Inscription in Releeshahn

Davide · **Joined:** Wed Mar 30, 2016 10:51 pm **Posts:** 52

Does anyone know what the inscription you find in Releeshahn (Myst V – End of Ages) means?
It's a repeating sequence of ten letters but my basic D’ni is not enough to understand it; the only word I presume to recognize is do (‘how’)…

[Reveal] Spoiler: Pictures

(The pictures were not visible... I hope now they are)

dgelessus · **Posted:** Tue Jul 26, 2016 11:19 pm

Here's the page from the old Guild of Linguists website (the new one doesn't have the photos anymore), you just need to ignore (or remove) the big popup in the middle saying that the site has expired.

For reference, here are the two comments below the picture:

Carolyn wrote:

I checked, and this text is seen on the floor of the courtyard in the good ending. (And it's cyclical; it's continuous text) I still have no idea what it means, though.

Carolyn wrote:

Transliteration: "bcheghdhopaz"
Which would appear to be gibberish.
Converting it as if it were using the alphabet found in Atrus's Prayer gives this: "bteghdhopchz", which is still gibberish.
This could have just been random letters put there as a placeholder, except that the 'æ' character is there ('å' in Dnifont, which would presumably have been used), making this theory much less likely.
Does anybody have any idea what this text is?

So there might not be much to discover with this text.

Davide · **Joined:** Wed Mar 30, 2016 10:51 pm **Posts:** 52

Thanks dgelessus!

So, apparently, it’s only a meaningless series of letters

…

Well, even if improbable, I’d like to think that it is some kind of code or just parts of words of a wise sentence :wink:

korovev · **Posted:** Thu Jul 28, 2016 9:42 am

Converting bceghdopåz in numerals, according to the relation between numbers and letters, gives:

1 & ) 4 % $ ^ 8 \ {
1-17-10-4-15-14-16-8-22-23

A cypher, maybe? :mrgreen:

Davide · **Joined:** Wed Mar 30, 2016 10:51 pm **Posts:** 52

Nice, Korov’ev, almost all the powers of two are in the correct places

I was also thinking of something like this
Help Us Decipher This Inscription
or the inscriptions you find in ancient coins (e.g. “DV PT VNMR” for “Divus Pater Venerabilis Memoria”).

Maybe I’m going too far but observing that the letters in the inscription form groups separated by spaces
do på z bce gh
you can get, e.g., something like:

dho p[r]a[chi]z[en] b[‘]che[v] [re]G[ahro]h[evtee]
(How amazes to thank the Mighty Words)

I know, it makes no sense and I’m not even sure the grammar (both D’ni and English) is correct, it’s just an example to illustrate the idea.
Anyway I don’t believe plausible it was Cyan intention to insert an hidden and enigmatic sentence at the end of Myst V but it has been fun to try to find a meaning

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

paz is an element similar to the beginning of the verb pazgo which occurs in the (untranslated) sentence:
met yishah kokenen kopazgo tenahsh mretson ahzmoreluh

The sentence can be partially interpret as:
‘this yishah was pazgo-ed in/with/by nash from the tson ahzmoreluh.’

This was published on the disk label for the Riven Soundtrack, and some time ago RAWA revealed that the text had been altered by the designer (presumably for artistic reasons) and he supplied us with the correct reading, and also seemed to suggest that the text had nothing to do with the game or the soundtrack.

Later I noticed that the word ahzmoreluh could be a D’ni transliteration of the name “Osmorella” from the game Cosmic Osmo, but I did not followed up on this. Recently I did some further ‘research’ into the Osmoian world, and (aside from learning more about Princess Osmorella) found out the there is a text in the game, on a computer screen and in a marquee apparently contolled by it, which says:

THIS PLANET WAS FUNDED IN PART BY A GRANT FROM THE OSMORELLA FOUNDATION

Since this is essentially the same syntax as in the disk text, I wonder if it is a sentence that RAWA just translated into D’ni as an ‘exercise’ and it ended up on the disk because the designer liked it (or most of it). If so, this means there are a few words in D’ni whose translation we can now supply:

yishah = ‘planet’
pazgo = ‘(to) fund’
nash = ‘part’
tson = ‘foundation’.

