Inkling: The Language of Splatoon

[pumpCurry]

I succeeded in an analysis of lyrics, "plaza's theme at splatfest : (ハイカラシンカ)". english version

 

[pumpCurry]

okok I translate tonight JST, plz wait ;)

Translation done a short while ago. I want at a glance.

 

[Bizz]

Wow, I mean, and I only dropped out of this thread for months and so many things have been figured out! It amazes me!

I actually want to talk about this on my language blog so I was wondering if there's a summary of what's been done so far. I'm going to assume there isn't so I guess I'll have to make it myself XD

I also really want to learn this if possible since I like learning random languages sometimes to get an interesting experience. If there's something organizing all this information into one guide, that would be nice.

 

[Jet Uppercut]

Here's something interesting. If you rearrange the letters Inkling, it spells Klingin.
Klingin sounds like Klingon.
Could the Squids be a species of Klingon?
Is Mozart still alive?
We may never know.

 

[Zombie Aladdin]

Wow, I mean, and I only dropped out of this thread for months and so many things have been figured out! It amazes me!

I actually want to talk about this on my language blog so I was wondering if there's a summary of what's been done so far. I'm going to assume there isn't so I guess I'll have to make it myself XD

I also really want to learn this if possible since I like learning random languages sometimes to get an interesting experience. If there's something organizing all this information into one guide, that would be nice.

I was able to figure out a handful of letters in English and a good portion of its numerals. I have since figured out the 9, but I am right now completely stumped going forward, even after getting the game. Seems PumpCurry is part of a Japanese effort to decipher it too, and he's made significant progress in Inkling hiragana/katakana.

Here are the numerals, updated with what I've gleaned. Percentages indicate how certain I am that it represents that digit, and digits without a percentage are ones I am 100% sure about.

 

[Jet Uppercut]

I was able to figure out a handful of letters in English and a good portion of its numerals. I have since figured out the 9, but I am right now completely stumped going forward, even after getting the game. Seems PumpCurry is part of a Japanese effort to decipher it too, and he's made significant progress in Inkling hiragana/katakana.

Here are the numerals, updated with what I've gleaned. Percentages indicate how certain I am that it represents that digit, and digits without a percentage are ones I am 100% sure about.

If it's anything like pool the 9 would be an inverted 6 with a line on the bottom.
Maybe 9 is 6 and the lined number is 9.

 

[Zombie Aladdin]

What do you suppose the eleventh digit must be?

I deduced that character must be a 9 based on the Sunken Sea Scroll depicting Callie and Marie in their childhood. The initial "UFO sighting" that kicked off the game's single-player mode has a datestamp dating the game to the Inklings' year 2015. This must mean that, if Inklings age in a similar way to humans, and they are said to be significantly older than the playable ones, they must've been born in 19?? and maybe grew up then. That photograph of the young Callie and Marie has a datestamp too, with the first digit as 1 and the "A" looking thing as the second.

That being said, the next two digits are not ones I see normally associated with numerals in the game, so it may just be someone else coming up with their own idea of the numeral system.

If you take a good look at the logo at the bottom-right of the N-Zap '89, you'll see the Inklings' 0 followed by a horizontally flipped 2 too--this must have been someone else's interpretation of what the number "89" must be in Inkling.

 

[Jet Uppercut]

What do you suppose the eleventh digit must be?

I deduced that character must be a 9 based on the Sunken Sea Scroll depicting Callie and Marie in their childhood. The initial "UFO sighting" that kicked off the game's single-player mode has a datestamp dating the game to the Inklings' year 2015. This must mean that, if Inklings age in a similar way to humans, and they are said to be significantly older than the playable ones, they must've been born in 19?? and maybe grew up then. That photograph of the young Callie and Marie has a datestamp too, with the first digit as 1 and the "A" looking thing as the second.

That being said, the next two digits are not ones I see normally associated with numerals in the game, so it may just be someone else coming up with their own idea of the numeral system.

If you take a good look at the logo at the bottom-right of the N-Zap '89, you'll see the Inklings' 0 followed by a horizontally flipped 2 too--this must have been someone else's interpretation of what the number "89" must be in Inkling.

A zero followed by a horizontally flipped 2 sounds a lot like a regular 89 to me.
Maybe they just copied what appeared on the original Zapper for their weaponized recreation.

