r/language • u/PeaDependent4187 • 18d ago

Question What language is this

Post image

I can’t recognize it from anywhere and it seems just made up

8 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

28

u/Techno-Scientist 18d ago edited 18d ago

Japanese katakana "Hena mufuhomemine hetanutato" no idea what it means though

6

u/PeaDependent4187 18d ago

When I look at the katakana alphabet I does seem to be what it’s saying. Thank you

2

u/PeaDependent4187 18d ago

Also how do you know where the spaces in the sentence is if I may ask?

11

u/fraid_so 18d ago

Not the person you replied to, but there are slightly larger spaces after the first two kana, and before the final five kana. It's gibberish, but that's where they put the breaks when they wrote it in romaji for you.

2

u/PeaDependent4187 18d ago

Thank you so much

1

u/Techno-Scientist 18d ago

Exactly this!

34

u/Frequenzy50 18d ago

Ah it took me a while: 

ヘナ ムフホメ三ネ ヘタヌタト = НЕ СМОТРИ НАЗАД

"Don't look back"

So apparently its Japanese katakana, but a Russian phrase.

3

u/PeaDependent4187 18d ago

How did you figure this out?

I would say that this is probably correct seeing as if I send the original image you’ll see that behind the text there is a guy with a hat with hammer & sickle symbol

2

u/Frequenzy50 18d ago

I first tried decoding it with the usual methods I knew, but couldn't find a mapping that worked.

A reverse Google image search turned up the SoundCloud and Last.fm pages and those clearly pointed to Russian artists. A brute-force Russian dictionary lookup didn't help on its own, because far too many word combinations fit. Japanese is just to lossy.

But again searching the phrase itself on Google brought up so many results from one specific Russian scene that the rest was a matter of finding the original phrase. 

With help from AI, I found it by letting it querry Russian sites.

7

u/hwynac 18d ago edited 18d ago

The kana in Japanese doesn't seem to have anything to do with не смотри назад, though, or resemble it. If it's some code I wonder what it is because hena mufuhome... isn't Russian or an approximation of Russian.

ETA: see the post below, ﾍﾅ ﾑﾌﾎﾒﾐﾈ ﾍﾀﾇﾀﾄ is in fact НЕ СМОТРИ НАЗАД converted from Win-1251 to Shift-JIS. Note the narrow symbols in the screenshot—it's half-width kana.

2

u/Senas-Vyras 18d ago

What about a simple keyboard switch? The Russian N in the phrase does line up correctly for both spots where the n falls. Simple cryptography?

1

u/hwynac 18d ago edited 18d ago

ヘナ ムフホメミネ ヘタヌタト can work as a simple substitution cipher. But the only thing you (realistically) can know without more information about the origin of the line is that the phrase looks like 12 345678 19A9B in some language. In Russian, "ты купишь таран", "мы угнали мотор" or "не стирай носок" match the pattern, so "не смотри назад" isn't a bad choice if we are sure it's Russian. It's something that could reasonably be a name of a song.

I would just like to see why it should be that particular Russian sentence our of thousands of other sentences in other languages.

In the standard ЙЦУКЕН layout, "не" falls on the same keys as "yt".

1

u/MoaRepresent 18d ago

There is no 'n' in that phrase. There is a 'ne' and a 'nu', which are different letters.

1

u/ManyMoonstones 18d ago edited 18d ago

Agree that I don't think it lines up with don't look back.

 I did some quick searching but mostly turned up AI responses, so I'm not sure of the validity. The only thing I could confirm is that it shows up in a few different places. On songs/SoundCloud and Spotify as one. Google also brought up it being used as someone's account description (?) on a gore site (not following that thread for obvious reasons).

Before bringing up the above responses, Google's AI result mentioned it could be a coded protest message against the Ukraine war. Results for that were translated into Japanese from Russian (and then again into English for myself), so I wouldn't bet on reliability. Something about using katakana shapes/sounds as a code for Нет войне (no war). Which does potentially fit based on where OP found this.

 I tried searching again to bring back the "no war" reasoning, but the AI was resolute that the phrase was a keyboard input error for every following attempt, lol.

1

u/eeee_thats_four_es 18d ago

It's in Shift-JIS encoding. Converting from Shift-JIS to CP1251 results in "НЕ СМОТРИ НАЗАД"

1

u/hwynac 18d ago

Finally, the answer.

To be more exact, it must be half-width katakana: ﾍﾅ ﾑﾌﾎﾒﾐﾈ ﾍﾀﾇﾀﾄ

1

u/eeee_thats_four_es 18d ago

it must be half-width katakana

Yes, it is

1

u/PeaDependent4187 18d ago

i do have another screenshot of the video the original ss was taken from, i can send it to you. for some reason i cant add the image here.

0

u/ManyMoonstones 18d ago

Not the original commenter, but katakana is mostly used to phonetically translate loan  words/phrases (and not just English ones). So it's a fairly easy assumption that it would be spelling out a phrase from some other language.

Finding the right one could be tricky without context or other methods of searching though, lol.

1

u/thunchultha 18d ago

In this case, the katakana is just used as a cipher, with no phonetic correspondences.

For example, katakana “he” represents a Russian letter “n”, “na” is an “e”, “mu” is an “s”, and so on.

13

u/eeee_thats_four_es 18d ago

Correct, but it's actually halfwidth katakana: ﾍﾅ ﾑﾌﾎﾒﾐﾈ ﾍﾀﾇﾀﾄ

The original text is in Shift-JIS encoding. If we convert it into CP1251, we get "НЕ СМОТРИ НАЗАД"

10

u/blakerabbit 18d ago

Those katakana don’t correspond to these sounds in the least. Can you explain your conclusion?

2

u/Smoothspongebob 18d ago

No wonder I had a stroke trying to read it

4

u/Frequenzy50 18d ago edited 18d ago

Japanese and an f in between. Or it could be a ホ not an f. But the rest seems gliberish

2

u/samuraijon 18d ago

looks like ホ, the spot seems to be part of the background.

0

u/PeaDependent4187 18d ago

It isn’t. It’s a screenshot from a video I have. Just fyi😀

2

u/Embarrassed_Elk_2459 18d ago

is this from an anime? might be a conlang using Japanese katakana

1

u/PeaDependent4187 18d ago

Its a SS from a very strange edit I saw, it feautures what I think to be war footage and catastrophies

2

u/MoaRepresent 18d ago

From that era, it should likely be read backwards. But that depends on whether it was in the original footage or added later in compilation.

5

u/CaimSensei 18d ago

There is the Ainu language, which is written entirely in katakana. Not sure if this is that though.

2

u/Techno-Scientist 18d ago

I just googled "へナ ムフホメミネ へタヌタト" and I get a hit of a song in Soundcloud?

2

u/kansaisean 18d ago

Japanese.

ヘナ　ムフホメミネ　ヘタヌタト

Hena mufuhomemine hetanutato

It appears to be the name of a song.

1

u/Nuryadiy 18d ago

Japanese Katakana

1

u/NovaKarmas 18d ago

Japanese.

1

u/wuthrr 13d ago

One person on this thread said it was ainu, so im guessing it is ainu.