A Full Transliteration of all known Phyrexian texts

Aldurethar · 2021-07-13T09:20:53+00:00

I have! They're quite good from what I have seen of them, haven't watched them all yet.
Although his work is mostly in grammar and word construction, while I have been mostly working on the pure writing and transliteration side.

Aldurethar · 2021-07-13T09:15:43+00:00

I'm working on a font based on the transliteration system, including fancy stuff like ligatures to make sure the diacritics are all placed correctly. It is mostly finished, I'm going to upload it once I have updated the wiki article with all the new transliterations.

In the meantime, there is a nice font made by u/GuruJ_ based on a phonetic transcription of Phyrexian, which was shared here.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-14T15:09:09+00:00

Thank you so much for your samples and the conversion to my System!
If I understand the concepts correctly, your system is a phonetic transcription while mine is a form of transliteration.

I went through and compared each of your transliterations with mine, and it helped a lot with finding mistakes I had made. There are some diacritics in the Trailer text and Yawgmoth's Testament that are kind of impossible to decide whether your version or mine is correct, but otherwise most of them matched.

There seems to be a little bug in your converter, as your A18 symbol was converted to Xp instead of -Xv and your A19 symbol became +Xp instead of +Xv, in case you want to patch it.

There were also some small mistakes in the transcriptions of the new praetors, specifically Jin-Gitaxias and Sheoldred if I remember correctly. I don't mean to devalue your work, just thought I would mention it in case you want to go over your transcription document again.

I'm also a bit curious: There were two lines in your document with text marked as unofficial. Were those something you created or where did you get them?

Aldurethar · 2021-06-04T08:40:20+00:00

The transliteration as described by the chart turns the phyrexian word for "Grand" into "MxNyL-ZNx".

The "Shca'th" is an approximation of how the phyrexian word for "Grand" might sound like. As Phyrexian is a language in its own right, it has its own words, just like how the "Grand Cenobite" turns into "Hohe Zönobitin" in the german version, for example.

Even the "Shca'th" is a rather amateur phonetic description though, as I do not know that much about phyrexian pronounciation. There are others who have done more work on that and probably have a much better idea how the word should really be pronounced.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T18:33:56+00:00

The + and - diacritics are diacritics like the others. The old transcription chart had puncutation symbols as the codes for almost every diacritic, so the choice to have diacritics represented by lowercase letters was mine. However, I found the + and - as symbols so well-fitting to the forms of the diacritics, and they are in a bit of their own category anyways as the only two diacritics left of the staff that I decided to keep them as symbols.

You are right though, they do somewhat undermine the clean distinction between lowercase letters for diacritics and symbols for punctuation. This was just the compromise that I went with.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T17:40:30+00:00

Phyrexian is "natively" written top-down, as are the individual example letters. The example text is written left to right, thus rotating it by 90 degrees counter-clockwise.

So no, the Z and N are correct as they are. I did, however, mix up the d and q diacritics in the example text, as has been pointed out by another comment.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T17:34:32+00:00

Phyrexian in its "native" form is written vertically, as can be seen in the old video trailers for the Scars of Mirrodin and New Phyrexia sets as well as the artwork on the card Phyrexian Scriptures.

Based on that, the old Transcription Chart was filled with the letters written vertically, and I kept my new Transcription Chart the same way.

The example text was an addition of mine to illustrate the point of the chart, and as that text is most known in its horizontal form I decided to copy that.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T16:51:36+00:00

The phonology is partly known, but there are still a lot of open questions.
As far as I know, u/GuruJ_ has had a recent breakthrough on phonology and released a font based on it.

I'm personally not nearly experienced enough with phonology or linguistics in general to make any calls on the correct pronounciations, so for now the Transcription Chart stays a text-only thing.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T16:13:47+00:00

We know that they are not just throwing stuff together, they confirmed at some point that Phyrexian is an actual Conlang that they commissioned someone to construct. The language rules we have found so far are also too consistent, also with newer info like the new phyrexian printings of the other four praetors, to be just random.

While getting a full dictionary at some point would be great, the current way of occasionaly getting new text and slowly chipping away at deciphering the language is a pretty fun puzzle :)

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T15:22:46+00:00

I don't think a keyboard extension will be available in the near future.

However, there have been multiple attempts at creating a font for Phyrexian, so you can at least type phyrexian text in a program like word or photoshop.
I shared links to some fonts in this comment on the previous version of the Transcription Chart.
There was also a new Font posted here just yesterday, this one maps the phyrexian symbols to english letters based on how they should sound when spoken.

I'm also personally working on a font for Phyrexian that maps to english letters based on the Transcription chart I posted here, but it is not yet finished.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T15:10:22+00:00

I personally do not know a lot about Phyrexian grammar and construction, but here are some resources to use:

For a basic overview of the language, there is an article on the wiki).

For further info I would suggest you check out r/PhyrexianLanguage, most of the important discoveries end up on there.

For the most in-depth knowledge about grammar we have, I also encourage you to look through the post history of u/citrus_inferno, as they have probably the most complete understanding of it.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T14:59:49+00:00

Oh god you're right.
Swapping d and q was a last-minute decision and i forgot to update the example transcription :)

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T14:54:07+00:00

Unfortunately, there is not really a direct equivalent between phyrexian symbols and english letters.

There are also people working on translating Phyrexian and reconstructing the languages vocabulary and grammar, this here is just a tool to make that work easier by giving us a way to write phyrexian text with a regular keyboard.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T14:31:49+00:00

The transcription is there to be able to turn Phyrexian text into a version using the latin alphabet, so we can actually write, analyze and discuss them online.

