Linguistics nerd vs. Voidtongue

[voltocitygel]

I knew someone would start to figure it out, and was kind of curious. Good luck to all of you trying to translate it.

One funny side note- we have a weapon called the “Mara Detron”, which is the only one with that prefix / variant. Assuming what we think is correct, this would be the “child detron” lol. Unless it has multiple meanings based on context, as words can. 

[apprenticeNerd]

2 hours ago, ominumi said:

So we are basically translating sentence structure? That's totally unfair. Finding intent behind random jumbo of words is near impossible. And I know DE likes to read these kind of threads. Said person making the Voidtongue is already coming up with new ways to throw off the trail. Want to keep it as a riddle.

What do you mean by "totally unfair"? This might just be me thinking highly of DE in general and wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I don't think there's any malice or adversarial-ness in how Voidtongue is being presented. Sure, translations are few and far between right now, but the more seemingly-random words we get and the more examples we get of how to string them together, the more we can deduce about the language and how it works. That's the whole point of this thread; it's a fun challenge! (And it'll be even more fun if and when we actually get a full-sentence translation!)

[(PSN)robotwars7]

7 hours ago, voltocitygel said:

One funny side note- we have a weapon called the “Mara Detron”, which is the only one with that prefix / variant. Assuming what we think is correct, this would be the “child detron” lol. Unless it has multiple meanings based on context, as words can. 

Mara is also a sanskrit word akin to "devil", so I believe a weapon, intended for killing, would be called "Devil's Detron" to inspire fear.

fun fact: the Mara Detron was a commonly used weapon by Smugglers during the Orokin Era.

[ominumi]

7 hours ago, apprenticeNerd said:

What do you mean by "totally unfair"? This might just be me thinking highly of DE in general and wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I don't think there's any malice or adversarial-ness in how Voidtongue is being presented. Sure, translations are few and far between right now, but the more seemingly-random words we get and the more examples we get of how to string them together, the more we can deduce about the language and how it works. That's the whole point of this thread; it's a fun challenge! (And it'll be even more fun if and when we actually get a full-sentence translation!)

The unfair part is sentence intent isn't consistent base on context. The three same voidtongue words means something in "Whisper in the Wall." Those three exact same words will mean something else in another quest. Only because the dictionary is small currently. It's a fun riddle for sure. My interest isn't the riddle itself. More the thought process of the persons who came up with the riddle.

[voltocitygel]

5 hours ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

Mara is also a sanskrit word akin to "devil", so I believe a weapon, intended for killing, would be called "Devil's Detron" to inspire fear.

fun fact: the Mara Detron was a commonly used weapon by Smugglers during the Orokin Era.

Devil would make a bit more sense, but interesting to see the same word used in two different ways, to be sure. 

Yeah, I read that! It makes me wonder how many of those smugglers joined up with the corpus after they were founded, since that’s one way the corpus could have gotten ahold of the weapon to design the ordinary detron. (Or the tenet, for that matter). 
kind of like how the gotva prime was originally used by proto-grineer foot soldiers, and it can be implied from the weapons performance and design that it was likely what they based the design of the grakata from.

Edited March 31 by voltocitygel

[Fallowsthorn]

On 2024-03-28 at 3:52 PM, Hazuruk said:

I've noticed Fibonacci saying "Vashtav, Mara Lohk" At the end of Assassination missions. How much you wanna bet Vashtav means Thank/Thank You, or something of that like?

Here's what I find interesting: the Severed Warden mob has voice lines, and one of them is very clearly "vashtav." I'm really bad at understanding distorted audio, but here's the video I took:

It says "vashtav" at around 0:15, I think as the end of a line, and it might say something like "oh-tah vahk" at about 0:42. No clue on the rest of it. At 1:32 it says "vashtav" again as a discrete line. Also at about 1:14 you can see its cute lil skull face, although the mouth doesn't move.

It was right after I shot it, so maybe it means something like "well fought"? There's not much that makes sense in both contexts. The other enemies (Grabby and Stompy) just make chittering noises afaik, but they don't have mouths, so.

Really interested to see if anyone can make out what it's saying! And it probably has other voice lines for, eg, when it sees you, or when it does its triangle jail thing, but if I turned visible I would've died immediately, lol. Also the combat music would've started playing over it, Ivara's Prowl kind of muffles a lot of the background.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

 

17 hours ago, Fallowsthorn said:

Really interested to see if anyone can make out what it's saying!

disclaimer: this is all speculation, I'm not a qualified linguist by any means.

what each of the lines sounds like to me in order

"um sho sahk, Kull mayo" - that's what the very first one sounds like, and the SW (Severed Warden) is not being attacked, just doing it's thing giving overguard to it's allies. I wonder if it is simply letting allies know it is goign to protect them, something akin to "I'll cover you!"

"eer kam eer, Vashtav" - Vashtav appears, though I imagine it is more akin to thankyou than anything else. what I find strange though is that SW would be saying thankyou when IT is the one providing shielding, not receiving it, so unless murmur can channel their words through each other or something, and it's actually one of the others saying thankyou, I'm not sure what to make of that.

