Recently, I've been reading a fanfiction called "The Lord of Mysteries" and in this chapter, the author mentioned the setting of the undecipherable diary of Cthulhu Round Roselle. Suddenly, a bunch of "linguists" came to argue with me, saying that there was no problem with the setting of Cthulhu. One of them even debated with me for twenty floors using "linguistics". However, due to the 150-word limit in this chapter, it was difficult to express my thoughts fully, so I decided to write a longer response on Zhihu and give the link to anyone who wants to argue with me. Even if I have to open a second battlefield under the Zhihu answer, I will be more comfortable replying there than in this chapter.
Step 0: Preset Conditions#
First, I want to clarify that I don't know anything about linguistics, I only know a little about classical cryptography and compiler theory, so this article will not use much linguistic knowledge.
To decipher the Roselle diary, the most basic condition is to have a complete original book with continuous dates, such as the "Roselle Notes 3" that Huang Beibei showed on the cover in the dream of the God War Ruins. The ideal situation is to have all the notes that Roselle wrote from the time he crossed over to the time he was assassinated. For the convenience of discussion, let's assume that we have this.
Secondly, we need sufficient human resources, at least equivalent to the entire intelligence department during World War I. Without enough manpower, we cannot do statistical work, and without statistical work, we cannot complete any step. Of course, if the computing power of an extraordinary person can replace a differential engine, then forget what I said. However, in this article, we will not consider the extraordinary elements in the Lord of Mysteries.
In the following text, when I use the quoted "I", it refers to a Lord of Mysteries native who meets the above conditions.
Step 1: Date and Time#
Even Old Neil can do this, please refer to the original work if you think others have a god's-eye view.
Speaking of this, Neil showed a proud smile:
"I have deciphered some of the symbols, confirmed that they are expressions of numbers. Look, what I found, this is actually a diary! Well, I hope to compare the historical events of different dates, especially the events around the emperor, with the records of the diary on that day, in order to decipher more symbols."
- Volume 1, Chapter 20, Forgetful Dunn
Originally, I could have listed this as a preset condition, but there are always some people who say it can't be done without even reading the original work. The reasons are nothing more than "mixing Arabic numerals and Chinese numerals," "Huang Tao wrote a diary for three days and fished for two days," and the omnipotent "Huang Tao's handwriting is ugly and there are mistakes and omissions." However, these are not the main reasons why I wrote this step. The biggest reason is that in my opinion, it is illogical for Old Neil to be able to interpret numbers and infer that Roselle wrote a diary.
Why do I say this? Because first, you need to compare a large amount of text and find that they all start with a string of "XX Month XX Day" in "Roselle's text" before you can assume that the Roselle notes are a diary. Of course, you can also assume that this is a diary without comparison, because the possibility of this thing being a diary is already very high.
Knowing that "XX Month XX Day" is the expression of the date in "Roselle's text", you can gather the dates at the beginning of each Roselle diary together in chronological order to get a date sequence. How to determine which part represents the year, which part represents the month, and which part represents the day? Since the calendar of the Lord of Mysteries is the same as the calendar used by Huang Tao (i.e. the Gregorian calendar), it is easy to find that the "Roselle text" before "Month" only has 12 variations, and the "Roselle text" before "Day" has 31 variations. The occasionally appearing "Roselle text" before "Year" is most likely to represent the year.
Once the positions of the year, month, and day are figured out, you can start studying the arrangement of numbers. Since the number representing the month sometimes appears more than twelve times without being interrupted by "Year", it can be assumed that Roselle the Great forgot to mark the year at the beginning of the year. "I" can only study the arrangement of the numbers representing the day, and the research process is to repeatedly compare all different "Month"-interrupted date sequences to obtain an order that satisfies all sequences. For example, if "I" has three sequences {3, 5}, {2, 4}, {1, 2, 3}, "I" can deduce that the order of numbers that satisfies these sequences is 12345 or 12354. In the case of having a complete book, it is quite easy to compare and find the unique solution even though Roselle only wrote a diary every three days.