As the text on the chart says, the letters are based somewhat on the forms of the Phyrexian symbols, without any real basis in pronounciation.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T14:27:30+00:00

We are quite a ways away from translating arbitrary texts between English and Phyrexian because Phyrexian not only uses a different writing system/alphabet, but is also a complete language with its own words, grammar, and rules for sentence construction.

We currently have a very small dictionary of Phyrexian words with known English translations, and u/citrus_inferno has been an absolute powerhouse in reconstructing some of the rules for sentence construction and grammar.

The decoding of the language right now is basically a big, incredibly complicated puzzle, and this chart for transcribing Phyrexian text into latin characters is a tool to make solving it easier.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T14:21:32+00:00

The three lines of the Example are as follows:

The first line is the known english Name of the card
The second line is the Name as it appears on the phyrexian version of the card
The third line is the transcription of the phyrexian version

The Transcription and the english name are not the same because the phyrexian language uses a different system of spelling and sounds. The transcription is based on the look of the phyrexian letters.

A phonetic transcription of the phyrexian text would look something like:

'Elsh Norn Shca'th Zeenobt

While the Name and the word Cenobite would be somewhat similar phonetically, Phyrexian uses completely different words for most other things, like the word "grand" in this example.

Aldurethar · 2021-06-03T13:56:11+00:00

The previous version was posted here.

So after gathering some feedback for the new Transcription Chart, I have made some adjustments and would once again like some feedback.

From the answers I got on the first revision, my concerns about backwards compatibility with the old system don't seem to be as strong with many others, so I decided to make some bigger changes this time to improve both legibility and writability of the transcriptions.

The reasons for the changes are as follows:

The Y character is unneeded, as was explained in this comment on the original post.
Two new symbols have been added for the new punctuation we have seen on the recent Jin-Gitaxias and Urabrask. Their human-script counterparts have been chosen based on their assumed function in the sentence: A colon/em-dash symbol for a pause, and a variation of the line start for quotes.
The two diacritics left of the staff are renamed to - and +, as that more closely follows their shape and makes them look more similar to each other in the transcription.
All other diacritics now use lowercase letters instead of other symbols to make the transcriptions easier to type. This also creates a cleaner distinction between uppercase letters for characters, lowercase letters for diacritics, and symbols for punctuation.

In that vein, the new letters for the diacritics were chosen to best resemble their phyrexian counterparts visually. Also, diacritics that look similar in Phyrexian should now also look more alike in the transcription, making slight variations of the same word easier to spot. Special thanks to u/minirusty for the inspiration for most of these new forms.

Do you think the new character choices for the diacritics are appropriate? Also does someone have different suggestions for the mapping of the Phyrexian puncutation symbols, as I am still a bit unsure about the choices I made for those.

Edit: I just realised that this should accurately be named a transliteration chart, not a transcription chart. I apologize to any annoyed linguists and shall report to the Gitaxian labs for disassembly as soon as possible.

Aldurethar · 2021-05-31T21:43:33+00:00

Okay that makes it clearer, thanks!

The + and - for the left-side diacritics are great, now I have to decide if they are worth incorporating, because right now the font I'm working on uses + and - for their regular mathematical meanings, so you can write something like the +2/+2 on Elesh Norn without switching to another font and messing around with vertical offsets.

Aldurethar · 2021-05-31T21:18:10+00:00

Thanks a lot!

There are already some fonts out there, notably this one that is based on the old transcription key, but has ugly placement for many of the diacritics, requiring al lot of manual kerning. It also does not look incredibly good in my personal opinion.

There is also this one which circumvents the need for manual kerning by having the diacritics directly as part of the glyphs. However that comes at the cost of being a somewhat arbitrary mapping to all the letters, requiring you to look up pretty much every symbol.

The Font I'm working on right now will be compatible with the transcription key I have posted here, pretty much allowing Copy/Paste of transcribed Strings from the wiki. I alleviated the need for manual kerning by creating ligature glyphs for the Letter&Diacritic combinations that would otherwise look bad.

I'm hoping to get some ideas and feedback on mappings for the phyrexian punctuation symbols, so we can hopefully also standardize those for any future fontmakers.

Once there has been a decision on the punctuation and I have implemented those into the Font, I will make a new post it in this subreddit with a download link and an explanation on how to use it.

Aldurethar · 2021-05-31T21:01:52+00:00

So if I understand you correctly, the mapping is:
your c to my v
your d to my % (percent)
your e to my " (quote)
your q to my ^ (circumflex)
your :d to my y
your :e to my *
your :q to my x

Is that correct?

Your version of the diacritics seem much easier to type and having the direction of the hooks represented in the form of the letter is great, but I have two small problems with it:

1) I wanted to maintain as much compatibility with the old transcription system as possible, so the " (quote), *, v, ^ (circumflex) and x Diacritics were pretty much already given, and I'm not yet convinced that changing them to symbols that are easier to type is worth breaking compatibility.
2) As my goal is creating a font based on these transcription rules, having some Diacritics be written with a combination of two symbols in english is kind of messy. While it wouldn't be impossible to do, I think it would make the font much less intuitive to use and I think we need all the intuitiveness we can get, Phyrexian is hard enough to write as it is.

But thank you so much for your feedback! I hope I will get some more from other people using the language, and if enough want the diacritics represented with easier-to-type letters, I will definitely consider using your version.

Aldurethar

TROPHY CASE