triangles.markdown

layout	title	permalink	hidden
triangles	Triangles	/triangles/	true

Disclaimer

• Product of the Puddleby Secrets Alliance. Reciprocity is good for you.
• Refer questions about this page to Phroon, Fanan or Poplar.
• The epistemic status of all content herein is 'uncertain'.

Orthography

There are 29 triangle forms. Two of these appear to be punctuation:

• . is akin to a period, ending a sentence.
• , is a separator used to disambiguate phrases. The rules by which modifiers attach to nouns and by which verbs consume nouns are subtle; sometimes , is used to clarify the associations for legibility, and sometimes it's used to override the default conventions.

The remaining 27 triangles represent letters:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+

Alternating triangles are rotated such that the messages condense and interlock, but there doesn't seem to be any significance to this rotation -- it is purely orthographic.

Despite difference in orthography, both of these messages means the same thing:

• ky fananmy promot+wtab
• ky fananmy promot+wtab

Sentence Structure

The structure of a clause is:

noun [modifiers...] [noun [modifiers...]...] verb [adverb]

A clause alone is a valid sentence, or two clauses may be joined together with a conjunction. Conjunctions are marked by the letters vai. We have no examples of multiple conjunctions in the same sentence, and it isn't clear what the associativity would be in that situation.

Subordinate Clauses

There is at least one instance of a subordinate clause:

noun noun noun verb verb

In that case the grammar is not entirely clear, but it appears that the innermost verb binds to the closest nouns as needed and that this verbal phrase then acts as a noun for resolving the outer verb, e.g.:

noun (noun noun verb) verb

Nouns

Every noun appears with a suffix specifying its declension:

• ky means 'subject'
• my means 'direct object'
• vy means 'secondary object' or 'subject of a subordinate clause'

Any of these can add a d to mark a plural.

Nouns may be followed by additional words that modify them:

• Words ending in zyn are adjectives and attach to the preceeding noun
• The word pas means 'the' and attaches to the preceeding noun
• Words ending in if are possessives and indicate the if word owns the leading noun -- "word sentenceif" would be "word of sentence".
• Words ending in rm are prepositions and refer to the preceeding noun

Verbs

All verbs are inflected with a four-character suffixes. Our current working theory is that these suffixes combine to specify the mood, aspect, and tense.

We are reasonably certain that our translation scheme for verb conjugation is not quite right yet; particularly the construct we've currently labeled the future tense does not seem entirely likely. It is possible that some of the symbols actually denote whether the subject is animate or inanimate. More study is needed.

verb-?t??

The first character specifies the mood:

• o is the subjunctive
• q is the indicative
• w is the imperative

The second character is always t in all messages thus recovered.

The third character specifies the aspect:

• a is the perfect (a concrete beginning and ending)
• d is the imperfect (ongoing)

The final character specifies the tense:

• d is the past
• b is the future

There is probably a symbol for specifying the present tense, but thus far it hasn't been seen.

There does not seem to be any concept of subject/verb agreement for person, number, or gender, unless the static t is indicative of the third person.

Vocabulary

Some of the following vocabulary is 'high confidence'; there are sculptures in the eastern mountains that illustrate the words, almost as though the creators were leaving us a primer.

• oao -- light
• tzr -- org
• tli -- material plane
• m+tz -- sun
• tian -- mirror
• qui -- time
• axa -- greymyr
• maht -- fear
• mapr -- break
• tlaic -- war
• mih -- death

Based on phonetics, we've concluded that the if tzr sounds like 'org', then it's likely that tzrt is 'orga'.

The following words have been painstakingly deduced from the triangular messages; in most cases we're quite certain that the meaning is directionally correct, even if the translation is imprecise:

• lama -- priest
• yet+ -- beginning
• yet -- middle
• pi+c+ -- piece
• jrin -- join
• caus+ -- cause
• us+ -- use
• strp -- stop
• b+ -- be
• lik+ -- like

One of the most frequent words in the trianglular messages is the word erd; structurally the word appears to be singular, suggesting it refers to an individual rather than a group, though it's also possible it's a pronoun ('us') and that pronouns or some collective nouns follow different rules.

Comparing the phonetics to tzr (org) has led some PSA members to hypothesize that the middle character has a frictive 'g' sound; this could indicate a sound like 'dgo' or, more idiomatically, 'joe'. Some of the iconography associated with the mythical 'Josephus the Ancient' seems to be associated with the triangle script, making it difficult to exclude this possibility entirely.

It's also possible that erd is a pronoun; it could be a reference to an unknown figure, or to the mythical 'Mataline the Mysic', who appears to be mentioned by name in several messages.

For the sake of clarity the document below translates erd as 'Erd'.

Order

There appears to be no indication of a 'correct' order for reading the triangle messages, nor is there any clear indication that they are connected in a narrative structure. Each 'set' of messages appears to be topically connected, however. No effort has been made to reorder the following translations.

Open Questions and Mysteries

• Who or what is erd?
• The triangle inscriptions tell stories that clearly mimic the well-known creation myth. Are they the historical basis for that story?
• What exactly is the oaomy xioaozyn, the 'shadowy light'? Does it come from the 'glowing Moon of the Land of Shadows' as our myths describe? What precisely did Mataline take?
• What (and where) is the omitlimy? It seems to correspond to the 'Land of Shadows' of myth; the construction of the word suggests it's somehow a modification of our plane.
• Many inscriptions speak of the xioao -- the darkness, the shadows? -- as if it/they were alive and in some sense thinking. Is this metaphor? Are these beings or forces emanating from the omitlimy, perhaps corresonding to the demons of legend?
• The inscriptions near the Greymyr village seem to be describing a desperate attempt at stopping the shadows using mirrors -- it almost seems to be saying that erd tried to use them to travel through time. In all other contexts, however, the mirrors are used to travel through space. Is this a mistranslation or an insight into how mirrors work?
• Who created all of this? Were erd and Mataline the Ancients of our legends? Did survivors of some prehistoric cataclysm settle here in the islands we would later call the Lok'Grotons?
• Several passages seem to speak of stopping or slowing time. Is this why we live despite dying? Why we can depart to Purgatory? Is this why so many long-time residents seem to be stuck in loops? Why we never age? Is time in Puddleby still stopped? And if so, how long, exactly, have we been here?