Observer Talk - An Origin Story ~ Fringe Television - Fan Site for the FOX TV Series Fringe

Observer Talk - An Origin Story

      Email Post       11/05/2012 06:51:00 PM      

This week I think we got only the second on screen attempt to decode the observer language, the first being way back in season 1.

However as usual this new notebook contains yet more different symbols, Astrid's epiphany explanation is that the symbols may have multiple meanings and one symbol may represent different English letters depending on your perception. So it is most probable that there are multiple observer character sets that translate to the same English letter.

Quite a hard concept to grasp, and at the moment I don't think we as viewers are supposed to be able to decode all the different character sets, only the one we have already managed to get a foothold on. Perhaps that was chosen as our puny, not cyber enhanced, brains might just be able to comprehend it !

I found it very interesting that Astrid was decoding the notebook using a computer program that uses the symbols that we already know from the observer signage. Maybe she was using that language as a common reference of some sort.

Talking of that computer screen, the symbols are recognisable, but as usual don't make much sense when translated to English.

Elsewhere in the episode the only other translatable phrase was a very litteral affair.

The lid of the box the transport cube was in says - "IT'S THE CUBE CASE"
Outside of the episode we now have the new RewardWire.org website.

The site has lots of literal translations we can look at, but there are a couple of interesting points.

First is the ? character appears to be different to what we have seen before, I was expecting this as before it has been confused with the / character.

Second the uppercase U character is much clearer here and my original assumption about it seems to have been incorrect, so it's good that it has been cleared up.

Also the individual information about the Fringe team has now been cleaned up, for instance previously the hair colour for Olivia was marked as Blond in English and Blonde in Observer, this has now been corrected.

The other thing that has changed is feet and inches are now words, not the symbol equivalents. I may be reaching slightly but perhaps someone has been reading these articles and decided to address the small issues :-)

One final thing about reward wire is that when you move the mouse over the Report Sighting link, the observer equivalent is displayed, but before the correct character is displayed some seemingly random characters are displayed first. I think they are random and not part of a sequence but it may be worth seeing if there is a hidden message there.

All that leaves us with is the updated language key, this has the correct U character, ? and the # discussed last week.




4 Comments:

Mosaic_Hyde said...

I loved the translation of the cube box lid. :)

Dave Thompson said...

Here's the font from the rewardwire.org website

http://rewardwire.org/css/fonts/observer-regular-webfont.ttf

Zort70 said...

Thanks, for the font link, that might answer a lot of the missing characters !

I'm travelling at the moment so will take a look when I arrive.

Anonymous said...

I understood what Astrid was trying to explain a bit differently. Maybe it's like Akkadian (Assyrian/Babylonian): it was written in cuneiform characters. There are hundreds of them and each had many different meanings. First, every sign had one or more syllabic/phonetic meanings, e.g., "ta," "at," "mi." Secondly, one could see it as the original ideographic meaning that a sign had in Sumerian (an older and unrelated language), e.g., "dingir" meaning "god." Again, one sign could have more than one "idea" meaning too, e.g., "star" and "god." This way an individual sign could have several possible readings. The only way to figure it out is through context and even then it's not always possible to decide on one meaning.

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