 

[pumpCurry]

A zero followed by a horizontally flipped 2 sounds a lot like a regular 89 to me.
Maybe they just copied what appeared on the original Zapper for their weaponized recreation.

hey guys! I got "イカすアートブック (ika-su artbook)" official artwork book, at 11th October,
This book was released on 10th October in Japan. :D

in this book, there --"a lot lot lot of "-- textures, its very clearly, And, I found TWO list of "numbers" from this book.

a)
* Inkopolis plaza (number-plate, town-plate and etc...)
* "stage:Walleye Warehouse (ja:ハコフグ倉庫)"
* "stage: Port Mackerel (ja:ホッケ埠頭)"
* "Date-stamp of squid squad's poster"

b)
* "stage: Moray Towers" (ja:タチウオパーキング)

I capp or drawing tonight,JST. plz wait. and comeback later.

and, I and we updating squid language's site:
http://ikasekai.com/ (ika-sekai as squid-world)

enjoy!

hello.

ja: 少なくとも、文字は複数種類存在していて、日本人がひらがな、カタカナ、アルファベット、漢字、ギリシャ文字等を
読んだり使いわけているように、イカの世界でも、「文字セット」が複数あるように見える。
なので、fontfaceが違う文字を、混ぜてはダメなのかもしれない。
つまり、「同じ文字がほかのfontfaceの文字セットでも同じように存在する前提で **考えてはいけない**」と思っている。

 

[Zombie Aladdin]

Well, now! Consider the numerals solved! There seems to be two different sets on that package, however. Some of the big ones I haven't seen in the game.

 

[Flipz]

Well, now! Consider the numerals solved! There seems to be two different sets on that package, however. Some of the big ones I haven't seen in the game.

I would not be at all surprised if the Inkling language, like actual Japanese, had two completely separate phonetic representations of the language; in Japanese, apart from Kanji (the ideogrammatic written language that's often supplemented with the other two) you have Hiragana (the phonetic character set used to transliterate Kanji, as well as for particles; basic rule "native Japanese words") and Katakana (the phonetic character set used to render foreign "loan words" and proper names of non-Japanese origin). It's obviously not a 1-1 thing (as I recall, Japan doesn't really have Hiragana and Katakana for numerals, instead using either the Western number system in most contexts and the traditional Kanji for each number otherwise), but given that Inklings have a heavily Japanese cultural context, it wouldn't surprise me that they would develop similar rules for their own language.

 

[Ao Ika]

It's getting somewhere. If it is gibberish, we could well make our own using game characters.

 

[MissingNumbers]

It's getting somewhere. If it is gibberish, we could well make our own using game characters.

Welcome to the party.

 

[eli]

I got "イカすアートブック (ika-su artbook)" official artwork book

and, I and we updating squid language's site:
http://ikasekai.com/ (ika-sekai as squid-world)

すげぇーーー。ありがとう！

___

Also it's cool we have official lyrics to the Squid Sisters' songs now.

If anyone can see any correlation, that'd be cool, but as always I highly doubt it. :p Attached is a comparison just for reference, though.

EDIT: Looks like @pumpCurry already posted about it (and used colors!) Thanks for using my font, too! :D

 

[eli]

In other words… version 2 of my Inkling font is now live! It's now fully typeable with all letters, numbers, and symbols. I posted a few months ago when I first released it, so thought I should keep this thread updated, at least. :)

Download & more information here:

http://frozenpandaman.github.io/inkling.html​

 

[pumpCurry]

In other words… version 2 of my Inkling font is now live! It's now fully typeable with all letters, numbers, and symbols. I posted a few months ago when I first released it, so thought I should keep this thread updated, at least. :)

Download & more information here:

http://frozenpandaman.github.io/inkling.html​

oho, ngyes! woomy! very yummy :D

マンメンミ！

 

[plokijjikolp]

Just checking back to see progress made in months, and..
Woah, the Squid Sister's song was translated! Well, phonetically, not meaningfully.
I had a feeling that Inkling translated into Japanese, as why people were failing when trying to translate into English.
..Unfortunately, I've only mastered Hiragana and some of Katakana. Rip.
Good luck!

 

[Zwei]

I figure one of the pitfalls that initially led people to believe that this is gibberish is that they were looking at the language more as a substitution cipher (character to character) as opposed to a meaningful and completely separate language. Different languages have different grammar rules, and these can be found out from context. Here are a few examples of differing grammar from real-world languages, all relating to English so everyone here can understand.

Spanish: Adjectives are always placed directly after nouns. i.e. "girl pretty" vs something weird like "The girl is pretty" or "pretty girl"
Chinese: Possible to have outright tense-less verbs, 3 different forms of writing for the same spoken language
German: 3 different words for "the" (der, die, das, depending on the gender of the object), infinitive forms of verbs are 1 word and all have "n" or "en"
P.I.E.: 2 different words for different types of farts, unlike English (who says this inkling language would be all formal? Likely to not be so considering the old English dialect used in the readable in-game text, and the supposedly carefree nature of the inklings)

And, also, the biggest thing I must stress to the number movement: what are the odds the inklings would also develop a base-10 system? You did note a weird "11th" single-digit number, and this could be a sign that the base itself is different from the rest of the world. An example of a different base would be hex where you count to 100 like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, ext. Another example of a different base would be binary, which consists of 1's and 0's. 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000. People working in numbers: I highly suggest you look into this base issue. While I did my research and inklings do have 10 fingers on each hand (allegedly meaning they are likely to come up with a similar base), who knows? Maybe 5 fingers on each hand led them to develop hex (not to be confused with hexadecimal).