"Havak Jass" - it says this after you shot it, so I'm wondering if this is a line indicating distress (though that begs the question "can the Murmur feel emotions in the first place?"). if so, it's probably asking for help/protection itself, and if not, it's simply informing it's allies that it is being attacked (and perhaps also indirectly saying "your protection is at risk).

the next thing it says, after being shot a second time is inaudible to me. I'm wearing headphones, but there's a LOT of distortion in the voices. I'm also trying to spell out the phonetics in a way that is relatively close to the known voidtongue words (but again, I could be off)

"ooh tay vak" - this one comes out a lot clearer to me, at this point I think "Vak" or "Vahk" is definitely a word, there's a lot of emphasis there.

"mushala kulaan" - the first part is really distorted again and I think hidden by the musical note that plays at the same time, so I might be wrong, but I think it's two words.

the line that comes after that is again, too difficult to make out. 

"ahgut ehvo" - it seems to be saying this as you attack the other Murmur Fragment, so possibly another combat-related phrase? do murmur fragments actually care/comprehend when one of their own gets killed? honestly this has started sending me down a much deeper philosophical rabbit hole when it comes to the murmur and I blame you lol.

"Havak Jass" - this time though it sounded like there was an R, so it's more "Harak Jass". it might have been that the first time and I got it wrong lol.

"nisu karehoh"  - it's really distorted but I think this is what it said.. I'm really reaching now though.

"ah sho slaak" -  "Sho has got to be a word in Voidtongue IMO, not onyl is it here, it's also in the one music track that was the login for Whispers in The Wall. no idea what it means, but it's a thing I reckon!

"Vashtav" - it appears again, but this time it seems to be on it's own, with no other words. could it have multiple meanings based on the context?

"Mushala Kulaan - same line again, but for some reason it seemed clearer that time. 

after that, you killed the SW and it was forever silenced; you've set back our progress in this field by several minutes! oh, nevermind there's another one just around the corner..

@apprenticeNerd you have any thoughts on this? was I even close with my interpretations? :D

 

 

 

[Fallowsthorn]

18 hours ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

Vashtav appears, though I imagine it is more akin to thankyou than anything else. what I find strange though is that SW would be saying thankyou when IT is the one providing shielding, not receiving it, so unless murmur can channel their words through each other or something, and it's actually one of the others saying thankyou, I'm not sure what to make of that.

See, this is why I think it's not "thank you," because yeah, it doesn't make sense in context. (The hive mind is an interesting concept but I think if it's true it's more likely to just be MITW talking through all of them, rather than individual networked consciousnesses.) But if it's an acknowledgement of combat prowess, then that would fit both an enemy and an ally saying it.

18 hours ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

"Havak Jass" - it says this after you shot it, so I'm wondering if this is a line indicating distress (though that begs the question "can the Murmur feel emotions in the first place?"). if so, it's probably asking for help/protection itself, and if not, it's simply informing it's allies that it is being attacked (and perhaps also indirectly saying "your protection is at risk).

I think you're right on this (or at least close enough), I can hear it very clearly now that you've pointed it out! It seems to be a distinct line both times, but I don't think we have enough evidence to really guess what it means. A sample size of two isn't very big, and the invisibility doesn't help with figuring out who it's supposed to be addressing.

Ooooooor apparently I can just go to the wiki, where someone has uploaded all the sound files for each of the Murmur bosses (except Stompy, who doesn't get to talk): https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/The_Murmur/Quotes. "Havak Jass" seems to be "MITWTriangleIdleE" which is frankly hilarious as a name and I will be using it forever, thank you. Some of the others also say vashtav - notably, the Anatomizer says "oull ne vashtav," at least according to the transcription of... I guess whoever uploaded it? I don't know where these come from, I assume the game files given the placeholder names. TBH most of them just sound like growly noises and occasional random consonants to me. (Plus MITWTriangleAttackH, which seems to have a weird bubbly noise mixed in.)

Going back to just "vashtav" for a moment, and taking it as given that the transcriptions are correct (vashtav is a fairly easy one to pick out), we have:

• Severed Warden and Fragmented say it standalone as an attack line (whether this means "while attacking" or "on being attacked" is unclear)
• Gruzzling says it on death, standalone
• Anatomizer says it as an idle line in a sentence ("oull ne vashtav")
• Gruzzling says it as an idle line in a sentence ("vok [?] vashtav")*
• Fibonacci says it in dialogue as part of a sentence, but the sentence structure indicates it may be an interjection [shrug emoji]

*this is "TreasureBoxIdleF" and to me it sounds like "vok vash, vashtav" which may mean it's a compound word, or possibly that it just sounds like part of another word. There's also no way to know if there's meant to be a comma between the words, or if "vok vash" is one word or two, or if the Gruzzling just has a freakin' stutter. It also sounds excited and pronounces it "vash-TAV," who know whether that's relevant.

Maybe someone who knows what they're doing can logic some of this out like a cryptogram, but from where I'm sitting it feels like trying to put together a thousand-piece jigsaw with a couple dozen pieces and no box art, and half of them are sky. We just don't have enough information. It's still interesting to speculate, but I don't think we can be sure of much.

19 hours ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

after that, you killed the SW and it was forever silenced; you've set back our progress in this field by several minutes! oh, nevermind there's another one just around the corner..

lmao 🤣