THEORY: Team Aqua/Team Magma's Backup Plan

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Karpi

In this cave we have lived.
We owe all to the Pokémon.
But, we sealed the Pokémon away.
We feared it.
Those with courage, those with hope.
Open a door. An eternal Pokémon waits.
First comes Relicanth.
Last comes Wailord.

This is literally what it says. But let's assume that we don't know that ahead of time, so we replace each letter with a number in the order it appears.

1 2 - 3 4 1 5 - 6 7 8 9 - 10 9 - 4 7 8 9 - 11 1 8 5 12

Would be the first line. At a certain point, the person trying to figure out the meaning would realize that they are only using about 26 (no Z, Q, etc) numbers to signify different "letters"

The fact that each symbol the translator comes across appears exactly once on each of the tablets we know as the key should signal that it is indeed a key. You can then reassign the numbers to the order they appear in the key's "alphabetical order" to get something like

9 14 - 20 8 9 19 - 3 1 22 5 - 23 5 - 8 1 22 5 - 12 9 22 5 4

and so on. The next step is to total the number of times each of these new assigned letters appears in the text to determine which seem to be vowels.

1 (A) appears 14 times
5 (E) appears 23 times
9 (I) appears 10 times
15 (O) appears 17 times
21 (U) appears 1 time

I am only able to count the vowels because in hindsight we know what they are. However, the following letters also appear a fair amount of times and can be confused with vowels.

19 (S) appears 9 times - similar to I
20 (T) appears 13 times - similar to A

Right here we have to make the logical jump that the writers used the same language as we are attempting to translate into. However, we are faced with an interesting situation as this is the pokemon world. Seconds after birth, a newborn pokemon is able to understand "human language" so logic follows that there is only one and has ever been one. No matter how the translator arrived at this conclusion, they somehow decided that human language is all one and the same. Meaning the letter with the frequency much higher than the others can be tested as "E"

With the knowledge of "E", we plug that back into our text and the following words show up:

23 e (we) x4 appearances
8 1 22 e (have)
11 9 22 e 4 (lived)
15 23 e (owe)
20 8 e (the) x2
16 15 11 e 12 16 15 (pokemon) x3 [at this point i realize i mis-numbered some of the letters in the M-R range but thats not the purpose of this]

along with:
sealed
feared
Those x2
hope
Open
eternal
comes x2
Relicanth

Which I can't be bothered to turn into numbers. The point is, after you find one letter (E) you look for combinations like "T-H-E" that make small common words. At any point the translator is bound to realize the key is a direct copy of the alphabet, but it IS possible to figure out the code without it.

Hopefully this doesn't make me sound TOO stupid. Feel free to poke holes in this process :P

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Interesting idea, but now I'm a little confused. :dizzy:

@Karpi You're also making the assumption that the language is just the modern language encoded. Not all systems use single consonant and vowel letters, some are phonetic symbols, some could be a bit more complex and just use symbols with specific meaning.

Yeah, its in English for us (or whatever language the game is localized in) but let's look at it this way. The unlocking of the Regis itself in the game isn't canon, so we don't even know if the language is supposed to correspond. The only reason that it does is because of simplicity and gameplay-and-story segregation.

And so you replace those symbols with numbers, then what? You've just assigned new symbols to old symbols you couldn't understand in the first place. Make the assumption that its using the Latin Alphabet and is actually code? I'm thinking that braille in the games is actually supposed to be its own ancient language, so you wouldn't be able to translate it without a translation key like the Rosetta Stone was for Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Simplified for us because we're supposed to be able to figure it out, but in a more "realistic" setting where the PC isn't controlled by a person that has all this prior knowledge?

You're essentially taking a lot of your knowledge in hindsight to translate this. No one in the Pokémon world would contain this same knowledge.

Quote:

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Seconds after birth, a newborn pokemon is able to understand "human language" so logic follows that there is only one and has ever been one.

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In the anime, where they're pretty inconsistent with how much a Pokemon can understand them since you have Pokemon who can perfectly understand people, yet other times we see Ash's Pokemon reasoning with wild ones because they don't seem to get what people are saying. But that's the thing, trainer-Pokemon can understand the meaning of the language. They've delved into the idea of aura, and that its users can feel the emotions of others. Who's to say that Pokémon don't have a sixth sense and just understand the meaning that is being conveyed? After all, the Pokémon themselves seem to have their own language specific to their species, yet understand each other very easily.

In the games, its at least been confirmed that while Pokemon have a basic understanding of the message a person is trying to convey, very few understand the language past "I think that's what he means".

And if there has been one and only one, then there would not be multiple writing styles. We have Unown, Braille (which itself is now an ancient language) and Cuneiform in the underwater area in Unova.

Then there's also the fact that the game as acknowledged that other languages exist by including characters that speak foreign languages in the game, so you can't make that assumption here.

Karpi: As Outrage said, you're making a lot of assumptions that you gained from being outside of the game -- imagine if you were in-game, with no help as to what the patterns mean (and part of an inept organization, to boot). How do you know that they're in order at all? You could assume that they're trying to say something or that it's just random. You'd need some sort of Rosetta Stone type thing.

Ultimately this is nothing more than speculation, but it is fascinating and something I'd never have considered. I always was under the impression that the Wailmer did belong to Team Magma/Aqua, and that they'd put them there on purpose to block the player's way.