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Hidden jokes in Planet Quakes! (Patreon)
Content
Hi! I'm Arcadi, one of the illustrators here at MinuteEarth. Here's the thing: I LOVE to sneak in lil secrets in our videos, and my favorite way to do that is using Ithkuil, which is a made-up language that I took up a couple of years ago. Ithkuil was designed by John Quijada in an effort to minimize vagueness and convey the most amount of information in the densest way possible. Does it accomplish that? I wouldn't say so. But it sure is fun to work with it! To me, putting together a sentence is like solving a sudoku. You sit down, you rack your brain for 10-20 minutes, and then that's that!
On top of being lots of fun, its writing systems are really cool-looking and are, IMO, perfect for hiding secret messages in plain sight. In any case, for our most recent video about planet quakes, since we mention so many different planets and moons, I wanted to include an Ithkuil translation for all of them, for funsies. Thing is, there are no direct translations for non-Earth planets, so you basically have to come up with a workaround. Again, for funsies!
The cool part about Ithkuil is that you can take a root word, like "planet" and start adding modifiers to it. On top of that, you can make those modifiers change the core meaning of the word. For example, since Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, I could translate Mercury as something like "THE first planet" (as in, the fact that it's the first, in terms of how the Solar System is arranged, is significant to the word; it's not just a random planet that just so happens to be going first).
We can do this for all our solar neighbors: Venus is "THE second planet", Mars is "THE fourth planet", and so on. For moons, you only have to double down on the concept: Europa can be "THE sixth moon of THE fifth planet". Pluto, no longer being a planet, makes matters complicated, but making things complicated is sorta Pluto's vibe.
This approach is very logical and hassle-free, but it's severely lacking in the whimsy department, so I decided to come up with more colorful translations for our planetary neighbors, describing them by some feature they have, rather than the way the Solar System happens to be arranged. Some translations are sorta basic (Mars is red, Jupiter is big, Mercury is small, Uranus is tilted), but others ended up being really interesting!
- Even though Mercury is closer to the Sun than Venus, Venus is actually hotter (on average) because of its thick atmosphere trapping all the heat from the Sun.
- Europa has the smoothest surface on any known solid object in the Solar System!
- Io is a weird moon: most moons in the outer Solar System are mostly made of water ice, but Io is made of rock, iron and sulfur! So I ended up translating it as "THE really dry moon" because of how little water it has. I guess I could've gone for "the ice-less moon" (or just go for "the really really volcanically active moon"), but that would've ended up being longer to write.
The original plan was for me to do some storyboards for the video and then let Sarah, our head illustrator, make it all look gorgeous and make a final version of the video, so I put together a translation guide so she could have something to reference and copy from, and even decide which school of translation to adhere to. Because of scheduling reasons though, I ended up doing the final drawings so this guide didn't get to serve its original purpose.
I wouldn't want for this thing to go to waste, so I decided to take this opportunity to nerd out about constructed languages and the stuff we throw into our videos just for fun! If you back and watch the video, you'll notice I ended up using the more colorful translations throughout the thing.
Anyway, class is dismissed! Hope y'all enjoyed this.
- arcadi
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