unforum

[TascoDLX]

[jazzychad]

AWESOME! That's definitely it. And what a crazy radical... I never would have thought to search with that one....

Thanks, TascoDLX!!

And that also completes our theory that each character belongs to a different tone group...

xiu1
chang2
shu3
yun4

[doublecross]

[The_Cube]

?

[Kradlum]

Re: ?

[mobius]

I've tried

[Dragonscales]

Maybe the only way to solve it is to give it to the guy from #256: Billion To One? Maybe he invented the weird language.

[crovax1234]

* crovax1234 blinks a few times.
Wait... what? Invented Chinese? If he's the one who invented Chinese... we have bigger issues to worry about.

[SteveC]

For what it's worth, I've asked a native chinese speaker if he understood any of it. The answer was that some of it was chinese-like nonsense, but most of it was completely unreadable.

[BBuck]

What do the missing strokes look like: all horizontal across boxes? I'm wondering if they could go together to make a character.

[KingOfWrong]

[mobius]

Well that was the idea, I knew it's possible but bit of a stretch as a solution for this card. Worth a try I guess and at least it's something else to cross off the list of infinite possible answers

[miamo_tutti]

It is neither "tone deafness" nor "congenital amusia."

You say po-TAY-to, I say po-TAH-to. Is that tone?

From Wikipedia's page:
It has been observed that in societies with tonal languages such as Cantonese and Vietnamese, there are almost no tone deaf people.

[atari5200]

Hey all,
I don't own the card, but I've been staring at several scans for a while now and how a few thoughts/observations. Not knowing the names of the individual characters (I know we know them, I'm just not sure which is which), I'm going to use a coordinate system with (1,1) the yellow in the upper-left corner (when the card is oriented vertically) and (1,11) the pink at the bottom of that column.

1. In all the scans I've looked at, (9,1) appears to be a different shade of blue from the rest of the blue characters. This may be an artifact of scanning, but if not things are interesting. If (9,1) is indeed a different color, than the six strangely colored characters have but 3 distinct shapes. (1,1) matches (1,2), (1,11) matches (4,7), and (7,3) matches (9,1).

2. Tone can refer to color as well as sound. Could the specific colors used be important? Perhaps their Pantone numbers (someone with the actual card would have to look those up) matter. More simply, all the colors appear to be from the old M$ Word basic set so maybe those names would be useful (I'll get a screen capture from wordpad and post it shortly).

3. Clinical is also a term used in audio mixing to refer to tracks are clean but unemotional. The ibanez website http://www.ibanez-guitar-players.net/glossary.htm defines it as "A track or mix which is too clean, lacking both warmth and an edge." Now, it's a bit of a stretch that the game would want us to find that specific definition, but given a grid of colored characters it can be read as instructions. Namely, remove the edge and the warm colors. Note the reference to warm and cool tones. In fact, now that I think about it, if one could class some of the mandarin tones as warm, then removing those characters might not be totally crazy either.

Thoughts?

[atari5200]

colors