The Bold Alphabet (WIP)

The Bold Alphabet is an alphabet that is very... well, bold. It's quite easy to tell it apart from other alphabets, in that it looks like the Inkling version of the main font in the original Splatoon. 

Like many of the other "alphabets" I'll be covering, our first clues start in the original Splatoon with Callie and Marie's amiibo performances. The trucks that they dance on flash logos/titles of the songs that they sing; there are different ones for each song.

This one starts with the logo for "Bomb Rush Blush", Callie's solo song from the first game. When you load it up through her amiibo, this is what you'll see:

From Splatoon Script Analysis, http://splatoon-scripts.tumblr.com/

This logo lines up with the romanized title of the song in Japanese, "tokimeki bomb rush" (トキメキ☆ボムラッシュ, pit-a-pat ☆ bomb rush), with the katakana loanwords in their original English spelling. These letters each have a consistent equivalent (i.e. the Ks are always the same glyph.)

(our progress so far)

Next, I'll direct your attention to this sunken scroll, #10 in Splatoon 2:

What I'd like to point out is that, as we can see, this alphabet has lowercase letters. Yes, that's right, lowercases. And since I don't think there's a font for this, we may not find out all of the letters in this script. But... that's okay, I guess?

Also, the large letters spell "Open!", as you'll be able to deduce in a little bit.

Now, let's move on to sunken scroll #4, which describes Crusty Sean's food truck.

We'll come back to its lowercase letters later, but first let's take a look at the title of the book on the left. Substituting in what we already know, we get "/OO/ TRU/K", which is obviously supposed to spell out "FOOD TRUCK". I mean, how could it not...?

now we're moving!

Next, I'd like to talk about a less concrete and more odd display that gives us letters with more uncertainty, and this is the logo for the Squid Sisters song "Now or Never!".

SSA coming in clutch

What's odd about this one is that, while it is decodable, the way it is written makes no sense. This logo almost lines up with the romanized title of the song in Japanese, "ima nuraneba~!" (イマ・ヌラネバー！, we have to paint it now!), but with one difference: the last letter of each word is missing. Specifically, filling it in we get "IM ?UR??EB" → "IM NURANEB", but the last vowel sound is missing. This is especially weird considering the "ma" and "ba" in the Japanese name are grouped together, as Japanese is written in consonant-vowel syllables rather than with separate letters for each sound. The "a" sound generally does not get devoiced either, so this left me scratching my head. But, these letters do seem to hold up with other texts, so we're moving on.

If you look under the all-capital letters, you can see two words in both capital and lowercase. They start with an "A" and an "H", so I came to the conclusion that these said "Aori" and "Hotaru" (アオリ and ホタル, Callie and Marie's Japanese names).

If we take a look at the lowercase letters in Sunken Scroll #4, we'll be able to get some more letters:

Taking a look at the title phrase on the left side as a whole, we get "t/e FOOD TRUCK /an//oo/", which we can assume says "the FOOD TRUCK handbook". But this raises the question or repeating letters, specifically "b" and "k" being the same. To which I say, they look slightly different. 

"handbook"

The "k" seems to be the same height as the "b", but it appears to be bigger, or at least slightly thicker. Compared to the "b"'s curve size to line size ratio, the "k"'s line size is shorter, probably because of the vertical cutoff for the letters. Or maybe I'm just overthinking this...

Now, let's take a look at Sunken Scroll #9, to get some more letters:

First, let's look at the top left section, the logo for Annie's clothing shop in the Splatnet 2 shop.

The word at the top is "ANEMO", which is Annie's Japanese name (アネモ). The word below has both a capital letter and a lowercase letter, spelling "/rodu/e" → "Produce". But, the real meat of this piece is the all-lowercase phrase under the logo.

What we can get so far is "t/otto /e/ura/hi /ear Sho/", and can assume that the last two words say "Gear Shop". But the first two words are hard to understand. My personal guess is that they say "chotto mezurashi" (ちょっと珍しい). While "chotto" becoming "tyotto" will be explained in a bit, "mezurashi(i)" can be inferred from the only letters left in the English alphabet (that are used to romanize Japanese, excluding letters like "x") that haven't been found in lowercase. Out of g/z/s/m/y/w, "mezurashii" seemed to be a likely choice. 珍しい means "rare" or "uncommon", so the whole phrase would mean "slightly uncommon Gear Shop". 

Now, let's throw you for a loop:

If we look at the smaller text by the image of The Shoal and try to substitute it in, it's a mess.

"/akamono no t/ushin | Haikara S/uare no | Icaccha /a Grand Open!" → "Wakamono no tyushin | Haikara Square no | Icaccha ga Grand Open!"

The first order of business is getting "ty" to equal "ch", which is actually a quirk of Nihon-shiki romanization. Since ち is in the t-row of syllables (たちつてと), it is romanized as "ti", and ちゅ is romanized as "tyu". Haikara Square is Inkopolis Square. Icaccha is an odd romanization of ikatcha, but I don't know why it's written this way. While "/a" could be either "wa" or "ga", it's "ga", as you'll see below. 

But first, let's finish up the other Sunken Scroll:

Looking at the section with the jacket, we can see "IKASUKA/AN", which matches up with the Japanese name for the Squid Satin Jacket, "IKASUKAJAN" (イカスカジャン). The top right section with the squid with shoes says "Wonder", and the bottom right section says "FURUERU" (震える, meaning to shiver or tremble).

Now, let's look at something you'd never expect to see: the Splatoon 2 phone case. While most of it is nonsense, we can still make out some letters:

From the Padotagi Blog, at blog.naver.com/wonno79

Looking at the upper right description (labeled as "Shunka"), we can see "Unique de Coo/", and that last letter is probably an "l" considering its similarities to the glyph for "r". 

In the bottom left description (labeled as "Ikahada"), the last word is "Desi/n", and that gives us the "g" we were looking for earlier. 

the uppercase letters found so far

the lowercase letters found so far

As I don't plan on playing Splatoon 2 for a while (what with my Switch being in purgatory and all), I probably won't continue the search for the rest of these letters. So, if you find more additions to the list, feel free to comment them! Further the cause amongst yourselves!

And last of all, I hope you enjoyed this read. ^.^