Sandbox / Wickchecklish

OP by: mathfreak231

Category: Duplicate Trope

Intro

For a while I thought that Wingdinglish and Artificial Script were the same thing, but they do have subtly different definitions:

• Wingdinglish is specifically about Cipher Languages of the source language that use symbols. There's an emphasis on it being a "font" but it seems it can be any symbol alphabet. It doesn't necessarily have to be made up by the author.
• Artificial Script doesn't necessarily have to be a cipher of the source language, but it does have to be made up by the author.

These differences don't seem big enough to warrant having 2 different pages. There's also a bit of The Same, but More Specific with Cipher Language and Conlang, respectively. Furthermore, Artificial Script only has 31 wicks. I'm considering a merger.

Questions

Are the differences in their definitions necessary? Does Wingdinglish use more made-up scripts or pre-made fonts like Wingdings? 50 wicks of Wingdinglish and all wicks of Artificial Script were checked.

Wingdinglish

• 16/50 were correct usage i.e. a cipher of a real-life language.
• 1/50 was technically correct but was actually an unintentional programming error and thus loses the meaning.
• 4/50 described a symbol language but did not say it was a cipher for a real-life language.
• 2/50 described a font that's still recognizeable as Latin script, but don't say it's for an alien language.
• 10/50 were Zero-Context Example or other misuse
• 17/50 were potholes

Correct usage (cipher for real-life language)

1. Webcomic.Tales Of The Questor: The written language of the Racoonan people, featured prominently throughout much of the comic. Thankfully, the author provided a translation guide.
2. Characters.Genshin Impact Abyss: Floating runes appear above Abyss Mages or ritual fires. Players have observed that the runes simply each stand for a letter, and when the runes are converted to letters, Latin text can be read.
3. ComicBook.Weapon Hex: Laura speaks in the Lost Tongues which, written out, are just English with the letters replaced by various symbols. It appears to be the same language used by Scarlet Witch and Loki for their spells.
4. VideoGame.The Legend Of Banjo Kazooie The Jiggies Of Time: In the Forest Temple, the duo are informed by Cheato that to solve a number of puzzles, they will need to decipher the Hylian Language (it uses a modified version of Wind Waker's Hylian language which is already Japanese Katakana) into English (A is an unside-down De, F is Wa, G is an upside-down 4, H is Bo, etc...). A full listing can be found here.
5. Anime.Yohane The Parhelion Sunshine In The Mirror: The written word in this world uses glyphs that substitute for Roman letters. The parts written in kanji are left unchanged, however.
6. Webcomic.A Complete Waste Of Time: There are various phrases written not with the Latin alphabet but instead with the flowy cipher-script of the Ithicans. Decoding those passages will enrich your experience. Especially when reading the (handwritten) Act 5 recap.
7. ComicBook.Secret Warps: Laura speaks in the Lost Tongues which, written out, are just English with the letters replaced by various symbols. It appears to be the same language used by Scarlet Witch and Loki for their spells. Unlike in Weapon Hex, the translations here don't line up. Here's a cypher that lines up with examples found in the Weapon Hex comic.
8. VideoGame.The Sims 4: Upon studying the written Simlish glyphs carefully, one will find that many of the glyphs map neatly to the Latin alphabet. This is noticeable when a school-age Sim is made to play Keyboard Commander- some of the items have the same amount of letters as their English name, after watching a while one will start to notice patterns that allows one to create a simple substitution cipher table.
9. VideoGame.Maptroid: The document in the mountain is written in wingdings, which kind of fits the alien planet atmosphere, especially as it's also the only one with non-white text. It reads "Did you really bother to translate this?".
10. VideoGame.Rescue On Fractalus: The low resolution makes it not immediately obvious, but the Jaggi lettering is English turned sideways. It spells out the developers' initials.^note "LC" for Loren Carpenter, "DF" for David Fox, "CK" for Charlie Kellner, and "PL" for Peter Langston.
11. Untranslated Catchphrase: The Shroobs from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time have a single two word phrase in their language that they constantly repeat over the course of the game. It's only at the very end that we finally get a translation: "DESTROY!"
12. Music.Coldplay: Music of the Spheres has 12 planets, each with their own alien Cypher Language.
13. WebAnimation.Underverse: XGaster and normal Gaster always speak with a layer of Windings beneath their speech. XAlphys also writes all the entries in Windings, and at one point she and XGaster talk in it. Apparently, it sounds different enough from regular English that bystanders cannot understand it. should probably mention explicitly that it's a cipher of english but close enough
14. Webcomic.Iji Captain Lhurgoyf: Specifically, alien writing uses the Standard Galactic Alphabet. With an actual font, so you can theoretically read it if you know the code.
15. BloonsTowerDefense.Tropes S To Z: The Monklish. It's actually English written in different symbols in place of alphabets, and it has been used to tease many stuffs in updates as well as appearing in some in-game places like temples to make things looking more exotic to players. The Version 33.0 update of BTD6 even made Monklish one of the avaliable languages for the game!
16. Characters.Pokemon Generation II Chikorita To Granbull: Downplayed. They appear as hieroglyphs in ancient ruins. However, unlike most uses of this trope, Unown are pretty easy to decode since they're based on the Roman alphabet. Its Pokédex entry in Legends: Arceus implies that the Unown writing is indecipherable to most people, with very few realizing that the species is basically a stylized font. Justified by the fact that the writing systems used in the modern Pokémon world don't look at all like the Roman alphabet.

