanese, and most other island languages.

 

English, however is...more complicated. http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonology/syllable/syll_phonotactic.html

 

Which of course has to do with its history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_language

 

Now we know Equestria is not a island nation, that it expands a large territory, that the people of Equestria migrated there from somewhere else, and they have had political tensions between thier tribes which suggest the pony tribes have been at war with each other before. War itself has never been proven in the show, but considering the class devision of the Unicorns vs the Earth ponies and the militiristic culture of the Pegasi, it seems to be an extreame possibility that could go without saying.

 

Pony language has probably been put through the slicer more so than English ever has. Until the show gives us more lore to go on, we won't know how far this could really go.

 

So I think it's safe to say its phonotactic constraints are not as simple as CVCV....

Edited April 16, 2014 by KelGrym

[Frith is Magick 1,471]

 

 

Now we know Equestria is not a island nation, that it expands a large territory, that the people of Equestria migrated there from somewhere else, and they have had political tensions between thier tribes which suggest the pony tribes have been at war with each other before. War itself has never been proven in the show, but considering the class devision of the Unicorns vs the Earth ponies and the militiristic culture of the Pegasi, it seems to be an extreame possibility that could go without saying.   Pony language has probably been put through the slicer more so than English ever has. Until the show gives us more lore to go on, we won't know how far this could really go.

I won't argue with your basic premise, but it does not work so simply. The influence of historical events such as war depends on the homogeneity of the different languages. If we continue the assumption that each race's language specialized and decended from a greater language, it stands to reason that they would remain fairly consistent. We know that even the show presents itself as a dub of the Equestrian tongue, the different tribes understood each other clearly because of their communications and interaction as demonstrated in the Heart's Warming Eve play, meaning the most likely primary differences is diction related to specific culture aspects, as well as some minor differences (the same way different dialects of German can be mutually intelligible despite differences). Gryphons and Dragons my have distinct languages, but they are either mutually intelligible with Pony, or these races are bilingual.

 

English resulted from multiple varied languages and cultures interacting, which has led to a confused jumble of languages. If the languages in Equestria are relatively homogeneous, wars and cultural interactions would not have had the same effect, leading to the conclusion that Pony language works in a fairly consistent manner. Germanic and Scandinavian languages today work as an example. Despite knowing maybe a dozen Scandinavian words and approximately 200-250 German ones (pitifully small when you think about it), I have read song lyrics in Dutch, different German dialects, Faroese, and read a portion of Hovamol in Old Icelandic, and despite not understanding any of these languages in the slightest, I was able to pick out a couple of words and rough meanings based on my knowledge, despite the only language I know being English (which originated from Germanic languages). The difference between Pony and Gryphon may sound as different as English and Chinese, or they may sound as close as Tokyo Japanese and Kansai-ben.

[Kel_Grym 1,917]

@@Frith is Magick,

 

You make a pretty good point. I'll have to rethink my position a bit.

[SasQ 1,376]

OK, after a long time of absence on this forum (my Internet connection was broken), I'm back with some new stuff in this subject I'd like to share with you. When studying Hebrew language, I figured out a method of analysis which could be applied to the Unicorn language as well. So let me explain this method, and what new information it has brought to me.

In every language, there are some patterns, and some words or sequences of letters which repeat more often. In Hebrew, for example, there are so called "roots" of words, which usually have three letters, and those roots are then extended into four-letter words or longer. But if some words have a common root, they usually have a common meaning, just a bit modified by those additional letters. Some linguists discovered recently that there could once also exist more basic roots (primitive roots), consisting of only two letters, and all three-letter roots sharing the same two-letter root have something in common in their meanings (although it is often required to stretch one's imagination a bit to see it, because people 2000 years ago were thinking in different ways than today, more concrete and less abstract).

Since the Unicorn alphabet and language seems to work similarly to Hebrew (short words suggest syllabic alphabet with only consonants being written down), it must have some "roots" in it, too. So I tried the following approach to find them:

First, I transcribed the fragment from Twilight Sparkle's old copy of "Predictions and Prophecies" we've seen in the very first episode of "MLP:FiM" ("Mare in the Moon"), and tried to find all repeating patterns and mark them up with the same color. First, I searched for repeating pairs. I marked up each such pair with a different color to make it stand out. Why pairs? Because if there are any longer sequences of letters which repeat, they will be made of those pairs! Each three-letter sequence is made of two overlapping pairs. So if any three-letter sequence appears more than once, there will be two pairs which also repeat. And the same goes with four-letter sequences and longer. So it's enough to find the two-letter ones to find all repetitions! Here's the result of this operation:

The dotted lines in between are the places where the paragraph was split in the original inscription. Each line of the text above is one paragraph from the original sample (which has been framed in a box of one color area in Twilight's book).