So "I" obtained the order of "one" to "thirty-one" in "Roselle's text". At this point, "I" found that the "Roselle text" representing the month is "one" to "twelve", and couldn't help but marvel at my luck. I don't need to study the order of the months anymore. Here, I can also decipher the expression of numbers in "Roselle's text", such as "thirty-one" = "3 10 1" = 3 * 10 + 1.
After deciphering the dates, "I" turned to look at the year, and the result of "one one four three" confused "me" again. "I" know that this is "1 1 4 3", but what does "1 1 4 3" mean? The "linguists" mentioned in this chapter believe that the Lord of Mysteries may not be in decimal, so "I" don't know what "1 1 4 3" = 1143 means. Frustrated, "I" found that the first two digits of all the years in the Roselle diary are "one one", so "I" looked at the last two digits, but the last two digits also do not match the expression of numbers in the "Roselle text" that "I" discovered earlier. Just as "I" couldn't figure it out, the intelligence officer under my command told me that if "four three" is regarded as "forty-three", these years happen to be between the years when Roselle was born and when he died, further speculating that they might be in decimal (since the Lord of Mysteries has the concept of number systems if they can study steam technology). This requires some coincidences because Huang Tao probably wrote the year only three or four years in ten years, and we need to exclude the interference of Arabic numerals. "I" need an entire intelligence department to brainstorm.
The people of the Lord of Mysteries should be grateful that Huang Tao doesn't use the lunar calendar. If it were the lunar calendar, the years would not be deducible (Roselle's life span is less than sixty years), and encountering a leap month might make people suspect that some of the entries in Roselle's diary are fake. However, these will only increase the difficulty of deciphering to some extent and will not directly lead to the inability to decipher.
The reason why I think it is illogical for Old Neil to be able to deduce the diary is that it takes so much effort to deduce the dates, but Old Neil can decipher it with just a few scattered transcription pages. I tend to think that he is just guessing like other Roselle fanatics, but he happened to guess the right direction.
Let's review what we have obtained in this step: "Year" = year, "Month" = month, "Day" = day, "one" = 1, "thirty-one" = 31, "one one four three" = 1143.
Step 2: Word Frequency Statistics#
This is still a train of thought provided by Old Neil.
Emperor Roselle loved his daughter very much, so he might mention his daughter's name in the diary on her birthday. Therefore, "I" searched for the diaries written on Bernadette's birthday and conducted word frequency statistics on these diaries. It was found that the combination of the four "Roselle texts" representing "Bernadette" almost appeared on every day of her birthday, but never appeared before Bernadette was born. It can be inferred that this combination represents his daughter's "Roselle text". Note that we only know that "Bernadette" represents Bernadette, but we don't know whether it means the eldest daughter or the sweetheart, or it is a transcription of Bernadette's name in "Roselle text".
# Four-word combinations that appear more than once in the original Roselle diary
{'现实世界': 13, '这个时代': 6, '黑王座号': 6, '爱德华兹': 9, '无名小岛': 10, '玛蒂尔达': 6, '序列途径': 7, '亵渎石板': 20, '古老组织': 7, '这个世界': 13, '的非凡者': 7, '永恒烈阳': 6, '那个古老': 13, '这个组织': 8, '高序列强': 10, '序列强者': 10, '第四纪的': 9, '所罗门帝': 7, '罗门帝国': 7, '非凡特性': 20, '索伦家族': 9, '也许只是': 8, '一个问题': 8, '贝尔纳黛': 16, '途径的序': 6, '径的序列': 6, '个古老隐': 8, '古老隐秘': 8, '赫密斯老': 8, '密斯老先': 8, '斯老先生': 8, '老隐秘组': 7, '隐秘组织': 8, '那座无名': 6, '座无名小': 7}
Using this method, we can obtain the "Roselle text" expressions of some important people in Roselle's life, such as his wife Matilda, his eldest son Charles, and his second son Bovana. As long as the combination of "Roselle text" has never appeared before Roselle met them, we can basically determine that they refer to them.
Next is the place names. If the historical records state that Roselle went to a certain place between certain years, then the combinations of "Roselle text" that frequently appear during that period may represent the place (there is a basis for this, as there are parts in the original work where the emperor went to Fuzak with a delegation, and the word "Fuzak" appears many times in that diary). To avoid confusion with personal names, it is best to find cases where Roselle went on vacation with his children.