Accidental examples

1. VideoGame.Hack N Slash: The font used by the magic hat appears as gibberish. Turns out that the font was just misconfigured.

Symbols but not a cypher

1. Video Game.Wandersong: The language of spirits in this game appear as random, colorful symbols. When the Bard learns this language, said symbols appear in the background of the speech bubble to indicate that it is still that language.
2. VideoGame.Chants Of Sennaar: With some exceptions, all languages follow the standard English sentence syntax, just with various words replaced by different glyphs. using ideographs for words is not the same
3. Recap.Odd Squad S 3 E 1 Odd Beginnings Part One: There is a language known in the world of Odd Squad as "ancient Jackalopian". While the font looks like hieroglyphics, Oswald is able to translate it into English with ease.
4. VideoGame.Unleash The Light: George speaks in an unintelligible language that's represented by pictograms, but Steven and the Gems still understand him.

Stylized font but not for an alien language

1. Franchise.Splatoon: The script used for most of all the text in the games is English with hyper-stylized lettering (and sometimes Japanese), so sometimes you can just barely make out what certain writing is supposed to say. This supermarket sign◊ for instance, is supposed to say "stay fresh". anyone who knows the series would know it fits the trope but it still needs to mention it's an alien language
2. Characters.Earth Bound Allies: Mr. Saturn's speech is displayed in loopy, childish font to emphasize their odd speech patterns, zoom. Word of God is that their unique text font was inspired by the writings of Shigesato Itoi's (then) young daughter.

ZCE or other misuse

1. Pokemon.Tropes S To Z: Unown in Generations II and IV and the Braille in Generation III. The Abbyssal Ruins in Gen V has this written on parts of the walls. Good luck figuring out what the hell it means.^*It's just Braille (English Braille, to be precise).
2. Music.Madeon: The Adventure/Imperial alphabet (see Alternate Reality Game above).
3. ComicBook.X Statix: Doop's dialog.
4. VideoGame.Mario And Luigi Partners In Time: How the Shroob language is presented.
5. Webcomic.Bard: The undisputed master.
6. Webcomic.Behind The Light Tales Of Blunder: "Never Again" shows this is how Roechelle perceives the English language until she turns on Auto-Translate, and all just to learn that the miqo'te player telling her her glamour would be better suited if she was a miqo'te.
7. Fanfic.Hyphen: The Kadabra in Chapter 35 uses this a bit, seemingly when she's referring to names; hers translates to Last Echo, and she melancholically refers to other individuals whose names were Depth Memory, Boulder Fist and Untold Intrigue.
8. Characters.X Statix: However, it has been claimed that Doop's dialogue is in a wingding font known as "Roswell Wreckage".
9. Creator.Bill Bryson: He's written that Esperanto text "looks basically like a cross between Spanish and Martian."
10. Characters.Waiting In The Summer: Arisawa has hearts in her eyes when trying to jump Tetsurou. this is Wingding Eyes