As you can see, there are lots of repetitions here! Each repeating pattern has its own color, so you should easily see all the occurences of the same "root", and what has been attached to it to make longer words. The best candidates for roots are the two-letter sequences which also appear as single words, such as eye+horn, tail+pony, star+thunder, horseshoe+rope, and rope+head. I made them lighter in color to be easier to spot, and the more letters attached to them, the darker their color becomes (but still having the same hue to mark up that it belongs to the same group, the same "root").

My second step was to make a map of these groups, starting from the two-letter roots, and branching out with additional letters. Here's the result:

Now we can see more clearly the patterns that emerge: There are five groups of words (each with its own color) which branch from a common root (one root for one group; I outlined these roots with thicker line to make them more apparent). This means that these words could have similar meanings, and this have to be accounted for when analyzing the text. There are also seven unique words which doesn't have any common root. Each of these words can be considered a group on its own, and each could have its own meaning different from others. And this tells us something important about the original text sample: We have only 5+7=12 unique meanings in there! So whatever the English translation of this text expresses, there are at least (and perhaps at most) 12 unique meanings that have to be carried in it. Sure, there are 27 unique words in the Unicorn text, but some of them make groups of similar meanings (judging by their common roots), so we need to limit our analysis to that.

Before this colorful analysis of the Unicorn text, I did a similar thing with its English translation: I colored words in it with different colors depending of what part of speech they are. I used black for nouns, red for verbs, brown for adjectives etc. Then I grouped them by their types to see how much of them are there in each group, and what do they have in common. There are some words which differ in spelling, but carry the same meaning, such as "legend" and "myth". There are also personal pronouns, which refer to some other nouns, so they, too, represent the same meaning, just written differently. I also outlined groups of words which make phrases (such as noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases etc.). They are made of different parts of speech, but together they make one compound part of speech, so they are related to the same meaning. Here's the result of this analysis:

This way I identified the main players in this text, and it turns out that there aren't many. We have:

• "The Mare in the Moon", refered also as "powerful pony", "who" and "she";
• "The Stars" which are to help her escape;
• "The Moon" refered as a place of her imprisonment;
• "The Elements of Harmony" which defeated her;
• "Equestria" which is a place she wanted to rule;
• "Eternal night" which is a condition;
• "The longest day of the thousandth year" which is a long name for a particular date;
• "The old myth" which is the same as "Legend".

and there are also some key actions, which are:

• "wanting to rule" – a compound verb phrase;
• "aid" or "help" (in her escape);
• "willing to bring about" (the eternal night), another compound verb phrase;
• "defeating" (her by the Elements) – this is actually a participle, that is, a verb used as an adjective to describe a noun;
• "imprisoning" (her in the Moon) – another participle.

And now hold on to your hooves:

When you count them up, you will find that there are exactly 13 separate ideas in the English text, too! This cannot be a coincidence! (If it is, then the creators of the show has trolled us royally.) Now what's left is to match them up – the English translations and the original Unicorn phrases – to crack this puzzle.

To make it more evident, and to aid myself in matching these meanings, I figured out a way to put it down in a language-neutral form, by using pictograms (or icons) – one "idea bubble" for each unique meaning. And here's how it looks like:

There are some small ideas I've left out, because they're just "modifiers", which could be achieved through prefixes or suffixes, or by grammatical structure. For example, the English articles such as "the", "a"/"an" which make nouns definite or indefinite, or prepositions like "in", "on", "by", "of" etc. They are not meaning by themselves, but they modify the meanings of other ideas.

As you can see, I also enclosed some idea bubbles inside bigger bubbles, to construct compound ideas out of them. Inside such a bubble we can swap the inner bubbles and put them in any order to fit the grammar rules of any language. (For example, in some languages, adjectives are being put before nouns they describe, and in other languages they're being put after those nouns, but they're always somehow connected together.) Such a language-independent form could be considered a stepping-stone from one language to another, and it can facilitate connecting the dots.