If the verb pazgo means ‘to fund’ then perhaps paz might be a noun like ‘money’ or ‘wealth’, or a more basic verb like ‘prosper’ or ‘thrive’. It is possible that in the Releeshahn text some D’ni apostrophes have been left out by the artist; then we might restore the reading to something like:

b’cheg h’dho paz

Conceivably this could be some sort of brief maxim. If paz were ‘thrive’ then dho paz would be ‘how I thrive’. The word cheg might mean something like ‘balance’, since this was a key idea that Atrus arrived at in his plans for writing the Age of Releeshahn.

The letter h (if it represents h’ as a shortened form of he) is probably some preposition, a relatively infrequent one if we have not seen it before; perhaps ‘alongside’ since that would combine well with ‘balance’ as a verb.

This is, of course, all very speculative …

Shorah,
Kh'reestrefah

larryf58 · **Posted:** Thu Aug 18, 2016 8:18 pm

Khreestrefah wrote:

met yishah kokenen kopazgo tenahsh mretson ahzmoreluh

The sentence can be partially interpret as:
‘this yishah was pazgo-ed in/with/by nash from the tson ahzmoreluh.’

THIS PLANET WAS FUNDED IN PART BY A GRANT FROM THE OSMORELLA FOUNDATION

This is, of course, all very speculative …

Shorah,
Kh'reestrefah

I believe you're onto something. It makes a lot of sense.

I tend to start that repeating sentence with dho, so it comes out as "dho paz b'chegh" to me. "How fund to (chegh)"?

...Perhaps it's Atrus lamenting, "how the heck am I going to pay for all this?!"

Talashar · **Joined:** Sun Dec 08, 2013 12:24 pm **Posts:** 91

Khreestrefah wrote:

paz is an element similar to the beginning of the verb pazgo which occurs in the (untranslated) sentence:
met yishah kokenen kopazgo tenahsh mretson ahzmoreluh

The sentence can be partially interpret as:
‘this yishah was pazgo-ed in/with/by nash from the tson ahzmoreluh.’

This was published on the disk label for the Riven Soundtrack, and some time ago RAWA revealed that the text had been altered by the designer (presumably for artistic reasons) and he supplied us with the correct reading, and also seemed to suggest that the text had nothing to do with the game or the soundtrack.

Later I noticed that the word ahzmoreluh could be a D’ni transliteration of the name “Osmorella” from the game Cosmic Osmo, but I did not followed up on this. Recently I did some further ‘research’ into the Osmoian world, and (aside from learning more about Princess Osmorella) found out the there is a text in the game, on a computer screen and in a marquee apparently contolled by it, which says:

THIS PLANET WAS FUNDED IN PART BY A GRANT FROM THE OSMORELLA FOUNDATION

Since this is essentially the same syntax as in the disk text, I wonder if it is a sentence that RAWA just translated into D’ni as an ‘exercise’ and it ended up on the disk because the designer liked it (or most of it). If so, this means there are a few words in D’ni whose translation we can now supply:

yishah = ‘planet’
pazgo = ‘(to) fund’
nash = ‘part’
tson = ‘foundation’.

Wow! My day is made. :mrgreen:

Similar passive constructions in Aitrus's map (kokenen kosayen, kokenen kohooren) contain redundant subject marking on both the auxiliary ken and the main verb. While it's possible that kopazgo is an adjective, I agree that it's probably a past tense verb, in which case we have yet another formula for passive clauses. (This is why passives are my favorite part of D'ni!)

An alternative analysis of tenahsh is as the equivalent of the English "by a grant". nahsh would then be a mass noun meaning 'grant', or maybe even just 'money'.

KathAveara · **Posted:** Thu Aug 18, 2016 10:40 pm

Khreestrefah wrote:

tson = ‘foundation’.

Which can possibly be further connected with tso "of"

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Here is a picture of the artist’s prototype of the text repeated in the circle of continuous writing in the Releeshahn pavement (as pointed out above by Dglessus):

Inscription

So the repeated phrase is: bcheghdhopaz (as quoted from Carolyn).