Pothole

1. Suddenly Speaking: The scarab from the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle was The Unintelligible, at least as far as the readers were concerned, speaking with incomprehensible symbols that over time became increasingly reminiscent of English characters, before changing to a legible font in its viewpoint issue. For a period during the transition, the scarab's symbols became a form of Wingdinglish.
2. PokemonGo.Tropes IR: Unown comes in 28 forms based on English alphabet letters as well as ? and !, and has an achievement dedicated to collecting all of them. This Pokémon is so rare that most players haven't even seen one on the Nearby list, let alone in a gym. It's even rarer than wild Tyranitar and more useless than Magikarp.
3. Scud the Disposable Assassin: The Unintelligible: Drywall and his brethren speak a language that can only be understood by creatures without a soul, such as robots and lawyers. Interestingly, the Wingding language contains the same number of symbols as the sentence being translated, so with proper context clues one can roughly translate much of their dialogue.
4. Western Animation.Ninjago: Season 8 came out after The LEGO Ninjago Movie, and implements several touches from the film: the ninja's faces and hairstyles now resemble those of their movie counterparts, their uniforms are more personalized and distinct (such as Cole's lack of sleeves and Nya's armored skirt), Ninjago City is now near the ocean, and the Asian-style ciphers are prominently on display. The Destiny's Bounty is also redesigned to match its movie counterpart.
5. EarlyInstallmentWeirdness.Pokemon The Series: Early seasons featured Japanese and some English text. 4kids would remove the text and either replace it with English text, leave it blank, or use a random gibberish language. Eventually, even in Japan they began using the made up language in order to make the series more "international friendly" and fit the Earth Drift. The games also featured Japanese text until the fifth generation, where they embraced the anime's Wingdinglish. English and Japanese still appear sometimes, but most text consists of made-up text.
6. Anime.Queens Blade: Translation Convention: It's heavily implied during all the series that none of the Western characters (Leina, Elina, Nowa, etc.) speaks Japanese at all and they speak a language based in glyphs (Although it's implied in Rebellion to be English, with a different, alien typography). On the other side, Tomoe and Shizuka speak Ancient Japanese, but it's never explained how they managed to understand the language of the rest of the cast, since both girls never traveled outside their country in their lives. In a very funny twist, they tried to learn the language using a very old scroll with Russian greetings instead.
7. Manga.Puella Magi Kazumi Magica: Cypher Language: The runes appear in chapter 5. And then in chapter 6 we actually see a witch speaking it. example of the supertrope but potholes to the subtrope
8. Characters.Castoff: He cheerfully runs ahead of the party and into the forest, pets snakes, teaches Vector his native language (represented by scratchy runes) and befriends people with incredibly bouncy enthusiasm.
9. Characters.Weaverdice Tongju: When the PCs are exposed to Paima Feima's power, text turns into a blur of indecipherable Wingdinglish aside from randomly being asked to roll.
10. ComicBook.Yoko Tsuno: Apart from a few words in German, characters are always interacting in French (English in the translations), no matter if they are actually talking in English, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese... There is also little to no indication of the language being spoken, apart from an occasional comment, such as a Japanese person offering to speak English for the benefit of Yoko's friends, Yoko explaining to a befuddled Pol that Morning Dew only speaks Chinese, or Yoko asking Emilia to stop snarking in Russian. Averted in Saturn's Gemini for the first time in the entire series, when an alien's speech is rendered as Wingdinglish.
11. Recap.Roommates Pages 1 Through 221: Deal with the Devil: The Erlkönig offered power to Jareth, just the Wingdinglish made it a bit hard to spot, but was turned down.
12. Webcomic.Awful Hospital: The exact details haven't been given, but Fern is able to communicate with a decent number of the other-zonal aliens she encounters. From what Magdolene says, as long as you and another being share enough context for what you are communicating, it'll go through, if an alien you can otherwise communicate with mentions something you don't have context for, that concept gets interpreted as Wingdinglish. The effect doesn't work if your zones are too different, meaning Fern does occasionally need translation for Starfish Languages.
13. Webcomic.Arthur King Of Time And Space: Shout-Out: Merlin's spells are often lines from classic children's literature in Wingdinglish.
14. TranslationConvention.Live Action Films: In Star Wars, the primary language (Galactic Basic Standard) is the only one translated to English (or whatever language the media is being dubbed into). Other alien languages may or may not be subtitled. It's also possible that Basic is identical to English, albeit written differently.
15. OmnicidalManiac.Video Games: The Shroobs in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time stage an Alien Invasion of the Mushroom Kingdom and seem to take great pleasure in subjugating and slaughtering the native inhabitants. In their Wingdinglish language, there's one particular set of symbols that shows up regularly — and it translates to "DESTROY".
16. Characters.Splatoon Inkopolis And Splatsville: Jelfonzo has a rotating selection of t-shirts that he wears on each day. The Tuesday shirt seems innocuous at a glance, as it's passed through the series' Wingdinglish, but if you translate it back to the English alphabet, you'll notice it just reads "FUCK YOU". Given how friendly he is, the Tuesday shirt probably shouldn't be taken as offensively as it should be.
17. Main.Typeset In The Future: The cover of this 1986 book uses Westminster typeface beneath the title, with random lines of letters, numbers, and symbols to imply rapid and complex thinking by the face on the cover.

