Elijah Mirecki
Warning!
If you like puzzle games, go play Tunic before reading this! Major spoilers ahead!
Decoding Tunic
In Tunic, you’re dropped into a world where you aren’t given any instructions other than how to move. As you play, you learn more about the world by collecting manual pages, that are mostly written in Tunic but have some English sprinkled throughout.
I heard that it’s actually translatable and has a bunch of secrets in it, so naturally I had to figure it out (mostly without the internet because why spoil the fun?).
It’s not every day you stumble upon an simple script you can learn to decipher on your own without a team of linguists!
So. How do you figure out a language that you know nothing about? Figure out things you do know, and go from there. For me:
- I assumed it was in English under the hood
- Most words are only 1 or 2 characters, so you must be able to combine multiple English letters into a single character, not just a substitution cipher.
- I assumed the horizontal lines were to group characters into a single word, since existing human scripts like Devanagari already do that.
- I know “the” is the most common word in English, and often precedes nouns
- There’s a hint in the manual that implies you can combine 2 character fragments
I started looking through the manual and found that character A (below) occurs before a bunch of nouns. But so do B and C. But B didn’t appear before any proper nouns, so I guessed it was “a”, not “the”. But what about C? Maybe it’s “an”? No, on one page it occured before “the”, so it can’t be “a” or “an”…
A:
B:
C:
Anyways, I know what two words mean. But those are some trivial examples.. I took a break from translating and started solving some of the puzzles. I came across one where there’s a signpost with 4 different characters written on it:
For context, a bunch of the secret puzzles are solved by pressing the d-pad or arrow keys in specific sequences based on some clues. So I knew the 4 different characters were talking about the four directions… but which ones? I flipped through the manual again trying to find more ways to translate, when I recognized the characters - on a compass! So obviously they’re talking about the cardinal directions! Now I know 4 new words! But actually, not quite. At this point, I didn’t know if they were single letters, or the entire words. (bottom left of below page)
More information! Wonderful! But it still ain’t enough to decipher the whole script. I looked through the manual to find more concepts that I could map to words. One of them was “key”. In a couple spots talking about unlocking doors or showing key icons, there was the word glyph D (below). Part of it matches the “ee” component of “east”, and the other component of the character matches the first character of a page talking about what I assume are “cards”, so that’s gotta be the character for “key”. At some point in this process I realized Tunic must be phonetic.
D:
I kept doing this with some simple words like “shield”, “move”, “potion”, “controls”, “focus”, “use item” … when I hit that last one, I realized I knew enough characters to use a new technique - pick some arbitrary sentence, fill in the characters I know, and guess the rest. And from there you’re really sailing. There might by a couple characters you don’t know, but once you see them used in context across a few different sentences it’s straightforward to figure out what they are.
“Traverse the glow to visit strange beings” - a hint for one of the puzzles.
See my deciphering notes if you’re interested in more details!
Why it’s a cool concept
Back in the day, Korea used Hanja script (Chinese characters used to write Korean words). The nice part about Chinese characters is you can use a single script to represent Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, and more, even though they all have completely different grammar. The not so nice part is you have to memorize thousands of complicated characters to be literate.
The Korean dynasty of old decided literacy was a good thing and should be possible to learn even for the uneducated or slightly educated. So they designed a new phonetic script (Hangul) - i.e. a script with characters that match how they’re pronounced. If you look at a word in Korean that you’ve never seen before, you’ll know how to pronounce it flawlessly because of the shiny new Hangul script!
Fun fact: China nearly went under a similar script revolution, but the emperor decided literacy should be a trade secret… so, we’re still stuck with memorizing thousands of characters to be literate. Maybe the fact that Korea didn’t have political, historical, and cultural attachment to the script helped them ditch it more easily.
Tunic reminded me of the Korean script which I’ve always loved. There are plenty of languages out there that use phonetic alphabets - Korean, German, Spanish, Polish, Telugu, Hindi, and many more. But there is some compositional elegance to Tunic and Hangul. Sentences are delimited with periods and form cohesive thoughts. Words are delimited with spaces and form groups of sounds, characters form a single sound, and letters form smaller parts of sounds. In languages using the Latin script (like English), it’s not obvious what groups of letters form a single sound. Assuming you don’t know Polish, count the number of syllables in this phrase: “wszystkiego najlepszego”. Good luck. Now try with Korean: “생일 축하해요”. 6 syllables! I don’t even know Korean and it’s obvious because there are 6 characters, and I know each character forms a syllable.
Tunic isn’t quuiiiite as elegant as Korean. English has words like… “words”. It’s a single syllable, but has to be represented by 3 characters in Tunic - “wor” “d” “s”. Depending on the phonemes in your favourite language, it may or may not be representable by combining sounds into single characters.
In summary…
Scripts are fun, go play Tunic, and I’m truly grateful to King Sejong the Great for valuing literacy for his entire kingdom over prestige for its select elite.