Twilight Sparkle and the Enigma of the Ancient Tome

Twilight looked once more at pages 77 and 100, with confusion. She stared blankly at the rectangle. She looked again at the page numbers, with more gloom this time. None of that gave her any idea of where to look for the answers.

She then turned her attention back to the weird scribbles in the book. As she observed, they not only appeared next to the schemes, but also occupied entire pages. This was especially frequent near the start of the book. Twilight was quite confident that the scribbles were actually letters of some alphabet. All the signs were there: only a hoofful of different scribbles were present in the book, all they were easy to tell apart, they aligned horizontally and, the most important of all, Twilight noticed that some combinations of them frequently occurred together.

She needed to visit the Canterlot library. The trip was not short, but Twilight didn’t need to think twice about it. “Who knows what secrets this book holds,” she thought. “It is quite unlikely that nopony had studied this language before. I just need to find out what this language is. Surely the library will have something like an index of all known languages...” During her trip, she allowed herself some time to look through the train window and appreciate what it displayed. Sunny meadows, sparse maple forests and small lagoon-blue lakes. “If this language was studied, I may be able to understand what is written in the book.”

In the linguistic wing of the library, an old book titled Languages of the World: Living and Dead<\it> by somepony graph Bronze Armchair lay dormant on one of the countless bookshelves. Twilight pulled it out from the shelf to examine it more closely. The cover was clean; however, the fore-edge of the book was blanketed with a thin layer of dust. A silent sob escaped Twilight’s heart and echoed throughout her body. “All the books are cleaned from time to time to keep the appearances, but some of them don’t get nearly enough attention. Reading<\it> attention.” To partially rectify the situation, she opened the book on its contents page.

Foreword, Glossary, Living languages, Dead languages, Artificial languages, Appendix: Writing systems... “Here!”

The appendix indeed contained alphabets, sets of hieroglyphs and families of pictographs — about a hundred of different ways to transform sounds, words and/or concepts into images. Twilight could not help but to appreciate the sheer creativity that went into developing so many ways of communication with text.

One of the alphabets grabbed her attention the most. “This is the one!” she said outloud. The scribble shapes of this known alphabet perfectly matched the scribbles in the old tome, proving her hypothesis was correct. Twilight immediately looked at the caption next to the alphabet. It read: “Alphabet of Takapony, the language of the now-extinct Ever-moving unicorns.” Despite Twilight’s vast knowledge of history, she could not remember if she had ever heard of the Ever-moving unicorns. She flipped some pages to find the section about Takapony.

The book by graph Bronze Armchair read: “At the time of writing, the language of Takapony remains one of the most underresearched and underdocumented of all the known extinct languages of Equestria. The research of Takapony is hindered in particular, aside from the usual reasons applicable to the extinct languages, due to the low volume of available textual information.” When reading a book, Twilight usually narrated it in her head with a voice she imagined the author would have. This one sounded like a needlessly pedantic professor with a golden watch, who probably gave an oath that he will never utter a sentence shorter than twenty words. “It is theorized that the Ever-moving unicorns (also known as the Booming unicorns) produced written works in large quantities, whereas only a small subset of them was discovered. This theory is substantiated by the fact that many of the known texts reference works currently undiscovered, bearing their names in Takapony (see below for commentary on the semantic of Takapony).”

She kept on reading, she had to.

“One of the additional factors aggravating the linguistic research prospects is the nature of Takapony.” This was the first sentence in the entire text shorter than twenty words, but Twilight needed to read it three times to understand it. “It is stipulated that due to various factors, including, but not limited to, relatively small size of the population, remoteness and separation from the other groups of ponies, purposeful obfuscation of the communications in the presence of an outside attacker, controlled linguistic experiments, Takapony was developed to become highly abstract and general.” Every new sentence Twilight read annoyed her a little bit more than the last. It was a rare case of Twilight hating a book. Regardless, she knew what she must go on. “As of time of writing, the academic community remains divided on the question of the possibility of Ever-moving unicorns possessing the scientific advances prescribed to them by some of the researchers of the said language. The most prominent figure in the research of Ever-moving unicorns, Dr. Blue Monocle, holds the position that the Ever-moving unicorns were highly capable of...”

Twilight paused for a second and conceptualized. Her mind didn’t even need to use words to bring a glaringly obvious idea to her attention, “Let's now switch the author; I can return back if needed.” Searching for the next book to read was not hard, since she now knew what to look for. She didn’t need to look for long.

