The Language of Kanto (LGPE)

[elementcollector1]

Back again with another language decipherment thread, this time for the symbols seen in Let's Go Pikachu! and Let's Go Eevee!

I'll admit that this one stumped me for a long time. See, the first thing any good cryptographer does is count the number of symbols that appears, and given the amount of semi-English languages that crop up in the Pokemon series (especially in the anime), and the recent development of Sinnoh having a katakana syllabary instead, I was pretty confident that if it was around 26 it was English, and if it was around 50 it was Japanese. However, that did not prepare me for the amount of symbols found in Kantonian text.

Which is 14.

Well, technically, it's 12. The 13th and 14th characters, to the best of my knowledge, only appear in Cinnabar Lab, and are not used anywhere else. For comparison, this would be the shortest or second shortest alphabet known to mankind, as the shortest (Rotokas) also has 12 letters. So, for a while, me and the buddies I do Poke-language decipherment with were convinced that this was just gibberish text, both for this and other reasons - the symbol distribution was relatively equal (any language uses some symbols more than others), the texts were too small to be obvious English (and too limited to be obvious Japanese), etc.

However, I always like to second-guess when it comes to this stuff, and thankfully someone else had the spark of inspiration that led to this language's translation over on Reddit. Essentially, what pokemaniac91 figured out was that each symbol stood for at least two English letters, instead of one - A and M shared a character, and so did B and N, C and O, and so on. From there, any string of text could be 'translated' into pairs of possible letters for each symbol, and the translation guessed from the list of available possibilities. Nothing ever came of this on the Reddit thread, so I decided to follow this rabbit hole and figure out if there were any secrets hiding here.

Pictured: Me, following yet another rabbit hole.

From this, it's obvious that some of these just don't translate and are meaningless gibberish text. However, more interestingly, some just as clearly do - and they're mostly Romaji, the Latin-letter script for Japanese words. Here's some that stuck out, and their locations:

POKEMON - Game Freak office Charizard/Venusaur poster.
KUCHIBA GIM - Poster inside Vermilion Gym. Note the 'I' character used as 'Y'.
POKEWOOD - S.S. Anne poster inside Vermilion Gym. Well, I guess a ship is typically made of wood, and it does transport Pokemon, so... Pokewood?
POKEMO WII PIKAH - Pikachu poster in Celadon Department Store (left side wall). No 'N' on the Pokemon script, but probably they just ran out of room. You'd think it might be referring to PokePark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure, but...
POKEMO WII IBUI - Eevee poster in Celadon Department Store (left side wall). There's no Eevee-centric game for the Wii or Wii U, so maybe the Let's Go! duo were actually intended for a Wii release and didn't get finished on time?
... TAM DEPT - Title of Celadon Department Store directory. Haven't narrowed down the first bit (hence the ...), but TAM DEPT is short for Tamamushi Department Store - Tamamushi being Celadon's Japanese name.
... BENRI - Last bit of Celadon Department Store directory's 2F. 'Benri' means 'convenience' in Japanese, and this is where many core items are sold - Poke Balls, Potions, etc.
NEMUR - Gravestones in Pokemon Tower. 'Nemuru' is similar to the phrase 'rest in peace' in Japanese, and the last character was presumably cut off to save room, similar to the 'POKEMO' from earlier.

There are undoubtedly more hidden within the game, but I'm still working my way through every bit of text. Plus, I don't really have a Japanese background, so I'll likely miss potential word combinations (if someone here does have a Japanese background, I've attached my documentation so far - have a read through and see if something jumps out at you!)

I've also attached my Kantonian font, which only goes to P (M through P are unassigned as of now, as I haven't figured out what - if any - letters they represent. M and N are commonly used, but O and P are the ones that are only used once...)

It's interesting that they'd try to use a 'halved' cipher here. This definitely plays into my pet theory that somebody at Game Freak is a cryptographer...

Notably, with this, the only regions that don't have their own unique language are Johto (unless you count Unown) and Kalos. I haven't played X and Y yet, so maybe there's some text in there somewhere? Not sure.

 

[elementcollector1]

EDIT: Do you ever just have a major breakthrough the second after you post something?

Anyway, I finally narrowed down what characters 'M' and 'N' on the fonts are! It turns out a framed placard on the wall of the Pokemon Fan Club has this to say:

This means that that 'F' character (assigned as 'N' in the font) has to be 'S'. However, this conflicts with earlier assignments, which should link it to 'G' - which was already assigned to that H-looking character, like so:

Pay no attention to the poor structure of this guide, I'll fix it later.

We got that from the poster in Vermilion City Gym, which I thought read 'KUCHIBA GIM' - having the I instead of a Y was a little odd, but I thought maybe it was just a quirk. Nope, turns out the proper word is JIM - as in Jimu, the Japanese word for gym, making that character actually the J/V and the 'F'-looking character the proper G/S, like this:

There, fixed.

The highlighted character on the far right (M in the font), then, is the last remaining untranslated character. Coincidentally, there's only one remaining untranslated slot - the L/X one. So... it's probably those two? Given that Y and Z appear to be missing, I wouldn't be surprised if they did something funky and cut X and Z (the two least-used characters in the English alphabet) out and made it L/Y instead. We'll see...