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[notgordian]

[Grey District] - Light and Dark [SOLVED]

[notgordian]

I tried to see if there's any recurring frequencies here, and it almost looks like there are more symbols than letters in the alphabet (couldn't confirm or reject that hypothesis, just eyeballing it seems that way).

I did notice three symbols are repeated far more than all the others. I highlighted them in the photo below. You'll have to click on it to see it well, unfortunately.

[James Stone]

I counted 42 distinct symbols. This lead me to the Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet, but this looks like a dead end. Maybe this isn't a substitution code but a phonetic code? Any ideas?

[pikajens]

It looks like phonetics. There are a variety of symbols repeated throughout the different charachters, like the flags and the circles.

[Wang Guantao]

Many of the signs look like Semaphore to me. but 42 destinct is too many, unless maybe, 2 signs indicate the same semaphore letter. Just a passing thought.

[notgordian]

Exercising my hope that the symbols mean something simpler than they appear to, I followed the following dead ends.

Vertical Numbers Matter
Counting the number of symbols in each column ROW (i was looking with the wrong perspective), you get 11/11/10/11/11/12/5. No matter how you ROT it, I don't think kkjkkle spells anything useful. (that gives a total of 71 symbols by my count, by the way)

Drawing a Pretty Picture
I tried filling in the boxes of duplicate symbols to see if a pretty pattern/picture emerged. Couldn't see anything.

I'll try to see what other ideas I can come up with, but ARGH! (an exasperation of the Hardness of this ARG puzzle for me).

[morelaak]

kk, i wasted 37 credits, don't want anyone else to...

was going out on a limb... the puzzle looks like it went up about the same time as the post about the TIA assistant director's massive heart attack.

It is not Jeremy Freud.

So dont waste your time/cash on that one...

[Arkaham]

They kind of look like actual drawings. Imagine faces and hands. Maybe sign language? Anyone knows that?

Here's a link to a "dictionary", but I wouldn't know how to start looking around it: http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb/browser.htm

[Wabonan]

the symbols look familier to me I just don't seem to place them.. I looked here
http://www.omniglot.com/index.htm
they have most of the writen languages here. they even have Science fiction alphabets also phonetic alphabets. I didn't see it there but i have seen that script or something similar somewhere.

[morelaak]

yea, that was my first reaction too.

The use of circular images reminds me of emotes, and the use of angles and pointers reminds me of Symbols...

However, aside from the superficial similarities, i have no idea what they could mean.

[morelaak]

wait a min...

what if the heavily repeated symbols represent vowels?

more specifically, the vowel sounds in Pitman's Alphabet?

the image outlined in yellow in the pic (thx notgordian) looks a lot like a simplistic illustration of a person pointing at himself. assign that to "ie", the character in Pitman's that makes the "I" (as in "I am") sound.

also, there are a lot of circles in the symbols. more so than there should be vowels in words, but still...

maybe circular symbols with stuff inside of the circles represent vowels...

the symbol outlined in green doesn't fit this pattern tho...

still, if we can gather enough information to single out one or two letters, it would help a lot as to eventually figuring out the pattern.

also, i know it's probably a dead end, but has anyone stegged the image yet?

[catherwood]

I recognize that as "sign writing", a pictographic representation of American Sign Language. brb with a link...

http://www.signwriting.org/

but if you don't know ASL, it will be one more level of abstraction. I'll take a stab at translating later tonight...

[morelaak]

hey...

after reading that it was signwriting (thanks catherwood) i tried downloading a signwriting editor/imagebank. however, it seemed pretty sparse on words, or at least on the words that are used on the man's back. however, i did manage to get the gist of it.

every image is a different word, so this is going to be a paragraph that will hold the man's name.

Before i gave up on the sparse library i had access to, i managed to find the first word in the paragraph, "people". the image is exact, so it's definitely signwriting.

the editor can be downloaded on the site catherwood put up. it's a little hard to navigate, but not to bad if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

looking forward to figuring this one out.

Morelaak

[echidna]

Thanks for the break-through, Catherwood . I've been trawling through the symbols on that site and have come up with (spoilered now we have the answer):

[James Stone]

SOLVED