There are more than 35 years of history that contemplate the saga of The Legend of Zelda and the franchise Nintendo has led us to explore Hyrule in all possible formats. Time travel, unique versions and different contexts nourish one of the most important fantasy sagas in video games.
One of the elements common to all deliveries is that we encounter the Hylians, the inhabitants of the magical kingdom. The link between them is the Hylian language, which is different from that used by other tribes such as the Gerudo, and we can find it in murals, signs and other points of the stage. Anyone who tried to read them could not decipher their meaning, but the truth is that it is possible to solve such gibberish.
For example, if we could see the first glyphs in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but they were only three symbols and the texts they make up are completely illegible. That appearance in the 1992 work was very rudimentary, so we had to wait for Link’s first two 3D video games to better understand the alphabet.
In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask it is possible to read words, although in a particular way. As stated in the book The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia, five drawings actually represent the vowels, while the rest are a form of Japanese kana encryption and are syllables that allow the terms to be formed.
However, there is the particular problem that Nintendo didn’t specifically think about the glyphs making sense when placing them, so many signs simply don’t represent any words at all. A notable leap occurred with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, whose alphabet can be found in up to five video games more of the Japanese IP. Once again, the Japanese syllabary is used to understand many of the symbols, although the opportunity was taken to expand its possibilities.
Not only were natural numbers included, but an additional degree of grammar was added with the appearance of the period, the hyphen, and the opening and closing parentheses. With the arrival of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for Wii, the Japanese company chose to give Latin players a break, as it came up with a new alphabet that is based on the English alphabet. A curiosity is that it was decided to include a triangle and a circle among some of the symbols.
Later, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword appeared, which draws on the oldest alphabet to date of the franchise within its own timeline. As if that were not enough, the opportunity was taken for The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds to adopt this format for the most part. Of course, the development team did not want to break their heads too much, since D and W, E and K, G and Q, O and Z and P and T are represented in different ways. the same way. So it’s a bit of a headache trying to read through this method.
Finally, both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom received their own alphabet that follows the path of being based on English. However, once again, Nintendo did not care enough about repeating letters, so it can be confusing trying to decipher the texts. Either way, With a little patience you can really find out what those scribbles are trying to tell you. incomprehensible things that you have seen over the years, which speaks of a very great degree of dedication to detail on the part of the creators.
Bonus ball: the Gerudo alphabet
Las fiercest warriors in the saga They are not far behind and living in the Gerudo Citadel for generations has led them to cultivate their own customs, as well as methods of communication. It is common for the different video games in the series to explain the meaning of some words, but if you want to directly translate a store sign, here is its alphabet.