Now, I must admit, that despite those clever techniques, I haven't been able yet to match those two texts. But I presume that this technique is a good way to do it, and it might turn out to be helpful in my future investigations. There are some additional hints I found this way, though, which I'll tell you later, so maybe this technique is not at all useless after all Or maybe you can try to play with my findings, too – maybe you will find something what I missed and you will crack that puzzle once and for all? Who knows...

Oh, one more thing:

For those of you who don't know yet, I started working on inventing the Unicorn Language from scratch, independently of the above investigation. I'm curious what you think about it, because I have a big dilemma: Should I continue inventing the Unicorn Language from scratch, even if it might be non-canonical and won't agree with the text sample analyzed in this thread? Or should I continue cracking this code and make sure that my invented language would fit the above text to make some sense out of it, even if it might be hard as hell, or even never happen? What do you think?

Edited July 27, 2020 by SasQ
Corrected the formatting

[Kel_Grym 1,917]

@@SasQ,

 

Personally, I'm always one to encourage conlang, so I think you should continue making the unicorn language from scratch.

 

There may indeed be an existing code, or it might be coincidence. Even if there is, it probably hasn't been fully fleshed out yet, and was probably something an artist decided to do on the fly...or perhaps Lauren Faust has all the secrets locked in her head, who knows?

 

What I do know, is that trying to make the Unicorn language fit perfectly into what you cracked so far, may be nigh impossible given that we don't have a whole lot of canon use of unicorn text to work with.

 

Weighing the cons and pros of making the unicorn language fit perfectly into the code or just running with what you have, I'd say you should probably run with what you have. You have a chance to make a whole new conlang. This in itself is a rewarding experience, and would no doubt add a whole new layer to the collective headcanons of the fandom, especially fanfic writers.

 

If you try to take what you're working on just to fit into this code that may or not be really there, I think you're setting yourself up for more frustration than its worth.

 

This is just an opinion of an artist though. I'm a little bit more biased to productive creative works, than analytical reverse engineering.

Edited November 5, 2014 by Minister KelGrym

[sweetolebob18 728]

I've read the book "Guns, Germs and Steel" which I highly recommend to anyone interested in this kind of thing.  The author points out that agriculture has been independently discovered at least 4 times & maybe 9.  Writing has been independently discovered at least 2 times & at the most 4.  In other words, farming is easier to think of than writing

 

Farming is necessary to develop the economic surplus necessary for persons to engage in non food acquiring activities (in other words, before somebody can sit around all day thinking, they still got eat).  So, farming 1st, then writing.  The 1st records are government records because their is a limit to how complex things can be without writing.  6 of the 7 ancient civilizations had writing (& the Incas were working on it).  It takes literally centuries for literacy to become common enough for literature to be possible.  The Illiad was around for centuries (maybe) before anybody wrote it down, there just weren't enough folks to read it for it to be worth their time.

 

As to how long does it take once you've got the idea?  I know the Cherokee alphabet was invented by one man over the course of about 20 years (I've read Sequoya got the idea seeing white men read & write but never learned to read English himself)

 

Also, when I was a kid, I used to flip through the family encyclopedias & read stuff that looked interesting.  Letters change over time & alphabets tend to grow larger.  For instance, "J" used to be "I" until it was split off & both "U" & "W" started as "V".

 

English is a very volatile language & has changed a lot in just the last 1200 years, you've got Old English, Middle English & Modern English.  Most languages are about 80% similar after 1000 yrs or so.  (For instance, El Cid can still be read by modern Spanish speakers & Canterbury Tales (about same time) can not)(Or so I've heard)

 

In the episode "Hurricane Fluttershy", Twilight was recording wing strength of various ponies, so I would guess that is the modern alphabet  (if there are more than 1).  It is also possible that there is more than 1 written language.  In "A Friend In Deed", Pinkie was talking to a cow that sounded Swedish & the Diamond Dogs sounded like they had a different language (It would certainly make sense for other races to have other languages, even if all ponies had the same language)

 

As to "How many letters?".  Polynesian alphabet has 8 consonants & 3 vowels.  If you are assuming Pony language leaves out vowels (like some human languages do), then 8+.  A big problem w that is too many words are spelled the same, which is why alphabets tend to grow.

[Kel_Grym 1,917]

@@sweetolebob18,

I read Jared Diamond's book as well. Very good read. Didn't get to finish it all though, and lost the book