3/10/12

Αναλύοντας τη γλώσσα των παρατηρητων!!!


Διαβάστε παρακάτω ενα πολυ αναλυτικο ξενο αρθρο για την γλώσσα των παρατηρητων!!!


Hello, welcome to a new feature on Fringe Television, hopefully this will be a weekly post for this season, but that really depends on the Observers !

I want to start analysing the Observer language from each episode and seeing if there is anything it can tell us.

First though you will have to go though an Observer Langauge primer to understand why it is so interesting

The idea that the Observers had a different language first appeared all the way back in season 1 episode 4 -Arrival

I remember some attempts to decode this at the time but with little success.

We did see some more examples of Observer writing after that, but the symbols seemed to change style. In fact they look more like the symbols used on the communicator device first seen in The Arrival and more recently in season 4's Making Angels

The symbols I am concentrating on are the ones that made a prominent appearance in season 4's Letters Of Transit because vitally that episode gave an English equivalent of what the characters meant.

Actually it was just before that episode I realised what they were as the promo trailer for the epsiode had the words HEED, SERVE, OBEY and three sets of characters that looked like the original observer notebooks. My logical assumption was that the characters were the literal translations. That followed on into the epsiode where the signs in the train station made more and more sense if you could identify the characters. 

I started matching the letters to the English equivalents and refining the actual character by looking for multiple examples. In the earliest version of the key below I had dashes and dots belonging to the wrong characters, but once you see the same character next to or inbetween a different letter you can extract the correct strokes that make up a symbol.

The image below is my attempt at detailing each character with it's English equivalent. There are upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation that have been identified. I've tried to include a couple of examples from different fonts or handwriting from the show.

The recent Observer Protocol Wanted videos helped to cement this and revealed quite a few more characters which is why this key is so complete.


As you may observe the characters are completely random in nature and don't make a lot of sense. Take the lower case t character as an example, it is completely daft to use this set of 6 individual strokes to make a t equivalent. The only reason I can think of for this is so that no one would ever be able to translate the language if they found the notebook as you cannot guess at what the characters are.

My next source of reference is the press kit that was sent for the season 2 episodeAugust.

That document contains the majority of the characters we have seen on the language signs and a few extra ones that have yet to be identified, but are probably the missing characters from the alphabet key.

As you can see from my translation below most of it seems like a random arrangement of characters, apart from a couple of sections, the runs of numbers. From that I have assumed that the characters for 8 and 9 are correct as I don't believe they have been on screen yet, but it makes complete sense given the other numbers are correct.

The question is why that document does not translate to the Observer language ? Was it an attempt at misdirection or simply a set of characters used that at the time of production no one knew what to do with ? 


One thing this translation did was make me smile when I realised that the trap set for September in season 4's final episode literally means 5 as you can see from the press release version the 5 character matches the trap symbol.

Going back to the translated letters one slight oddity in the key is that we have one character that seems to represent / and ? whether that is a mistake I don't know, but it is a little strange.

It is also worth noting that there seem to be mixed rules on using upper and lower case letters on signs and computer screens. For example take the Observer protocol videos, the WANTED equivalent has an upper case W followed by all the rest in lower case.

So now to this weeks season 5 opening epsiode where we see some more writing on the Observer Carbon Monoxide machine. The only characters that are loud and clear are on the error message that is displayed.

My translation of this is shown here, there is a character that appears on the press kit document but I currently have no English translation for it, Shown as ? in the image.

Unfortunately the words are not English equivalents so I can't yet work out what that character should be.

My guess is that because the "Natives" now know how to speak observer the messages have been encrypted to make them harder to understand. I have tried some basic decryption techniques but with little success. So if anyone has any ideas then please post them in the comments.

Talking of unknown characters these are the ones I have identified that are not yet translated. They are mainly from the press kit and in all likelihood they are going to equate to G, J, K, Q, X, b, j, q, z and possibly some other punctuation.
I have created a True Type font file with my version of the symbols and if there is enough demand I'll publish the unfinished version for anyone to use until the full set can be identified, but until then here is a short message for you.

All that remains is to go back to where it all began and September's Notebook but it is bad news, I can't translate it. It contains characters that are either not the ones I am familiar with, or it is September's handwriting that is very odd or we just aren't meant to know. He is writing right to left so I have tried flipping and rotating the image but which ever way I do it it still makes no sense.

The other possibility is that, as some others have suggested, some of the symbols he is using are actually word equivalents not just letters so there is a whole other level of translation to be done.

It probably means that it isn't important in the grand scheme of things and that answers only lead to more questions, but I'd still like to know !

Πηγήhttp://www.fringetelevision.com/

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