Hey all. After spending a few hours over a few days obsessively messing with my spreadsheet, I have some thoughts I wanted to share.
Firstly: the trigram WOMAN-APPLE-SCISSORS. I think that these runes correspond to T-H-E. WOMAN-APPLE is a very common digram, and SCISSORS seems common enough to represent E. If we assume this, there is a series of runes WOMAN-APPLE-SCISSORS-DEER-SCISSORS, which could map DEER to R and make the gloss T-H-E-R-E.
The issue here is the concept art of the key. The inscription there is WOMAN-CRYSTAL-FARMER, which would conflict with the above assumption if that sequence is supposed to read K-E-Y. If the T-H-E gloss is correct, the key would need another 3-letter word. However...
This follows into my second thought. It's been discussed that the runes may be based more on Japanese orthography than English. I made an interesting observation based on this last night. The unvoiced and voiced versions of some kana (k/g, t/d, etc) are represented by the same character, only with an added diacritic - a symbol that looks like " called a dakuten. If we take this into account, we can create a list:
A I U E O K/G T/D S/Z H/B R M N Y W
This gives us 14 unique symbols, some of which are doubled up. We are still missing some letters though - C, F, J, L, P, Q, V, X. We could roll C into K/G; F, P, and V into H/B because those sounds are all related in Japanese; L into R because those are the same sound in Japanese. Maybe J belongs with S/Z, since the kana shi with a dakuten represents a ji, as in "genie". Q and X may not be mapped because they are rare in English. So we could have:
A I U E O K/G/C T/D S/Z/J H/B/P/F/V R/L M N Y W
This leaves us with 24 out of 26 English letters with only 14 characters. If we glance back up at my first thought, we can see that if WOMAN corresponds to T or D, then the key may bear a 3-letter word starting with either of those.
Of course, I have yet to come up with anything intelligible with all this. So I may be seeing patterns where there are none.
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