Some people can’t help but translate things. We see languages and want to decipher them, like people who climb Mount Everest just because it’s there. Languages in games such as FEZ, Titan soulsThe sky, 7 days to the end with you and Witch, invite a player to try to break them uncover more lore about the game, and players are often rewarded for doing so, even if it’s usually just additional story. Translating the Fes language was literally the first thing I did, and basically revealed the entire plot of the game before I even started. Oops!
But all those example games were made on a shoestring indie budget. What happens when a giant multi-billion dollar company like Nintendo makes its own language? The answer is that we have THREE languages. The Zelda series has Hylian, Sheikah, and since Tears of the Kingdom, Zonai — three languages that look very different and are designed to represent the culture of each of their respective races.
Hylian was broken long ago like a Japanese henna code – you might remember Wind Waker HD Special Edition Wii U, which was adorned with a ton of Hylian runes detailing Link’s story, or the fact that the game lets you translate Hylians in New Game Plus. The Sheikah was translated relatively quickly, too, and it turns out to be an English code, where each Sheikah rune is translated into a letter of the English alphabet. It wasn’t particularly useful in game, since Sheikah runes usually translate to a very literal description of the thing they were written on, but still!
From the very first trailer for Kingdom Tears, it was clear that Zonai many a more complex language that probably hides a lot of secrets. Language experts have been working on the translation since the very first trailer, but there don’t seem to be any firm conclusions yet – or, just as likely, people have been distracted by the game itself.
This does not mean that there has been no progress. One team of translators is working on the assumption that Zonai also a Japanese code, just like Hylian, and others think it might match Chinese characters instead. No one is sure, but the nature of Zonai—that is, the fact that it is a highly syllabic language—implies that it most likely matches something like the Japanese or Chinese script, which are similarly based on syllabic characters.
Japanese and Chinese characters come from the evolution of pictorial representations of the things they represent in many cases, and translators theorize the same thing about Zonai. One particularly prolific translator, u/CloqueWise on Reddit even named the runessuch as “scissors” and “woman”, and decided that the runes for “farmer” and “owl” would combine to mean “sage” – which makes sense, since our good boy Rauru is associated with owls.
The next question is how it should be read. We can assume it goes from left to right, like English, but many languages are read in different ways. Arabic is right-to-left, and many Asian languages can be written in vertical stripes, which are read from top to bottom, column by column. After all, there are a lot of Zonai things that have something vertical written on them. There is even potential evidence that Zonai may have been written by – get this – bustrophedonic, which means alternating left-to-right and right-to-left for each line of the script. Doesn’t that sound exhausting?
There are translations in the game itself, which you’d think might help, but these translations—the ones offered by explorer Wortsworth when you bring him a photo of a tablet in the sky—are actually translations Hylian. Not very useful for translating Zonai. Also, he translates it all into Middle English, which is very difficult to read!
Shrine names can also be a clue – for example, their strange names could actually be what a speaking Zonai sounds like. A comparison of shrine names that have common features seems to reveal some potential translations, e.g u/DraconionDevil revealed:
Well yes:
Ekochiu Shrine – Rise and Fall
Orochium Shrine – Courage to Fall
This is VERY interesting to me. Both shrine subtitles contain pad as the last word, and the second part of both words contain ochia. Could ochiu be a Zonai word for fall? Maybe.
It’s worth reading full and very detailed reddit post on this, because it’s a great starting point for trying to find common syllables. Unless, of course, the shrine names are a dead end, as they were in Breath of the Wild. Or if the English translations are not correct and the original Japanese is closer to the Zonai translation. Or if the language is gibberish, in which case all this is a colossal waste of time. But we can’t think like that! We must not give up! Mainly because we’ve already spent this much time trying to decipher it!!!!
What would be really useful is something commonly called a Rosetta Stone – something in the game that exists to sort of clarify the language and serve as a starting point for decoding. Often these Rosetta Stones are set in stone (haha), in the sense that they only have one particular and very obvious meaning that cannot possibly be misinterpreted.
In Fez, this is very effectively shaded by having a room with literally a quick brown fox leaping over a lazy dog, in reference to a pangram also written nearby. This gave players a chance to understand which letters corresponded to which Fez runes.
But many translators can only begin to unravel the language from a significantly large portion of the text, and that is what Zonai scholars are currently doing. Fez, again, has a huge block of text at the very beginning, while Hypercube gives you monologues in a language you don’t understand.
If you assume that Hypercube speaks a language that is a direct match to English, which is usually the case, you can start working on letter frequency. E is the most common letter, for example, and from there you can start to find other common prefixes and suffixes, such as -ER, -ING, and so on, or common one- and two-letter words such as IT, A, and SO . Fez’s words are read from top to bottom and right to left, which makes it a bit tricky, but other than that, it’s easy.
Tears of the Kingdom has a lot of long text, but none of it still works like a Rosetta Stone because we haven’t figured out the idiosyncrasies of the language enough. Some scholars did compared the frequency of words and letters to try to match the Zonai with the known language, but for now it’s mostly still guesswork, even if the results sometimes give us something that looks right (ie it contains a lot of references to “dragons” and “time”).
We also have Secret stones, which seem to match up pretty well with Japanese henna for the particular element they represent, but… well, that’s not particularly useful, since the Secret Stones don’t even look too much like Zonai. Dangit!
The closest we have is the Ring Ruins text, which our friend Wortsworth is working on anyway. Zonai scholar u/DMCthread310 (which itself is code for a specific color of embroidery thread – black) comparing the English and Japanese translations of the Ring Ruins text from the game to try to understand the similarities and meanings behind the text, but they didn’t make much progress.
It doesn’t help that translating Zonai requires a relatively fluent command of English, Japanese, and Chinese scripts, on top of being enough of a linguist to speculate about grammar, syntax, word order, and reading patterns. It doesn’t help that Wortsworth translates these passages as fragmentary, which leaves out many connecting words. Maybe Zonaija doesn’t read too much?
To sum it all up, the Zonai text in Kingdom Tears is still very much a mystery. Some people seem to have cracked words, phrases, or word order, but without that Rosetta Stone confirmation, there’s little evidence that any of them are right. There isn’t really a critical mass of people trying to translate Zonai for the above reasons – it takes a very special type of person, and besides, the game just only out, so most players are probably still enjoying the game like a normal person.
For now, Zonai can keep her secrets. But not for long, Zonai. We’re coming for you.
