The Book of Woo – Revisited
Most of you will remember our strip #500, The Book of Woo. We created four illustrated pages, inspired by the Voynich manuscript, which show strange illustrations next to a cipher text. Despite the big effort of some of our readers, the cipher text has not yet been deciphered. The comment section of the strip contains almost 400 comments with more or less valuable information for anybody who is interested in the challenge.
However, thanks to our reader Foogod, there is now a much better place to find concise information about the Book of Woo, the Book of Woo Wiki! At the moment, you can find pages about the following topics there:
- Transliterations
- Facts about the encrypted text
- Analytical results
- Theories about the encrypted text
- Artwork interpretation
- Links and resources
Foogod also created a computer font that can be used to write all the glyphs found in the Book of Woo. The font looks really good in my opinion and it could also be used for magic formulas or other things like that. Click here to download the Book of Woo font WooGlyph Sans!
If you have a look at the Wiki page for theories about the encrypted text, you will see that there is strong evidence that the character which looks like “Z”, and the corresponding character which looks like “~”, is some kind of space/suffix marker/dash character instead of a regular letter. This would reduce the relevant alphabet to 14 letters, plus the special “oPo” character.
I have decided to give you a little hint. The following word appears in the plain text:
ENGLISH: Potbelly Hill | GERMAN: Bauchigen Hügel
That means if the plain text is in English, the word is “Potbelly Hill”, if the plain text is in German, the word is “Bauchigen Hügel”, if the plain text is a mixture of English and German, the word is “Potbelly Hill” or “Bauchigen Hügel”. It should be quite easy to determine on which page. I hope this will generate some debate about the supposed content of that page.
I have also decided to send Satsuoni a poster package for providing the first decryption step and further significant contributions to the discussion. I will also send Foogod a poster package for setting up the Book of Woo Wiki and creating the Book of Woo font. Don’t forget that I will pay the person who is able to provide a decipherment that’s sufficiently close to the plain text a reward of $300. Send your decipherment attempt(s) to novil@gmx.de.
What a nice treat for #600. The Book of Woo was a really awesome thing you did! I know it will be deciphered sooner or later! You did a great job making it!
So wait, are you saying that both “Potbelly Hill” and “Bauchigen Hügel” are present in the plaintext, or just that “Potbelly Hill”, in either German or English, is present?
I actually ran across the book of woo page ages later than it was posted because I hadn’t checked Sandra and Woo in a while, so while I wanted to go through all the posts about it and see if incoupd lend a hand, I figured it had probably already been cracked, since it had been a while since it was posted. Maybe now I can try my hand at it!
Hmm, is it by any chance possible that during your encryption of the message, you actually translated the original german/english plain text into a completely different language? Perhaps one which is writ not with an alphabet, but with a syllabary?
Someone should propose a mapping of this symbol set to a Unicode Private Use area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
I clarified why I gave the word in German and in English:
*Stares at the hint*
*Dusts off his translation notes, works feverishly for the rest of the day*
Dang it Novil!
I’m a relatively new reader, and I just wanted to thank the Sandra and Woo team for one of the best webcomics (and comics) I’ve ever read. Thank you 🙂
Well, there’s only one way that hint could be even remotely useful, given how far we haven’t gotten: There’s a location where we can actually locate this “word”.
I’ll leave it at that for now. I do have a question for Novil, though:
Does that word only appear once in the entire thing?
@Novil In case the same the same thing that happened to your email happened to mine: I have received and answered to your email (sorry about delay). Thank you!
It’s obvious that the “n” looking symbol is a vowel of some sort as it appears in a pattern resembling how “E” appears. However, nothing I could come up with that came up with any english that makes sense for the first part so I presume that the first half is likely some other language or some other encryption is there.
Also in the first page of the text there is a word that has 7 characters, the first 5 are the same, but the last 2 are different, which means they’re cognates which means if the language is german or english then there are a limited number of suffixes and so that should give something to build on.
Another thing… I got to thinking about the potbelly hill into and looked for a direct 1 for 1 place for it and I noticed something else interesting…
There are no repeated letters. This leads me to believe that every time there is a double you have symbol which means that this letter is repeated and then shifts the encryption in some way so that if the encryption were originally…
b = a
every time a double is hit it shifts cypher to…
c = a
and then the next time it becomes
d = a
This is my guess since if it went back and forth things like “there” would appear as “chnsn” and “hgsns” back and forth rather than being one way for a period in the text and then another and then another. But that’s just my guess.
Not that I am sure this will make a huge difference in the translation, but, when you are talking about potbelly hill are you speaking of the game or the place?
