Some people can't help but translate things. We see languages, and we want to decipher them, like the people who climb Mount Everest just because it's there. The languages in games like FEZ, Titan Souls, Heaven's Vault, 7 Days To End With You, and Noita, invite the player to try to crack them to reveal more of the game's lore, and players are often rewarded for doing so, even if it's usually just extra story. Translating the Fez language was literally the first thing I did, and it basically revealed the whole plot of the game before I'd even started. Oops!
But those game examples are all made on indie budgets. What happens when a gigantic, multi-billion-dollar company like Nintendo makes its own language? The answer is that we get THREE languages. The Zelda series has Hylian, Sheikah, and as of Tears of the Kingdom, Zonai — three languages that look very different and were designed to represent the culture of each of their races.
Hylian was cracked long ago as a cipher of Japanese kana – you may remember the Wind Waker HD Special Edition Wii U, which was emblazoned with a ton of Hylian runes detailing Link's story, or the fact that the game lets you translate Hylian in New Game Plus. Sheikah was translated relatively quickly, too, and turned out to be a cipher of English, where the Sheikah runes each translated to a letter of the English alphabet. It wasn't massively useful in the game, as the Sheikah runes usually just translated to a very literal description of the thing they were written on, but still!
From the very first Tears of the Kingdom trailer, it's been clear that Zonai is a much more complex language that probably hides a ton of secrets. Language sleuths have been working on translating it since the very first trailer, but there seem to be no solid conclusions yet – or, just as likely, people have gotten distracted by the game itself.
That's not to say there hasn't been progress. One team of translators is working on the assumption that Zonai is also a Japanese cipher, just like Hylian, and others think it might match to Chinese characters instead. No one is really sure, but the nature of Zonai – that is, the fact that it's a highly syllabic language – imply that it most likely matches up to something like Japanese or Chinese scripts, which are similarly based around syllabic characters.
Japanese and Chinese characters come from an evolution of pictorial depictions of the things they represent in many cases, and translators are theorising the same thing about Zonai. One particularly prolific translator, u/CloqueWise on Reddit, has even given the runes names, like "scissors" and "woman", and has decided that the runes for "farmer" and "owl" come together to mean "sage" – which makes sense, since our good boy Rauru is associated with owls.
The next issue is how it's supposed to be read. We might assume that it's left to right, like English, but many languages are read in different ways. Arabic is right to left, and many Asian languages can be written in vertical stripes, to be read from top to bottom, column by column. There's plenty of Zonai stuff that has something written on it vertically, after all. There is even potential evidence that Zonai could be written – get this – boustrophedonically, which means alternating left to right and right to left for each line of script. Doesn't that sound exhausting?
There are translations in the game itself, which you'd think might help, but these translations — the ones researcher Wortsworth offers when you bring him a photo of a tablet in the sky — are actually translations of Hylian. Not very useful for translating Zonai. Also, he translates it all into Middle English, which is very hard to read!
The shrine names may also be a hint – as in, their weird names might actually be what spoken Zonai sounds like. Comparing the shrine names that have commonalities seems to reveal some potential translations, as u/DraconionDevil discovered:
Falling:
Ekochiu Shrine - Rise and Fall
Orochium Shrine - Courage to Fall
This is one I find VERY interesting. Both shrine subtitles contain fall as the last word and the second part of both of these words contains ochiu. Could ochiu be the Zonai word for to fall? Perhaps.
It's well worth reading the full and very detailed Reddit post on this, as it's a great jumping-off point for trying to find those common syllables. Unless, of course, the shrine names are a dead end, like they were in Breath of the Wild. Or if the translations in English aren't accurate, and the original Japanese is closer to the Zonai translation. Or if the language is gibberish, in which case, this is all a colossal waste of time. But we can't think that way! We mustn't give up! Mostly because we've already spent this long trying to decipher it!!!!
What would be really useful is something usually referred to as a Rosetta Stone – something in-game that exists to clear up the language in some way, and serve as a starting point for decoding. Often, these Rosetta Stones are set in stone (haha), in the sense that they have only one particular and very obvious meaning that can't possibly be misinterpreted.
In Fez, this was lampshaded very effectively by having a room with a literal quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog, in reference to the pangram which was also written nearby. This gave players the chance to understand which letters matched which Fez runes.
But many translators can begin to unravel a language just from a significantly large body of text, and that's how Zonai scholars are working at the moment. Fez, again, has a massive block of text right at the start, as the Hypercube monologues at you in a language you don't understand.
If you assume that the Hypercube is speaking in a language that's a direct match-up for English, which is usually the case, you can start working out letter frequency. E is the most common letter, for example, and from there you can start finding other common prefixes and suffixes, like -ER, -ING, and so on, or common single- and double-letter words like IT, A, and SO. Fez's words are read top-to-bottom, and right-to-left, which makes it a bit tricky, but other than that, it's a breeze.