Also, anyone thought of using the sunken scrolls to figure out some of this? Some of them to include inkling/octarian text, and the research notes appear to be a direct translation in some cases.

 

[Zombie Aladdin]

The thing is that I found an unencoded bar graph in one of the Sunken Scrolls, strongly suggesting that, at least for numerals, they put them in with normal Arabic first, then encode them later, and that was a bit that slipped past the quality checks. It is possible that it DOES run on a counting system that isn't base-10, but nearly every counting system that exists in real-life Earth has a base of a multiple of 5, whether it be western/oriental (base-10), Mayan (base-20), or Babylonian (base-60), due to the simple fact that humans usually begin counting on their fingers (with the Mayans using their toes). Logically, Inklings would follow this system too, not only because they also have five-fingered hands, but squids have ten tentacles, the type of body parts I'd figure squids with human-level intelligence would use to learn counting.

However, you are right: It does not rule out that this may be a base-11 system. In Arabic, the eleventh digit would be A, which seems to correspond with marks in Port Mackerel labeling sectors as characters resembling "A" and "B."

I am, so far, the only person in this topic to attack it as a cipher from the English side (PumpCurry is attempting it from the Japanese side). Every other effort prior to mine was as a language, and the results yielded were totally different. I have not ruled out the possibility of this being gibberish, however. (That being said, nothing has so far come out of attempts to solve the language used in some signs in the Animal Crossing series, and that's been around for way longer.)

There are also many, many types of substitution ciphers, with varying complexity of keys. There can also be many keys used for the same purpose; the multiple numeral sets point towards this. (For instance, in the U.S. Civil War, Union codebreakers had discovered at least three different keys for encoded Confederate messages, which are used at random.) I have, however, ruled out the one-time pad, which is the only truly unbreakable type of substitution cipher, so I feel that if it's not gibberish, it WILL eventually be solved. Just most likely not by me.

 

[Zwei]

The thing is that I found an unencoded bar graph in one of the Sunken Scrolls, strongly suggesting that, at least for numerals, they put them in with normal Arabic first, then encode them later, and that was a bit that slipped past the quality checks. It is possible that it DOES run on a counting system that isn't base-10, but nearly every counting system that exists in real-life Earth has a base of a multiple of 5, whether it be western/oriental (base-10), Mayan (base-20), or Babylonian (base-60), due to the simple fact that humans usually begin counting on their fingers (with the Mayans using their toes). Logically, Inklings would follow this system too, not only because they also have five-fingered hands, but squids have ten tentacles, the type of body parts I'd figure squids with human-level intelligence would use to learn counting.

However, you are right: It does not rule out that this may be a base-11 system. In Arabic, the eleventh digit would be A, which seems to correspond with marks in Port Mackerel labeling sectors as characters resembling "A" and "B."

I am, so far, the only person in this topic to attack it as a cipher from the English side (PumpCurry is attempting it from the Japanese side). Every other effort prior to mine was as a language, and the results yielded were totally different. I have not ruled out the possibility of this being gibberish, however. (That being said, nothing has so far come out of attempts to solve the language used in some signs in the Animal Crossing series, and that's been around for way longer.)

There are also many, many types of substitution ciphers, with varying complexity of keys. There can also be many keys used for the same purpose; the multiple numeral sets point towards this. (For instance, in the U.S. Civil War, Union codebreakers had discovered at least three different keys for encoded Confederate messages, which are used at random.) I have, however, ruled out the one-time pad, which is the only truly unbreakable type of substitution cipher, so I feel that if it's not gibberish, it WILL eventually be solved. Just most likely not by me.

Eh, it goes so much deeper than simple substitution. I don't think anyone has been able to figure out vingere autokey yet qithout brute force, ect. If we assume nintendo decided to make a language in this world, that it would be some way for inlkings to communicate, while codes and ciphers are meant to communicate in secret (I think the closest the two have been used together would be the navajo code talkers). You mentioned one-time pads, but what if someone at nintendo was given a copy and leaks it? Also, if nintendo goes through the effort to encode everything, then they may as well make it gibberish because nobody is going to break an RSA 2048 code anytime soon, and I don't think quantum computers would be given for such an effort (probably more likely to run protein folding code).