Artificial Script

• 5/31 (16%) were index listings or other organizational (not shown)
• 12/31 (39%) were Cipher Language with an artificial script — i.e. they would also qualify for Wingdinglish
• 8/31 (26%) were made-up languages with original scripts; most of them are just more specific examples of Conlang.
• 1/31 (3%) describes a made-up language, but not its alphabet.
• 3/31 (10%) were Zero-Context Example
• 2/31 (6%) were potholes that didn't indicate which category they fell under

Cipher for real-life language

1. Animation.Happy Heroes: Parodied. Dog Planet's written language is literally just normal Chinese but with the end-bulbs characteristic of a Stock Femur Bone placed all over the Chinese characters, and Cat Planet does the same thing but with fishbones instead. Despite the minimal differences between the two writing systems, Ambassador Miao still has trouble reading a letter from Ambassador Wang written in "dog language" until Happy S. erases the dog bone bulbs and writes fishbones in their place.
2. Characters.The Elder Scrolls The Races Of Mer: They have their own. Like Daedric, it is a simply cypher for the Latin alphabet.
3. ComicBook.Paper Girls: Untranslated "alien" speech is rendered in Cypher Language using a simple substitution cypher.
4. PuellaMagiMadokaMagica.Tropes A To F: The series contains a number of inscriptions made in not one but three different runic scripts, which had to be deciphered by the fans, who discovered that the runes were used to write sentences in German.
5. StarWars.Tropes A To D: Aurebesh is a fictional alphabet used to transcribe "Galactic Basic," which is Star Wars' equivalent to spoken English. Weblinks Are Not Examples but judging by the article it's a slightly modified Latin alphabet
6. TheLegendOfZeldaTheWindWaker.Tropes A To M: The Hylian language appears in text as a Artificial Script. In the second playthrough, Link can comprehend the Hylian language, or it becomes legible to the player at the very least. Or you can take the time to translate them yourself. not mentioned, but it's a cipher for Japanese
7. TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess.Tropes A To J: The game features a developed Hylian alphabet like that of The Wind Waker, though the text itself converts from English words instead of Japanese.
8. Video Game.Outward: Most of the writing visible in the game is written in the "rune alphabet", which consists of normal Roman letters mirrored over themselves. The actual text is mostly composed in French.
9. VideoGame.Shroud Of The Avatar Forsaken Virtues: Like Ultima, all in-game inscriptions are made using an invented alphabet (despite being technically in English).
10. VisualNovel.The Expression Amrilato: Juliamo is written in an unique alphabet. Most letters at least resemble their Esperanto counterparts but a few are radically different.
11. Warframe.Tropes A To D: Both the Grineer and the Corpus languages as well as the Fortuna dialect use their own fictional alphabets, (though for the most part they are just substitution cyphers for English, with some letters missing). The Orokin alphabet, also used by the Tenno, is more complex, and even offers two ways of writing words — in a line or in a circular formation, resembling a flower.
12. Webcomic.Quentyn Quinn Space Ranger: Ralph uses a few exotic "fonts" for in-universe writing: Racconan text is written in Lovecraft's Diary, while Cue's name is written in Roswell Wreckage both dead links but they were described as "fonts" so i'm going to assume it is a real-life language

