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 nothing wrong 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 answer on Zhihu, I still find it more comfortable to reply there than in this chapter.
Step 0: Preset Conditions#
First of all, 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 this is the case.
Secondly, there needs to be enough human resources, at least equivalent to the entire intelligence department during World War I. Without enough manpower, statistical work cannot be done, and without statistical work, it is impossible to complete any step. Of course, if the computing power of an extraordinary person can replace a differential engine, then forget what I just 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 say others have a god's-eye view.
Speaking of this, Neil smiled proudly:
"I have deciphered some of the symbols, confirming that they are expressions of numbers. Look, what have I discovered? 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 corresponding day in the diary, 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 with Chinese numerals," "Huang Tao wrote a diary 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 for me to write this step. The biggest reason is that 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 script" 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 script," you can gather the dates at the beginning of each Roselle diary and arrange them in chronological order to get a sequence of dates. 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 script" before "Month" only has 12 variations, and the "Roselle script" before "Day" has 31 variations. The occasionally appearing "Roselle script" 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 order of the numbers representing the day, and the research process is to repeatedly compare all the different "Month"-interrupted date sequences to obtain a sequence that satisfies all the sequences. For example, if "I" has three sequences {3, 5}, {2, 4}, {1, 2, 3}, "I" can determine that the order of numbers that satisfies these sequences is 12345 or 12354. In the case of Roselle writing a diary, even if he fished for two days every three days, he could still write for about ten days in the early days, so it is quite easy to compare and find the unique solution with a complete book.
So "I" got the order of "one" to "thirty-one" in "Roselle's script". At this point, "I" found that the "Roselle script" 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 script", such as "thirty-one" = "3 10 1" = 3 * 10 + 1.
After deciphering the date, "I" turned to look at the year, and the result of "eleven forty-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 "eleven", so "I" looked at the last two digits, but the last two digits also do not match the number expression in the "Roselle script" that "I" discovered earlier. Just when "I" couldn't figure it out, the intelligence officer under my command told "me" that if "eleven forty-three" is regarded as "forty-three", these years happen to be between the years when Roselle was born and when he was assassinated, further suggesting that it might be decimal (since the Lord of Mysteries can study steam technology, it obviously has the concept of number systems). This requires some coincidence, because Huang Tao probably wrote the year only three or four years in ten years, and the interference of Arabic numerals needs to be eliminated. "I" need an entire intelligence department to brainstorm.
People in the Lord of Mysteries should be grateful that Huang Tao doesn't use the lunar calendar. If it were the lunar calendar, the years couldn't be figured out (Roselle's life span was less than sixty years), and encountering a leap month might make people suspect that some of the Roselle notes are fake. However, these will only increase the difficulty of deciphering to some extent and will not directly lead to the impossibility of deciphering.
Why do I say that Old Neil can deduce the diary but it is illogical? Because it takes so much effort to deduce the date, and 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.
To summarize what we have obtained in this step, "Year" = year, "Month" = month, "Day" = day, "one" = 1, "thirty-one" = 31, "eleven forty-three" = 1143.
Step 2: Word Frequency Statistics#
This is still a train of thought provided by Old Neil.
Emperor Roselle loved his daughter, so he would likely mention his daughter's name in the diary on her birthday. Therefore, "I" looked for the diaries written on Bernadette's birthday and conducted a word frequency analysis on these diaries. It was found that the combination of the four "Roselle scripts" 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 script". Note that we only know that "Bernadette" represents Bernadette, but we don't know whether it means the eldest daughter or the little sweetheart, or it is a transcription of Bernadette's name in "Roselle script".
# Four-word combinations that appear more than once in the original Roselle diary
{'Real World': 13, 'This Era': 6, 'Black Throne': 6, 'Edwards': 9, 'Unnamed Island': 10, 'Matilda': 6, 'Sequence Pathway': 7, 'Blasphemy Slate': 20, 'Ancient Organization': 7, 'This World': 13, 'Extraordinary': 7, 'Eternal Sun': 6, 'That Ancient': 13, 'This Organization': 8, 'High Sequence': 10, 'Sequence Master': 10, 'The Fourth Era': 9, 'Solomon Empire': 7, 'Solomon Empire': 7, 'Extraordinary Characteristic': 20, 'Soren Family': 9, 'Maybe Just': 8, 'A Question': 8, 'Bernadette': 16, 'Pathway Sequence': 6, 'Pathway Sequence': 6, 'An Ancient Hidden': 8, 'Ancient Hidden Secret': 8, 'Hermes Trismegistus': 8, 'Hermes Trismegistus': 8, 'Trismegistus Mr.': 8, 'Hidden Secret Organization': 7, 'Hidden Secret Organization': 8, 'Unnamed Island': 6, 'Unnamed Island': 7}
Using this method, we can obtain the "Roselle script" expressions for some important characters in Roselle's life, such as his wife Matilda, his eldest son Charles, and his second son Bovana. As long as this "Roselle script" combination did not appear before Roselle met them, it can be basically determined that they are referring to them.
Next is the place names. If it is recorded in the history books that Roselle went somewhere between certain years, then the combinations of "Roselle script" that frequently appear during that period might represent the names of those places (there is a basis for this, as there are parts in the original work where the Emperor went to Fosak for a state visit, and the word "Fosak" appears many times in that diary). To avoid confusion with personal names, it is best to look for 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 might have a more coherent expression in "Roselle script", and it might even be possible to deduce the meaning of some "Roselle script" through this. This is actually unlikely because most people only consider "Roselle script" as a cipher rather than another language. It is mentioned here only to illustrate the possibility.
Step 3: Linguists#
After deciphering the date and some proper nouns in "Roselle script", "I" can finally consider hiring professional linguists to help me decipher the Roselle diary. Since I don't know 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", "de", "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 would never have thought that these two would be compared.
Oracle bone inscriptions are products of the real world three to four thousand years ago. The content recorded on them can only be inferred from fragments of historical records. 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. His inventions are still widely used today, his famous quotes are essential parts of textbooks, and his deeds are well-known... Taking into account the extraordinary elements, many people he knew are still alive. The people 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 script" lacks the path of character 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 ciphertext of the Twelve Palaces Killer#
The scale of the Twelve Palaces Killer's ciphertext is not even comparable. There are more than 25,000 Chinese characters in the original Roselle diary alone, while the Twelve Palaces Killer doesn't even have a fraction of that. I think there are more commonalities between the decipherment of Oracle bone inscriptions and "Roselle script" than between the Twelve Palaces Killer's cipher and "Roselle script".
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 script", so she can only play the game of deciphering the ancient tomb sect with a complete set of Huang Tao's notes, and after guessing for a long time, she still can't guess "hometown".
Roselle's writing is missing, 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 driven crazy. But in terms of Klein's reading experience, Roselle should not make so many mistakes. Many ugly characters seen in the original work are actually copied by others, and it's not bad if they can copy 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.
"Love 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 his work is his plot deconstruction, which is expected to be published at the same time as "Lord of Mysteries II". I delayed it and couldn't stand watching "The Record of Annihilation" and "The Master of Martial Arts". It will be considered a success if it is published before "The Circle of Destiny" (i.e., "Lord of Mysteries II") is serialized.
I recommend a Bilibili up master Zero who summarizes the works of authors. Maybe he has done the plot deconstruction of the Octopus earlier than me.