So optronixes has been busily decoding the Cybertronian glyphs of Transformers Prime.
And in doing so – discovered something amazing.
Bumblebee’s Cybertronian name isn’t Bumblebee.
It’s just Bumble.
We know this isn’t a character limit thing, because Bulkhead’s name is written out in full.
Which means the ‘Bee suffix was added after coming to Earth.
And now I’m imagining shortly after the original four’s arrival, Bumble doing recon on humans, as would be his scoutly duty to do so, and seeing them flee and flinch warily from tiny, yellow and black creatures, even when it’s just one. He brought it up to Ratchet, who then took it upon himself to research it (cursing and grumbling at human tech the entire way), and informing him about all of the small insects that come under the common reference of bees. One of these that he mentions, is of course bumblebees. Upon hearing that, Bumble – already attracted to these little yellow and black creatures that strike terror into the hearts of things much, much bigger than them for fear of their sting – excitedly asks everyone to start calling him Bumblebee.
Ratchet doesn’t have the heart to tell him that bumblebees are considered the mildest and least dangerous of bees.
All right. So here’s my attempt at deciphering the Cybertronian glyphs used in TFP.
Cybertronian – or at least Autobot Cybertronian – appears to have two distinct scripts: one similar to printing, the other more like cursive. This is the print script.
‘I’ and ‘Y’ appear to be interchangeable (as seen in the word for “cylinder”).
Some glyphs, when written next to each other, merge or run together. For example, the dual horizontal lines of ‘A’ run into the square component of ‘V’ in Soundwave’s name.
There’s a section at the end of the Covenant of Primus that has a nice english-to-cypher comparison on the afterword that shares many more letters ; yay! Am I here to share? Mais oui. Are the glyphs in the CoP different from those in TFP? Only a bit! I’d say what we have between the covenant and the script used in TFP is the difference between serif/nonserif/script font, because the larger patterns of the letter forms remain very similar. Here’s a chart from my work on the covenant which takes only like 5-10 minutes to crack, and five of them are looking for the letter K an cursing at how A’s kerning runs into other letters..
With this at our fingertips, it becomes quite possible to make both heads and tails of a longer stretch of cybertronian text. All one needs is large enough screenshots which I’ve been looking for, such as a high quality version of orion’s screen from Orion Pax 1-3. Then using the letters we already know and comparing with their mutations of letterforms in Prime and we can fill things out! It would be very exciting.
Sorry for butting in here but I felt it was worth adding the letters from War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron as well. Woo Aligned continuity!
(The only real difference is FoC has tweaked the character width so they avoid the awkward problem they had in WfC where half the Cybertronian text was actually missing and some of it became gibberish. They really wanted the ‘translating’ to look cool.)
Most of the glyphs are pretty similar! More like the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts than, say, a different character all together. At the very least they all keep the general ‘shape’. Most of the ones that look like they’ve changed dramatically are usually only slightly tweaked or skewed when you compare them. I think ‘O’ is the best example of this.
P.S. Thanks so much to both of you for sharing these. *o*
How's it hummin'? 