@ Durakken:
No, I’m pretty sure the code doesn’t shift around. If you take a look at nneonneo’s transliteration of the text, you can notice some words repeating several times. If the code shifted, this wouldn’t happen. You can see “rilota”, “galon”, “gede”, “dede” and many others repeat throughout all the pages.
@ Durakken:
It is probable, however, that a character indicates a double letter by itself. Which character this is may be unknown, but let’s represent it as ” * “.
Instead of writing “potbelly hill”, the plain text would be written as “potbel*y hil*”. Both German and English often use words with doubled letters, so if we are to believe that the entire text was written in one or both of these languages, something like this had to be done.
Or, maybe the double letters were simply ignored and written by themselves, then it’d just be ‘potbely hil’.
I, the great M, have already translated this Book of Woo manusscript within 84% accuracy!
I think I shall tackle the Voynich manusscript next, and solve this mystery once and for all. Far as I can tell it seems to contain a story about a fellow named Lagoles who has a disturbing relationship with his adopted daughter Luara. Or possibly revelations by an angel named Moronic.
With my brilliant translation skills, sure enough, the people who are still interested in that Voynich thing can finally let it go, once they have my great and accurate translation.
That and I think it may contain the cure for warp drives.
An attempted partial decipher based on Zipf’s Law:
(uses the nneonneo transliteration system)
(Clearly the grammatical system is not that of English)
rilothe dothe the wasda of was:
rilothe dothe the wiga sige gin is.
Len to dothe ruthe to I the ci of you I.
in nense letu rago sawas to
I the ison a the gin is the guwo of gin is.
gin is the wigo of was:
I etere of and dede ran.
I dothe the sene of wasda “in and”
and cen rede it rede the and wen and the runi the sawas for.
in and in and and towo to I dothe the tugan of gon the dithe for
segete. and sine for that
sine to that I to gin
is ago the dithe for
of I dothe. in
runi to I teso.
in I to
nige runi the sene
of neran and I a
wen and I a
and and runi.
Sawas the and
ruthe to I the
you and and sawas.
and sawas the gera
ruthe a and the
gera ruthe the
guto teri the
in it.
—
rilothe dothe the wiga sige gin is the dede dothe the rilothe it the
ransan the you I. in rilothe the rede for of rilothe enwo.
Neran was to in rilothe the rede
dothe ruthe the sathen was
of rilothe it gosogon was
is the I the dothe ruthe.
Wen was to lele is the
and a was the in it the
rawoton of neran the and the
gera ruthe. neran is the dothe
ruthe the a tele in it.
rilothe ethe the you I the lato
and rede dothe ruthe. Rilothe the
guwo of wasda the I is to
rilothe the ransan it the you
I the etere of and ran.
and sine for that sine to
rilothe the ransan the you
I the ense of segete.
Rilothe the you I the gosogon it
OF was the gosogon thethe of lele enwo.
—
in rago the nense
letu to rilothe was the
dura a and the gera
ruthe the teri the in
it. For the enwo.
weri in
rago runi
to cen that len the
you and ransan for
ransan a and the and
none the anre ruthe.
Cen the ense of len of it. It to the a sige enwo.
cen that the and and in. In the and and the cen that.
cen it the sathen ago and in.
cen it the sathen ithen and in. cen thethe the sathen
of that a the in rilothe. in rilothe it the you ci
of sathen segete of dithe a widi ruthe dinruwe. rilothe it
enwo the you ci of sine gan a and the gera ruthe wen
galon for galon the guto for the cen that was.
—
cen that it the a and enwo of rilothe the you I. weri in
rothe the and it to leri tele ago for leri dithe ago the ison of widi
uwe and sethe for and rilothe sethe the nense thethe. Rilothe the ense
of and ran. in rilothe the and anre and the gera ruthe and anre and the
galon for galon the guto for. in rilothe the you that it. dede
daco for dede dothe the ense. weri in you to rilothe thethe the
is! in was gan to nense the rilothe in the ruthe! in you to
nense the you for thethe. was len the a uwe galon the ati dithe.
Was wu len the a and the dura for dithe for! In the
Rilothe the you
I the ran!
With some parsing, we find the first three lines:
rilothe dothe the wasda of was:
rilothe dothe the wiga sige gin is.
Len to dothe ruthe to I the ci of you I.
Rilothe and dothe might be proper nouns, Wasga a title:
“Rilothe was the King (wasga) of Dothe:
Rilothe is the Great-Ruler (Wiga sige gin) of Dothe [still]. ”
It’s a stretch to pull that out, but it seems to almost work.
However, pairing up the tokens to work them into Zipf’s Law may have screwed up the distribution of words…
Call it a guess…