Nov 24., 2018   /   Everything, Foreign Versions

Denna’s Letter in Japanese-Follow-Up

So a few days ago I posted the raw text of Denna’s letter from The Wise Man’s Fear for reddit user Khaleesi75, who was analyzing the odd capitalization seen in the English version. I have to say when I compared it to the French (which really needs no further commentary and anyone can just pop into Google translate if they want), and the Japanese I’d say it’s pretty clear that there is definitely SOME kind of hidden code in here.

There is the obvious fact that the odd capitalization in the French version doesn’t really correspond it all to the English version… But then let’s talk about the Japanese version.

The Japanese language does not have capitalization.  If Denna was just drunk and they wanted to represent that she was writing strangely there are several ways it could’ve been done. But it almost certainly wouldn’t have been done by leaving odd spaces between certain letters, which is what we find in this letter in the Japanese text. I have actually never seen this pattern before in any Japanese writing.  Additionally, (without launching into too much of a lesson about the Japanese alphabets ) every one of these breaks appears between two letters from the Japanese phonetic alphabet . This could be coincidence , but it seems unlikely. We can glean a couple things from all this:

• The placement of the anomaly (capital letter or space depending on language) matters
• The phonetic sounds directly in front of and/or after the anomaly may matter.
• The “hidden message” is probably at least a phrase, because apparently writers in different languages had to put the anomalies in different places despite the content of letter’s sentences being the same.

I have stared at it for a few hours and frankly cannot puzzle anything out. But I am posting some more up close pictures of the letter with some notes  in case it helps anyone else. Click for super-large versions. Japanese is read top to bottom, right to left.

(The last part has the same content, postscript, and underlining as the English)

(Note that some things which may appear like strange spaces to non-Japanese speakers are just because punctuation fills up an entire character space when Japanese is typed.)

If anyone makes anything of it, please let me know!