MNU SPREADS LIES!
Unfortunately, the original blog that this title refers to has been taken down by Sony Pictures.
ANYWAY - this is actually a pretty sudden idea I had earlier this day (saturday 5) while in the shower - District 9 is what I consider the masterpiece of Neill Blomkamp's work as writer and film maker. It is out of the bat an outstandingly complex, bold and action and drama intense movie from start to finish. It has so much to offer that I'm sometimes afraid of what could come out with a possible sequel if it ever gets to happen - say it's like to wait for Half-Life 3.
District 9 is an 11yo sci-fi drama/action movie by now, and why does it still deserve a lot of attention from the public? - by that I mean, us sci-fi nerds... The Alien Language.
Keep in mind that most of the information and material used throughout this post is sourced from the movie itself, and not by interviews and obscure blogs - for the reasons bellow.
Like I said, District 9 is a decade old already, pretty much like No Man's Sky (which I plan to study the glyphs of), it had the time to build on a solid fanbase, at least for a while (seems like at most 4yrs after the movie came out), and it actually impresses me how little there is actually about how deep does the rabbit hole goes on it's language affairs - the alien language is a solid aspect of the movie, not just a background quirk of pure gibberish in an alien key-set like some movies and games do.
The Non-Human Glyphs
In the movie, the aliens have been around for 28 years, landing in South Africa by 1982, and so the humans had nearly 3 decades to learn the alien language and them to learn english - and both species seem to understand each other with reasonable if not great success - without needing one to actually speak english or the alien tongue, Han Solo style.
What does impress me a lot, of course, in the context of the movie it makes a lot of sense, in general that humans are stupid and racists, but is that the alien glyphs have been around for a long time, and still, people just label it as "gang marks" and stuff of the kind - it's never said on the movie, but it's rather probable that the name of the alien species, or at least, that specific group landed in Johannesburg is called Poleepkwa (Polip'qua? Pa-le'ep'kva????).
Back to my shower thoughts, I recall that by the time I had watched District 9 for the first time, I had become really interested by making and writing alien languages as well of designing cool visuals for tech in general, but I've never saw much more than an already well known key-bind of the Poleepkwa glyphs so far:
Also, here is how Hard Sci Fi look like in Poleepkwan:
It's actually pretty tricky and hurtful to look at - a lot of people like to compare it as techno-version of Chinese or Japanese, I can see why - but it isn't as simple as that, however, like us humans do - we could suggest this is just a font choice for their tech inscriptions - pretty much, we are not looking at Sans type of script here, but more like a stylized version of those - what make things not that much easier to read.
Also, the keybinding is much of an over-simplification, to assume on the aliens would use exactly 26 symbols each for a letter of the english alphabet, there is just too much going on for the amount of information people assume it is giving. There isn't enough context for us to infer what is the exact meaning of each symbol yet.
Is there any extra material around?
Not really, every mention I could find to the Poleepkwa glyphs leads back to the keybind already shown, another fan-made font also based off that key can be found here. I also stumbled upon one particular person that worked on a small expansion of the glyphs from 2011 to 2012 - but it's a non-cannon porn fanfic. Another instance of fan-made work takes us back to a russian table of characters.
At first, I got pretty happy in finding this, after all, Russian has 33 characters, so we would have more glyphs to work with and even sounds.
So yep, not any useful extra material really.
Ok, what about what's in the movie then?
Yes, there are about 30 occasions any symbols are somewhat readable, in full view or significant throughout the movie, ie, not going through every blurry alien screen frame-by-frame.
The funny thing though, is that many of the symbols ARE NOT listed in the key given - and since it's been 11 years since the release, Sony Pictures has also taken down the original font download page - so, unless I happen to stumble onto someone that happens to still have that, we won't ever know if the image we have as a source includes ALL the symbols or if it's just the ones that match with english characters in the keyboard.
Some other symbols happen to appear inconsistently in pieces of tech/weapons and screens - unless you consider it in a very general way, it's just there for the visuals.
From now and on, I will use sketches for the symbols for simplicity - as of the original pictures are sort of blurry and unclear.
How much readable content there is?
First, the material I've used will be available at my Google Drive.
The exosuit/mech chase scene had given me some clues to how the language works - still, one would have to own a blu-ray or HD copy of the film and analyze the scene frame-by-frame to record each of the Poleepkwan glyphs - I'm not that person, at least for now, I have managed to get only two glyphs off that scene.
As we will see, the clue I've got links back to my original hypothesis that the glyphs are actually too complicated for a simple english-alphabet key.
Notice how this glyph has parts from both A/V and S. The other one sports parts of M in different order. Hinting and odds are that the Poleepkwan writing system works with glyphs made of smaller parts, kind of how Kanji and Hangul works - though, we would need to analyze a ton of other glyphs to know exactly which are separate parts and which are diacritics or floating elements of certain glyph parts.
My attempt to explain Poleepkwan Script
So here is the way I found to dissect and write Poleepkwan.
First, I tried grouping look-alike glyphs:
And then I dissected the elements shown in the letter glyphs - there are about writing 37 elements, or just 20-ish to 30-ish elements if you consider rotations and repetitions to stack up.
I made small notes on each marking and questioned for a bit - there is also the problem of reading direction, which we see not many hints of whatsoever (for the individual glyph parts), every alien text is either a single glyph or bulk text. In scenes showing Christopher's computers in the hut, we see that at least, they read it top to bottom, left to right, when arranged in paragraphs (presumably, on how the text is generated on the screens).
In the hiatus time i took away from this post, plus investigation, I couldn't much progress in trying to read the script in any meaningfull way - we would need a couple of written words and their sounds to try make out a few of the sounds of this language.
Val, out...
- M.O. Valent, 13/12/2020
- M.O. Valent, 20/01/2021