Tears of the Kingdom has a lot of long text, but none of it really works as a Rosetta Stone yet because we haven't figured out enough of the language's idiosyncrasies. Some scholars have compared word and letter frequency to try to match Zonai up to a known language, but for now, it's largely still speculation, even if the results sometimes give us something that looks right (i.e. contains lots of references to "dragons" and "time").
We also have the Secret Stones, which seem to match up pretty nicely with Japanese kana for the particular element they represent, but... well, that's not particularly useful, since the Secret Stones don't even look much like Zonai. Dangit!
The closest we have is the Ring Ruins text, which is what our friend Wortsworth is working on anyway. Zonai scholar u/DMCthread310 (which is, in itself, a code for a particular colour of embroidery floss – the colour black) has been comparing the English and Japanese translations of the Ring Ruins' text from within the game to try to understand the similarities and meanings behind the text, but they haven't made much headway.
It doesn't help that translating Zonai seems to necessitate being relatively fluent in English, Japanese, and Chinese scripts, on top of being enough of a linguist to speculate on grammar, syntax, word order, and reading patterns. It also doesn't help that Wortsworth translates these passages as fragmented, which leaves out a lot of the conjoining words. Maybe he doesn't read Zonai too well either?
To sum all this up, the Zonai text in Tears of the Kingdom is still largely a mystery. Some people seem to have cracked words, phrases, or word order, but without that Rosetta Stone confirmation, there's little evidence that any of them are right. There isn't really a critical mass of people trying to translate the Zonai for the reasons outlined above – it requires a very particular type of person, and besides, the game only just came out, so most players are still enjoying the game like a normal person, probably.
For now, Zonai can keep its secrets. But not for long, Zonai. We're coming for you.
Comments 30
Glad somebody has taken the time to do this, seriously, I was not going to get any sleep before this was sorted.
I just want to see a normal translation of the sky island tablets. Whenever they guy half translates it and reads it, I feel like I'm going mad with the whole "I can almost understand this but not quite" thing. The fact the only translations offered in game are the crazy one and the rough translation is so frustrating.
I've already translated everything. Pretty much just says "kick his @$$ seabass."
@NintendoByNature Thank you
"BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE"
@NintendoByNature,
I thought it said "Two lighters for a pound", where's the profit margin in that.
The shine names, for the most part, are the names of people who worked on the game. Japanese family names, in turn, come from combining kanji symbols ... so overlap is going to be common enough that co-incidence is going to happen. It's like if a "to fall" shrine was called "bobsmith" and "falling" was called "jonsmith".
it's also important to note that a new language, witch would income a completely new syntax, morphic properties, and possibility completely new sounds we can't easily reproduce is something VERY different then an "reskin" of an existing language, say, mapping out the Japanese alphabet (one of them, or a combination of all 3) to new symbols, while keeping the syntax intact. New, dead languages are impossible to translate unless we have context, given a new language can include new ideas and concepts we don't have words for.
Not even Tolkien created new "languages", although he came close ... he created new dialects.
It's still fun to try and figure out what the symbols means, but for the most part they are decrypting (you're trying to find out how these symbols encode the Japanize language or words and ideas the Japanize already use) and not translating. Most of the people on reedit involved in this understand that, and they are using cryptography, not linguistics to try and solve the problem.
This is awesome I love seeing people deep dive these things and occasionally doing so myself if intrigued enough. I haven't got even play ToTk yet so I can't wait to play it for first time. Hoping it reminds me of beauty and fun of BoTW l.
@HeadPirate I'd argue both would be useful tools in deducing how everything translates.
Although I concede that it might take some of the fun out of it, isn't this exactly the type of problem that we would now look towards AI to solve?
@Thaswizz
They are not.
Linguistics is a study that looks at how human thought and experience translates into communication. It involves looking at how cognitive, social, environmental and biological factors necessitate the languages we naturally formed. it has no value in analyzing a constructed or made up language, as it's literally the study of how language changes and develops OVER TIME, in LARGE GROUPS.
Linguistics would be used to understand why I used the completely unnecessary word "literally" there when there is no indication my statement is or even could be figurative, but only after we already understood English and 2020s culture and society.
To apply linguistics to this problem would you need to know what language was this new language's root and already understand it, and people would need to be speaking it in a society we could observe.
Crypto-linguistics can be used to try and understand dead languages, but only when we know and understand the society that created them in great detail and we have at least one language that was based on the now dead language still being used
Xeno-linguistics would study how non-humans might form language, given how we create langue is a direct result of our cognitive processes and creatures with different brains would create vastly different forms of communication. It is, obviously, a theoretical science, not a practical one, and would only apply if this language was actually created by magic furries, not by a bunch of humans.
This is solely a cryptology and information theory problem, as it deal with encoding an existing language.
@Rambler
Yeah you're spot on. People have already done that, and symbol frequency and common symbol grouping length seems to conforms to what we would expect from Japanize and not what we would expect from "randomness", so the idea that there is a solution here seems pretty hopeful. At the very least, they put the same effort into this as they did to Inkling (which is an offset cypher of Hiragana).
