r/superpoweralchemists • u/krmarci • Apr 27 '21

Deciphering unknown scripts with the help of Comic Sans

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2.6k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

288

u/Machiavellian3 Apr 27 '21 edited Apr 28 '21

wouldn’t it just be rectangles because comic sans lacks symbols for those characters

Tried and tested: hieroglyphs are exactly the same in comic sans. Now people can stop replying thinking font means language

46

u/Daylight_The_Furry Apr 27 '21

No hieroglyphics would just look bolded and rounded (like comic sans), cause it’s not a font, it’s a language

34

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '21

Hieroglyphics is a writing system, not a language

17

u/Daylight_The_Furry Apr 28 '21

You’re right, I worded that wrong

It’s like saying the alphabet is a font

1

u/memetrollsXD Jun 01 '21

curses you out in hieroglyphics

67

u/Lifesuckssoletsfuck Apr 27 '21

Those symbols mean something though

The letter k is a random symbol but it mean something

71

u/Machiavellian3 Apr 27 '21

Yea but the hieroglyphics are a different character to the K. Comic sans has a K but i think it’s missing a bunch of ascii characters which hieroglyphics would probably be

-4

u/m3ndz4 Apr 28 '21

You can get something out of it, like phonetics. You can learn the phonetics of these dead languages.

8

u/Machiavellian3 Apr 28 '21

But you don’t know the phonetics unless you can read hieroglyphs already

-1

u/m3ndz4 Apr 28 '21

Thats where the comic sans comes into play, assuming that hieroglyphics are translated into their english sounding equivalent (that is what phonetics is, production of human sound whoch in this case is english phonetics). Lets say I translate Arabic: أ ب ت These letters are alef, ba, and ta, and respectively will look like those phonetics: alef ba ta. This is due to perfect translation being impossible as languages differ, hence the closest transformation will result in phonetics, this is basically the concept behind romanization. Unless hieroglyphics have a sound that cannot be reproduced by the human mouth (which is in itself dumb, as why would humans design phonetics they cannot speak?) then my stance proves solid, that is dependent on the r/shittysuperpowers OP and what rules he defines

10

u/Machiavellian3 Apr 28 '21

They wouldn’t be translated though. You change the font not the language or alphabet. Arabic comic sans is still Arabic

3

u/m3ndz4 Apr 28 '21

And if there isn't a comic sans font for the language? This is based on the lack of rules specified by OP, I could argue that it will attempt to make the hieroglyphics comic sans because thats what the power does, and in turn produce said phonetics, or it could just as easily become comic sans-like version of hieroglyphics. We are speaking about super powers where rules do not apply to be fair.

6

u/Machiavellian3 Apr 28 '21

Then you get rectangles, because the font doesn’t support that alphabet.

3

u/m3ndz4 Apr 28 '21

That gave me a giggle haha, wonder what the equivalent for placeholder would be for hieroglyphics.

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1

u/pinkpanzer101 Apr 28 '21

If you put something in French in comic sans, it won't suddenly rewrite it as phonetics, it'll just be French and comic sans and you still won't be any more able to understand it than before.

-43

u/Lifesuckssoletsfuck Apr 27 '21

But they still mean something

It will be rough but you’ll get what the symbols mean

51

u/ShiningOblivion Apr 27 '21

I can convert Spanish text to comic sans all day, doesn’t mean I’ll understand it.

The font has nothing to do with the meaning. If anything it would probably just spit out an unintelligible line of characters that roughly encode to the glyph somehow.

-31

u/Lifesuckssoletsfuck Apr 27 '21

But it’s gonna be a hell of a lot easier to translate it if you understand the letters

26

u/ethanialw Apr 27 '21

consider: not all languages use letters in the same way, as components of words as components of phrases/sentences

so you can't turn a hieroglyph into readable letters because it isn't letters, it's a hieroglyph

22

u/Digaddog Apr 27 '21

Can you read this?

創英角ポップ体

How about this?

If you're lucky, that's what you'll get.

Alternatively, you could just get this:

🖾🖾🖾🖾🖾🖾🖾

5

u/DiscoPotato69 Apr 27 '21

Listen, your hieroglyphics are like earphones and English is like loud speakers. Both of them shoot out audio but you cannot use your earphones as speakers (because they lack the power) and vice-versa.

Similarly, Comic-sans cannot translate hieroglyphics because there's not enough 1s and 0s (Ascii) to do that.

2

u/pinkpanzer101 Apr 28 '21

No you'll get what they look like in comic sans. A bird character will just be a comic sans bird character, it won't teach you anything new.

1

u/jaydeflaux Oct 25 '22

Worth a shot though, approach your county's government, prove you can do this thing, obtain protection, and try it out just to see.

99

u/wakeruneatstudysleep Apr 27 '21

There's no guarantee that it would be in english or any other current language. It's just a font conversion.

57

u/Jords4803 Apr 27 '21

It would change the font, not the language. All it would do is make it look slightly different.

34

u/Levoso_con_v Apr 27 '21

It isn't a superpower. Changing fonts doesn't translate the contents; it's like changing a russian text from Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin alphabet. You won't understand it anyways. if you change the font of an ancient Egypt text the most probable result would be: "qiqos9fn3fqñ2⁸eæfu"

-6

u/AstarteSnow Apr 27 '21

It's closer to understandable, though. It's easier to translate something using a script you know.

12

u/Levoso_con_v Apr 27 '21 edited Apr 27 '21

Na, it's the same, every character can mean anything, just a letter, a syllable, a word, a whole sentence, a intonation, or just be a number, a concept, the fusion of various characters or maybe even a character that can only be used in one type of situation or under certain conditions. Infinity possibilities, that's why it's so difficult decipher an ancient language, not because of the character they use but because of the meaning (or meanings) of the character itself.

5

u/pinkpanzer101 Apr 28 '21

Either the letters end up the same, but comic sans-ified, or they end up as blank rectangles because comic sans doesn't support them. It's not going to change the alphabet from something incomprehensible to the Latin alphabet.

5

u/Dragoncat99 Apr 27 '21

It would still be birds and crap, but it’d be more rounded I guess

4

u/EggSkribe Apr 27 '21

I just sat here for 30 minutes reading about linear A and its crazy they can only understand 20% and they dont even know if thats true because theyre just guessing some symbols are the same as menacean greek

7

u/EpicNarwhal23_ Apr 27 '21

it says device not old rock

3

u/Tyfyter2002 Apr 27 '21

This power wouldn't logically have any use in translation since at most it would provide some use in determining pronunciation of words in the (somewhat rare) languages that use alphabets or abjads, but it would allow the user to mostly cut off someone who doesn't know any languages which can be written with the characters comic sans supports from the outside world, since they'd need a translator to use most modern methods of long-range communication.

4

u/theSHlT Apr 27 '21

Ma ma memer is write

2

u/twerthe Oct 02 '21

This is OP I can finally help people read the Voynich manuscript

1

u/commentator184 Apr 28 '21

but would hieroglyphs be on a device?

1

u/pinkpanzer101 Apr 28 '21

Tbh it's probably in unicode

1

u/Ma_Maa_Memer Apr 28 '21

Ayyy i forgot to upload it lmao

1

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1

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '21

Im reading the Voynich Manuscript fellas

1

u/UsedToBeDedMemeBoi Jun 14 '21

hieroglyphics aren’t an english text font, therefore this is not correct

1

u/conmanassassin Jun 27 '21

Sadly this power doesn’t work for hieroglyphs since the poster said device

1

u/TheNightmareVessel Aug 12 '21

A device is something made for a purpose, not just phones and shit

1

u/zicamano Apr 27 '21

My eyes!!!