The Hoennian Language of ORAS

[elementcollector1]

Continuing off my last thread about the fully-translatable Sinnohan language in the upcoming remakes, I decided to go back and visit some prior games to see if they had any translatable languages also. To my surprise, I found one almost immediately - Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire include a syllabary of their own!

Now, unlike Sinnoh, this can't be translated in the games themselves. All the town signs are the same:

From left to right: Littleroot, Oldale and Petalburg town signs.

Similarly, all Route signs and Gym signs are the same, and at such a low resolution translating them isn't really easy anyway. So you might think this is pointless, right? Well... not exactly. In concept art for the game, an image was released advertising the brand-new PokeNav Plus, and incidentally showcased some high-resolution Hoennian text:

Pictured: Brendan, blissfully unaware of the horrors that lay in store.

My first thought, of course, is that if this was anything, it would be a substitute for Japanese katakana much like Sinnohan was. This is because Hoenn takes the place of the real-world island of Kyushu, the southernmost major island of Japan.

Incidentally, does this mean the cardinal directions in Hoenn are also rotated?

Then, I realized that the top right was actually a specific feature of the PokeNav Plus: The Trainer's Eye. This allows you to rematch Trainers that you've already defeated. The guy pictured here is a Collector, of which there are two in the entirety of Omega Ruby or Alpha Sapphire... and one who's rematchable: Collector Edwin. However, Collector Edwin's Japanese rematch screen is completely wrong for the text: It has the wrong number of characters in the headers.

The proper translation would have two symbols in the first black header, seven in the second and four in the third. So if this wasn't gibberish, that should be a fairly easy jumping-off point, right? Find a language, any language, that met those requirements and that's all we need. As it turns out, there is one such translation of ORAS that meets those requirements - specifically, Korean!

So that means that Hoennian is actually a cipher for Korean hangul, which... is odd. I've got two theories about this, feel free to post your own speculation:

1) The person who drew that concept art is Korean or desired to use a Korean conlang. While Bulbapedia has a page about all the concept art from ORAS, I've been unable to find the artist who drew them. Was it Ken Sugimori? Absolutely no idea.

2) Hoenn is, in fact, settled by ethnic Koreans and reflects this. This theory is a bit stronger, if only due to the particular distance between Kyushu and Korea:

Lower right is Kyushu/Hoenn and a bit of the rest of Japan, just for clarity.

Anyway, this translation isn't perfect. The white text describing Edwin's Strategy, Favorite Pokemon and About Me are all wrong - however, that might simply be because this is for a different collector that got cut from the Trainer's Eye feature (a distinct possibility) or Edwin's particular text was changed after the concept art was released. Either way, even if we ignore that there's still one character conflict (or, more accurately, three) - the word 'Pokemon' has two distinct symbol sets, one from 'Pokemon Collector' and one from the 'Favorite Pokemon' header.

Hangul in red are duplicates. From right to left: Hoennian, hangul, translated hangul*, English version.
*Google Translate is not the best at this.

As noted in the picture, the other source of text (the news blurb on the top right of the concept art) cannot be translated, as the news anchor doesn't have any specific line of dialogue I could find that this would translate (unless she says something like 'EMERGENCY!!' during the weather incident? I haven't checked.)

I spoke with someone who actually knows Korean (instead of using Google Translate to even get a remote understanding), and got this:

"As far as I'm aware, there's only one name for the franchise. Well, I mean, technically two. There's "POKETMONSEUTEO" (포켓몬스터), and its shortened form "POKETMON" (포켓몬). In other words, its names are "Pocket Monsters" and "Pocket-Mon". So there are no different characters used between the two, apart from the dropped "STERS" (스터/SEUTEO) bit."​

Will I plug his website shamelessly for the second thread in a row? Yes. Thanks Nick!

I thought maybe that would make the second instance 'Favorite Monsters' or something similar, but no dice - the first character of the second 'Pokemon' isn't the same as the last character of the first.

And this is where I'm stuck, for now. There's no other instances of translatable Hoennian in or out of the game that I know of. Additionally, unless we can somehow extract the base letters used to form the combinatory groups of two- or three-letter characters that make up Hangul, I somehow don't think we're getting all 11,172 possible combinations. Apparently there's a more restrained character set used for limited-memory applications (such as a video game), but either way, with only one concept art to go off of, we're a little short. Just a tad.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

Apparently there's a more restrained character set used for limited-memory applications (such as a video game)

Korean transitions of Nintendo games intrigue me because they're so under-documented on the Anglonet. Does ORAS use that restrained character set? (Apparently, there are some Hangul syllablocks that are possible but never used.)