The letter h does not seem to be able to come at the end of a word but it does come at the beginning in h'rot -- though we do not know what that means. Possibly dhopaz is one word -- 'civilization' (literally 'how' + 'prosper') :?:

On the soundtrack disk text: I agree with Talashar that tenahsh could correspond syntactically with either of the phrases ‘in part’ or ‘by a grant’, since te has a general sense that includes ‘in/with/by’; but if the second of these were approximated by a mass noun, something like ‘with money’, then it would seem the more redundant of the two phrases, and thus the likelier to be left out of the translation. Note by the way that we might render ‘by a grant’ as terthtahgtahv.

In the passive construction kokenen kopazgo ‘(it) was funded’, that fact that we have kopazgo rather than kopazgoen suggests that only the verb ‘to be’ is marked for agreement with the subject of the passive verb. So what then would be the explanation of the second -en in a sentence like the following?

.retiwah kokenen kosayen t’Telooknahvah Gahrten
“The shaft was designed by Surveyors Guild Master Garten.”

One possibility is that it marks agreement with the agent (the notional actor) of the verb kosayen, in this case Guild Master Garten. If so, it would suggest the possibility that you could mark the passive verb as having an agent such as ‘you’ or ‘us’ without needing an explicit agent object pronoun phrase:

.erthboogin kokenen kohoorem terthbroon ahnotahm
“A ceature was found (by you) in a lava tube.” :idea:

Shorah,
Kh'reestrefah

KathAveara · **Posted:** Sat Aug 20, 2016 3:58 am

How sure are we that "bcheghdhopaz" is the correct division?

dgelessus · **Posted:** Sat Aug 20, 2016 10:57 am

KathAveara wrote:

How sure are we that "bcheghdhopaz" is the correct division?

Because that's where the texture begins and ends

You have a point though, the text could start over at a different point, there is no visible separation in-game I think (althpugh it's a bit unlikely). Does the middle part of "bcheghdhopazbcheghdhopaz" make more sense?

korovev · **Posted:** Sun Aug 21, 2016 8:33 am

This must be the “feeling dumb after finding out the solution to a puzzle” sensation Rand mentioned about Obduction :lol:

In Exile the related phrase is of course Balanced systems stimulate civilization, so the inscription might perhaps be a fragment of that.

Note that kokenen kopazgo somewhat literally translates “was funded” if was and funded are taken separately, so (OOC) I wonder if this was a preliminary, non-definitive form of the passive.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

The text that was published on the Riven Soundtrack disk one might call "non-definitive" but I would just call "garbled" :wink:

It said:

met yishah kokene n koago tenahsh mretson ahmoreluh.

Years later RAWA provided the correct version of the text:

.met yishah kokenen kopazgo tenahsh mretson ahzmoreluh

A corrected text from RAWA is about as "definitive" as one ever gets in the world of D'ni linguistics, granted that it is not genuine D'ni but something RAWA has translated into D'ni as he understands it -- a purely "IC" distinction of course

-- and given that we are just speculating as to what it means.

What the text says literally (using one interpretation of the untranslated morphemes) is:

"This - planet - it was - I funded - in part - from the foundation - Osmorella."

So I suppose the plausibility of this boils down to a fairly esoteric question:

Who typed the sentence into the computer in Cosmic Osmo and is it the same person who arranged for funds from the Osmorella Foundation to be used for the planet :?:

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

dgelessus wrote:

Does the middle part of "bcheghdhopazbcheghdhopaz" make more sense?

If dhopaz is one word, then it probably does not matter grammatically which of the two possible places one starts to read the inscription:

1) bcheghdhopaz = b'cheg h'dhopaz = e.g. "to balance alongside civilization"
vs.
2) hdhopazbcheg = h'dhopaz b'cheg = e.g. "alongside civilization to balance"

If this is two words, e.g. dho paz (which feels more likely than dhop az), then there could be more of a difference between two of the possible readings, if paz were a verb that can have a dependent infinitive phrase:

1) bcheghdhopaz = b'cheg h'dho paz = e.g. "to balance alongside how I strive"
vs.
2) hdhopazbcheg = h'dho paz b'cheg = e.g. "alongside how I strive to balance"

Inscription in Releeshahn

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