Enter The Tabula Rasa Benefactor Project Contest
While I very much enjoyed watching Richard Garriott demo Tabula Rasa at E3, I was almost equally pulled in by the linguistic minigame: within the world of Tabula Rasa, vanished benevolent aliens named the Eloh have left behind technology and wisdom to help humanity and the other struggling races in their fight against the all-conquering Bane. Part of that legacy of knowledge comes in the form of the Eloh's language, which is pictographic and learned one symbol (called logos) at a time in various reliquaries throughout the game.
Like the simplified Futhark runes used in his Ultima series, the Eloh logos are a world-building tool more often seen in fantasy fiction than video game lore; unlike the Ultima runes, however, the pictographic Eloh language is universally legible - each symbol means one word, such as "father" or "into" or "cosmos." For those who learn the language, which is easy to pick up, all Eloh writing will be intelligible no matter what your native tongue: English, French, or Klingon.
To curry excitement for Tabula Rasa and its Eloh language "puzzles," the Tabula Rasa team has been holding a contest to see who will be the first to translate a paragraph of Eloh writing. Easing the journey is a list of currently deciphered logos, which make the job a lot easier by filling in some blanks and lighting the way to deciphering others: the Eloh language has a lot of traditional symbolic logic, such as the way parenthesis modify a symbol to include the concept of ownership: turning "we" into "our," and so forth.
The contest is open to residents of the US and Canada, so if you're interested check out the rules. I tried my hand and got an "Oooh, so close!" from the folks at Tabula Rasa, so if any of you cunning cryptologist or lickable linguists out there want to whip out your translations and compare, shoot me an email.
Break a morpheme!
Tabula Rasa Benefactor Project Contest [PlayTR.com]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany, Video Games on 19 July 2007
Other stuff like this: contest, eloh, ncsoft, pc, pictogram, richard garriott, tabula rasa