Also, I never noticed that each game had a different set of diagetic gibberish text, but I suppose it makes sense. I remember back when Sword and Shield was announced, a YouTube commenter wondered if someone could figure out the entire cipher based on the Game Freak logo in the stadiums.

 

[elementcollector1]

I decided to revisit this in my off time from translating the new Sinnohan language. I couldn't find anything new to officially translate, so I instead turned to inventing my own interpretation of this language (known as a 'conlang' to those who do this regularly). It's structured much like the Korean hangul alphabet it's based off of, with two to three 'base' letters forming 'blocks' that are the symbols we see.

To get the 'base' letters, I started by comparing every syllablock that had a shared letter. For example, jag, jeon, joh, ji, and ja all start with the letter J, so they all have to share that 'base' letter somewhere in their construction. Every Hoennian symbol (with a single exception, ja) fits in a 5x5 pixel space, so my first idea was to simply overlap all of these symbols and the base letter would be whatever pixels they all shared. This netted me... a collection of unconnected dots. Not exactly helpful to someone looking to remember/memorize all 29-34 hangul base letters in a new format.

I then tried again, but this time focusing on strokes. This concept is more important to Eastern languages than Western ones - specifically, how many brush or pencil strokes and in what order a symbol is made from. This netted results that were a lot more useful, as I immediately could tell that every symbol starting with J featured a vertical stroke to the right. From there, I followed a similar process to extract as many base letters as I could, inventing a few 'rules' to keep everything consistent in the process. Below are the base letters of Hoennian so far (this list is incomplete):

From left to right, top: S, J, N, G, M, P, H, and K. Bottom: E, I, A, O, EO, and EU.

The 'rules' for creating Hoennian symbols are then as follows:

1) Vowels in the middle of the syllable (e.g. mon, kes, jeon) have their base letters rotated 180 degrees.

2) Consonants at the end of the syllable (e.g. jag, jeon, kes but NOT po, gae) are flipped horizontally. This also applies to i when at the end of a syllable (e.g. gi, ji).

3) The letter 'm' is a special case that is not visible but still affects others - e.g. in 'on', the o would be normal, but in 'mon', the o would be rotated 180 degrees because it's now a middle letter. This also applies to two-letter blocks like mo or meo - the last letter is still rotated 180 degrees despite there being no ending letter (this differentiates these from the lone 'o' or 'eo').

For example, here's how you combine j, a, and g to form jag. J starts, so it remains unchanged. Because a is in the middle, it gets rotated 180 degrees, and because g is at the end, it gets flipped horizontally.

Far right: Rainbow is combined base letters, black is resulting symbol, and red is comparison to 'real' Hoennian symbol.

As you can see, it's not perfect, but I chalk this up to artistic liberty - making the line on the left thicker serves to differentiate it from other combinations that might otherwise look the same.

Here's another example, this time illustrating rule #3 - the difference between 'on' and 'mon':

...Ignore that the o on the bottom left's line is one pixel up from where it should be. Shush.

I'm still working on a full list of base letters, but this is what I got for now. To finish things off, here's one last illustration of combining base letters to form the word 'Poke(s)mon':

I'm not exactly sure why it's pokesmon instead of poketmon, but that's what is apparently used in the actual ORAS text. Maybe kes is more common elsewhere?

 

[elementcollector1]

Korean transitions of Nintendo games intrigue me because they're so under-documented on the Anglonet. Does ORAS use that restrained character set? (Apparently, there are some Hangul syllablocks that are possible but never used.)

Also, I never noticed that each game had a different set of diagetic gibberish text, but I suppose it makes sense. I remember back when Sword and Shield was announced, a YouTube commenter wondered if someone could figure out the entire cipher based on the Game Freak logo in the stadiums.

A quick note on this, since I did the research - while the total possible combinations of Hangul syllablocks comes in at 11,172, the useful combinations (to 0.1% accuracy) number 2,530 (in other words, the 2,530 most common Hangul characters represent 99.9% of all Hangul text).

That being said, here's the full list of 'base letters' and the combinations I'm using in my fanfic for Hoennian (as you can imagine, I only created the combinations I needed - the rest are open to interpretation):

If whoever reads this has some free time, maybe they could try and crack these?