Finally, Roselle's various inventions. Since many things created by Emperor Roselle are made up words, "I" assume that these made-up words may have a more fluent expression in "Roselle text", and even through this, we can speculate on the meaning of some "Roselle text". This is actually unlikely because most people only consider "Roselle text" as a cipher rather than another language. I mentioned it here just to illustrate the possibility.
Step 3: Linguists#
After deciphering the date and some proper nouns in "Roselle text", "I" can finally consider hiring professional linguists to help me decipher the Roselle diary. Since I don't know anything about linguistics, I can only give a few sentence structures that I think can be deduced from the word frequency statistics in the second step, such as common personal pronouns "you", "I", "he", "she", and common particles "de", "di", "dei", "le".
In any case, "I" at least know when and where Roselle wrote in his diary, as for what he did, it will be slowly deduced by the linguists I hired based on the existing information.
Some Answers on Zhihu#
Oracle Bone Inscriptions have not been completely deciphered to this day#
If it weren't for the answers from "linguists", I wouldn't even think of comparing these two.
Oracle bone inscriptions are artifacts from 3,000 to 4,000 years ago in the real world. The content recorded on them can only be inferred from fragmentary records in historical books, and many long-lost clan place names cannot be traced. Roselle was a historical figure in the Lord of Mysteries more than two hundred years ago, and his inventions are still widely used today. His famous quotes are essential parts of textbooks, and his deeds are well-known... Considering the extraordinary elements, many people he knew are still alive. The names and place names in Roselle's diary do not need to consider the possibility of changes, and even things that did not exist in the Lord of Mysteries were invented by Roselle. Deciphering "Roselle text" lacks the path of glyph evolution, but Roselle did not block the reference to history for you. What Roselle left behind in the Lord of Mysteries is enough to hold a Roselle exhibition. Compared with Oracle bone inscriptions, which have nothing to refer to, the reference to history is much more reliable.
The cipher of the Twelve Palace Killer#
The cipher of the Twelve Palace Killer is of a completely different magnitude. It's impossible for a living person to decipher it. The original work alone contains more than 25,000 Chinese characters, while the cipher of the Twelve Palace Killer doesn't even have a fraction of that. I think there are more commonalities between deciphering Oracle bone inscriptions and "Roselle text" than between the cipher of the Twelve Palace Killer and "Roselle text".
What can be deciphered is not wanted to be deciphered, and what is wanted to be deciphered cannot be deciphered#
In fact, there is a person in the original work who has the resources to decipher and also wants to understand what Roselle wrote, and that is Bernadette, who has a complete set of Roselle diaries in her hands. Of course, it can also be said that she doesn't want others to know the specific meaning of "Roselle text", so she can only play the Tomb Raider with a complete set of Huang Tao's notes and guess for a long time without even guessing "hometown".
Roselle's writing lacks, is messy, wrong, and missing#
This depends on the frequency. If he makes a mistake in every sentence on average, then the decipherer will indeed be frustrated. But in terms of Klein's reading experience, Roselle shouldn't make so many mistakes. Many ugly characters seen in the original work are actually transcriptions by others, and it's not bad if they can transcribe them correctly.
Postscript#
This is an article that was temporarily inserted before the first issue of "Mostly Negative Reviews". It took me a week to write. I originally wanted to put half of the timeline of Roselle's diary that I sorted out here as an Easter egg, but 25,000 words is too much, and it should be considered copyright infringement to put parts of the paid chapters here.
"Iceberg Diving Octopus" is the source of my motivation for writing articles. Every time I chat with his book fans, I can write an article out of anger. The next article related to him is his plot deconstruction, which is expected to be published at the same time as "Lord of Mysteries II". It's delayed, and I can't stand to watch "The Records of the Extinguished Fate" and "The Master of Martial Arts". I will release it before "The Circle of Destiny" (i.e. "Lord of Mysteries II") is serialized, which can be considered a success.
I recommend a Bilibili up master Zero who summarizes the works of authors. Maybe he has done the deconstruction of Octopus earlier than me.