Getting Started

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I tried to make the central bits from this wiki available on a single page for you to get started. Much more stuff is of course available in the individual pages.

Narga (talk) 22:49, 1 March 2018 (CET)

Links to comic and posts by novil[edit]

More links and other resources can be found on this page: Links and resources

Some facts[edit]

The following statements about the Book of Woo are important and accepted/confirmed to be true:

  • The Book of Woo definitely contains sensible information that can be deciphered.
  • The encryption isn't based on some sort of device or mechanism that is hard to get.
  • The plain text is some sort of literature, as one can guess from Woo’s comment and the illustrations. A lot of time went into the plain text as well.
  • The story for “The Book of Woo” is written in English or German or both and an arbitrary number of encipherment steps (in a broad definition) have then been carried out.
  • The following word appears in the plain text: ENGLISH: Potbelly Hill | GERMAN: Bauchigen Hügel . Novil says "It should be quite easy to determine on which page."

More facts can be found on this page: What we know

Important analysis findings[edit]

  • There are 31 different text symbols used in the Book of Woo.
  • The character frequency does neither follow english nor german character frequencies but is rather atypical for a plain text suggesting some frequency-altering encoding process.
  • It is generally assumed that word breaks (i.e. spaces), quotation marks, comma, and full stops will remain the same during the decoding.
  • On August 2, 2013, the reader Satsuoni posted the following in the comment thread (which was later on confirmed by Novil to be correct):
By looking at the distribution of character pairs I have discovered that the alphabet can be cleanly separated into two parts, with “u” and “e” serving as separators (incidentally, they look like on and off switch) between two sets. Sets seem identical in function. For example, “z” in one subset is equivalent to “w” in other. The distribution of separators doesn’t suggest that they are spaces of any kind [...]
  • This was taken into account for the first time in the Satsuoni-Novil transliteration but became a bit more usable with Foogod's transliteration.
  • Phlosioneer discovered that there are two sub-alphabets jdyqu and olpkgfxs (using Foogod's transliteration) + the special characters a and w that seem to be spaces or word connectors. The alphabets are used to transcribe a word the following way:
  1. Begin at the ending of a word, with alphabet #1.
  2. Alternate alphabets until the beginning of the word is reached.
  • nneonneo has taken this fact into account in his transliteration by using vowels and consonants for the two alphabets.
  • Potbelly Hill is an archaeological site in Turkey (called Göbekli Tepe there). As the user Rilota Ta wrote here somewhere, it is most likely referred to on page 3 of the Book of Woo, as 10.000 BC is the approximate age of the site and the scorpion figure on top of the drawn box is very similar to the one on stone pillar #43 there. http://aintnohothouseflower.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/254952-a.jpg

Transliterations[edit]

I suggest to get started with Foogod's transliteration. It was designed to have the following features:

  • One-to-one mapping between glyphs and letters (no loss of information)
  • All word characters (except "&") are ASCII letters (works better with text processing tools and human eyes)
  • The Satsuoni(2013) character duplication (see above) is represented by upper/lower-case letters (so Satsuoni-folding can be achieved by simply converting to all-upper or all-lower case).

Transliteration Key[edit]

Foogod key.png

Textfile

More transliterations can be found on this page: Transliterations

Contribute![edit]

You have your own ideas? Feel free to contribute!

Add your speculations, theories, current lines of investigation, or suggestions for areas which should be looked into under Working Theories or Artwork Interpretation!