Script for a conlang

1. Literature.The Mountain In The Sea: Used sparingly, but to great effect. Notably, only one symbol is ever given anything close to a confirmed, concrete English translation, though it's clear that the author at least knows what the rest of them mean.
2. Series.Into The Badlands: Used along with Conlang for the Azran language that no one outside of the city of Azra is able to read. When we hear the Azran language spoken in the third season, it is a constructed language made by applying centuries of sound changes to Mexican Spanish - which nobody in-universe picks up on either.
3. Series.Ohsama Sentai King Ohger: Letters, numerals, etc. on Tikyū are written in a unique script called "Tikyū language". Weblinks Are Not Examples and I can't even find the language on that link but I'm going to assume it's a conlang
4. TheElderScrolls.Tropes 0 To A: Four have been created for the series to date: The Daedric Alphabet, the Dragon Alphabet, the Dwemer Alphabet, and the Falmer Alphabet. There is also a fifth, known as the "Elder Alphabet", which is untranslated and appears on the Elder Scrolls themselves, as well as the Eye of Magnus. Weblinks Are Not Examples but based on my limited knowledge of the series these are all conlangs
5. UsefulNotes.Toki Pona: Toki Pona mainly uses the Latin Alphabet — 14 letters, all-lowercase except in names. The most popular original writing system is sitelen pona, Sonja Lang's logography, which evokes simplified hieroglyphs with pictorial shapes and rebus cartouches. An adjective can nest inside or stack above a noun: the symbol for Toki Pona is the smile of pona inside the emitting circle for toki. Also well-known is sitelen sitelen (also called sitelen suwi), Jonathan Gabel's intricate, non-linear, graffiti-styled script.
6. VideoGame.Chants Of Sennaar: Not one, but five logographic writing systems are used over the course of the game. Most of them are inspired in aesthetics (but not always in mechanics) by real-world writing systems some googling confirmed these are conlangs
7. VideoGame.Shiness The Lightning Kingdom: The Maherian language has its own alphabet, which you can read if you're one of the backers who were given a copy of the language's dictionary.
8. VideoGame.Thief:
   • The Keeper Glyphs of the Order of the Keepers.
   • Public signs in the third game also hint at the world of the series using a different script to any real-world one, even though all in-game texts and readable objects are rendered in Latin script, for the player's convenience.

"Fictional language" but does not describe a custom alphabet

1. Film.Scooby Doo Monsters Unleashed: Everything that has to do with bringing monsters to life (such as the book found in Wickles Manor and the text around the door to the Monster Hive) is written in a fictional language that Velma describes "an obsolete Celtic text."

ZCE

1. Characters.Thief: The Keeper Glyphs.
2. Creator.David J Peterson: Many, often full of confusing irregularities because of the evolution of the languages they're used to write.
3. VideoGame.Ultima: The default Runic, Gargish, and Ophidian Alphabets. Weblinks Are Not Examples and these links just show the alphabets, not how they're used

Pothole w/o context

1. Creator.JRR Tolkien: Tolkien was a noted linguistics freak, notorious for creating his own Con Langs and Artificial Scripts. His works tend to reflect this interest in the form of Central Themes.
2. Recap.Obi Wan Kenobi Part III: Some of the details in the Path's safehouse include names carved into the walls in Aurebesh lettering, presumably of people who have previously stayed there. These include names such as Djinn Altis, a Mythology Gag to The Callista Trilogy (Master Altis ran the Chu'unthor, the starship-based Jedi academy where Callista Ming trained) and Rahm Kota.

Conclusion

Artificial Script has a lot of overlap with existing tropes, so it can likely be cut. Wingdinglish has a moderate misuse rate but likely does not need TRS action for now.

Proposal

Cut Artificial Script and perhaps disambig between Conlang, Wingdinglish, Starfish Language.