Is Kate back at NL towers?!
Are Wortsworth's readings middle English? I thought they were more like early modern English, like Chaucer (kind of a transition between middle and modern).
It was a lot like what I remember of reading Chaucer, where you can get most of it if you read phonetically, and then figure out the more archaic vocabulary from context.
Admittedly, when playing I skipped over most of that because it's a skill that I'm not accustomed to using when playing a video game. Maybe I should try again.
Given that Zonai is essentially an ancient, dead language — and we already have in-game languages mapping to modern English and Japanese — it seems plausible that Zonai could be based on something completely different and not widely spoken.
Latin, Ancient Greek and even Ainu (the language of the indigenous people of Hokkaido) spring to mind, which would shrink the pool of people well equipped to translate this language considerably.
Given that fans have been studiously working on this since on this well before launch, it’s rather humbling that we haven’t even worked out what language it’s meant to be a cypher of (if it is a cypher as all!).
@johnvboy A lot like seeing animals and clouds. Do kids do that these days, or do they look up from their phone long enough?
I’m just curious to know if someone actually made it up to work or if it’s just nonsense.
@HeadPirate I appreciate your obsession but yes both are still valuable while realizing one may be less so then then the other. If you are evaluating and translating a language that is made up then you need both depending on the subject matter and while you can type large paragraphs it doesn't change that fact.
Depending on the game and it's linguistic use as well as other means in witch can be construed as hieroglyphics then you can use more then your presumed mastery as it is non existent when we're dealing with fake game language.
I just sat here marveling at this extensive and exciting article, wondering what or who to thank, until I saw the author credits. Thank you for stopping by @KateGray, hope you're doing well <3 lovely stuff
@Thaswizz
With respect, you are simple wrong here. I don't think you understand what linguistics is. It is a study of language as a cultural concept. You're like someone saying that we should study "history" to figure out what happened 7000 years ago, unware that "history" isn't the study of the past, but the study of the written record of the past.
There is no shame in not knowing that. But maybe just accept that sometimes you can be wrong about things?
I'm also not talking about "any game". I'm talking about this one.
Just imagine if the "Zonai alphabeth" doesnt even exist and the dev team just put "interesting" random pictorial characters like how probably they did.
Some "scholar" need to find a girlfriend/boyfriend.
A couple of corrections @KateGray, Hylian differs from game to game and in some it's a cipher of English like Sheikah while the Secret Stones match up pretty nicely with kanji (i.e. Chinese characters used to write Japanese), not kana (the Japanese syllabaries).
That aside, really interesting article, especially for someone like me who studies linguistics, English, Japanese, Chinese etc. (so while I could potentially help I suspect that by the time I finish the game people will have already cracked Zonai if it's possible to do so in the first place)!
@HeadPirate While you're absolutely correct about the shrine names it is still worth noting as someone already did on the Reddit thread - although I came to the same conclusion even before reading it - that "ochiu" in the "falling" Shrines is suspiciously close to 落ちる ochiru, to fall in Japanese.
In the Nintendo .com interview, the devs state the Sheikah aesthetic was inherently Japanese in BOTW, so in TOTK they wanted to do something different.
To me, the Zonai aesthetic contains a certain Mayan quality. I'm just a layman, but perhaps they could try connecting Zonai to one of the Mayan languages?
@JohnnyMind
I mean, if you know Japanize at all (like it looks like you do), you know what a bunch of pun-loving dudes they are. I would say it's actively misleading to look at the shines, because it's far more likely there is some insanely "hilarious" pun at the center of why the shrine was made to have a puzzle based on it's name rather then the name having anything at all to do with the language.
It's also important to note that shine descriptions where a late addition, likely because the puzzles were too difficult without direction. Whatever they were doing with the language they already had in place long before then.
But hey, it's just speculation and I could be wrong, so if someone is having a grand old time working on how shine names might be part of the language ... power to them. Nothing meaningful was ever discovered without at least a few people exploring dead ends. Never know when one of them is going to be a lot less dead then you thought.
Removed - flaming/arguing
the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics. Specific branches of linguistics include sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, hist
So much more then a cultural concept, but if you think that's what linguistics do you. I'll leave you with you feeling superior in your wrong definition.
The long green exciting game spawned much articles about its fluff.
There you go. Translation over.
All of them say “Drink your Ovaltine.”
All of them say, "lions got robbed against the cowboys tonight"
This reminds me of a Lego series I grew up called "Bionicle", it was about a universe of living constructs. There robotic like beings were created by a giant mechanical being known as "Mata Nui".
They lived by three virtues, "Unity, Duty, and Destiny".
What made the series so fun is they had their very own language called "Matoran". It was a series of circular shapes that each represented a different letter.
I turned my my pc font into it as a kid because I loved it so much. I enjoy when fantasy goes all out to make their universe seemed lived in. As if you are touring a world far removed from your own. It's alien in nature.
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