Ever-Moving Unicorns and Their Fascinating Language written and illustrated by Blue Monocle was Twilight’s book of choice. Before opening it, she sighed, thinking, “I wish that the new author’s writings would be more...” Trying too hard to generate respectful sentiments only, her train of thought derailed. When Twilight put it back on track, it continued, “I hope this new author won’t waste my patience on stupidly complicated sentences.” Twilight thought of Rainbow Dash, but decided not to over-analyze why. She just started reading the book.

“Ever-moving unicorns were a fascinating settlement, distant from their contemporaries in so many different ways. Living in isolation from everypony else, they developed a unique language and science, the secrets of which we unravel to this day.”

“Before they founded their settlement, the Ever-moving unicorns, well, moved, but the name stuck even after they found their home. The unicorns lived in harmony, until the roaming changelings started to undermine their strength. Unicorns knew they were in a trap: simply moving won’t work. The spies would know immediately. Using code words was probably considered, but I wager we will never know for sure, since no records of that kind survived.”

“Changeling spies were disguising as ponies, as griffons and even as flies. They forced the poor unicorns to encrypt all their speech and writing, so changelings won’t understand it. This led to the development and adoption of a new language, Takapony.”

“Unicorns, being as clever as they are, designed the language to have all the necessary qualities. First, it was completely new — all the changelings’ previous intel became worthless. Second, the language was relatively easy to learn. It had only hundred amd fifty (!) words.” Twilight looked at the misprinted word for a second, then carried on. “The language supported only the most basic grammatical constructions; it was devoid of any unneeded complexity that is typical for a natural language.” Twilight stopped for a second and laughed at the thought of graph Bronze Armchair trying very hard to learn this language. But, before long, she was interrupted by the voice of Blue Monocle, speaking from the page. “Third, the language was extremely versatile, allowing the unicorns to express all the thoughts they wanted to express (although with occasional simplifications). Unbelievably, it even allowed them to continue their scientific research.”

“An observant reader may ask...” Twilight was indeed a very observant reader. She read the question, simultaneously asking the book the same thing: “how can a language have so few words and yet be so versatile?” The book was quick to provide an explanation. “The unicorns found a brilliantly simple solution to this exceedingly difficult problem. They generalized, abstracted the language, by making every word correspond to a very broad concept, a concept as non-specific as reasonable. For example, the word that is usually translated as “sun” actually means sun, light, lit, reveal, etc. — all at the same time. It would be incorrect to say that every word had many meanings (or many translations). Instead, every word had exactly one meaning, but this meaning was so broad that modern natural languages struggle with expressing such broad concepts. Every time the unicorns needed to refer to something in a more specific way, they used extra words, each word refining the meaning of a phrase or a sentence. For example, the concept of science was captured by appending the word “sun” to a word that broadly meant “communicate”. A word appended to the end of the phrase refined the entire phrase, rather than just the word before it.”

“The language experiment worked. The spies could not learn anything, nor spread any rumors to destabilize the settlement. Unicorns lived in peace for some time.”

“Sadly, this came to an end when the changelings accumulated in numbers. A large insectoid swarm launched a devastating attack. The unicorns defended as best as they could, but the attack was ravaging. The settlement was completely destroyed...”

“I believe that the Ever-moving unicorns had created a buried library. A backup of all their science, if you will. One discovered Takapony book even has instructions on how to access it. The problem is... it is protected by an advanced cipher. The Takapony caption next to the ciphertext read: <-to-> *.”

Twilight followed the star, ending up at the bottom of the page. There, she found: “I follow a convention, where words in triangle brackets contain “translations” for the Takapony words. Words that are known to separate phrases are additionally enclosed with hyphens.”

She then returned to where the main text continued: “I take this sentence to mean: the path to the abundance of science (a library) will the bright ponies find, with the power of friendship. Alas, so far no one could crack the code.”

“With the help of friends, Takapony is easy to learn. What it is not is easy to decipher. No one can tell us how exactly the language worked. It’s a miracle we can understand anything at all! If you are brave enough and want to understand some Takapony text, I can only say to you: good luck and may this book help you!”

Twilight skimmed through the rest of the book, finding more facts that were known about the Ever-moving unicorns (frankly speaking, not many), the general explanation of the structure of the language (reverse engineered and, as the author put it, “quite likely not entirely correct”) and the partial dictionary. She also looked at the appendix: a lovely personal story of the author that is tangentially related to their studies.

After that, she turned her attention back to the previously long-forgotten artifact. On the page with number 0, ten words were written in a bold monospace font: <action> <many> <tool> <-of-> <know> <exist> <-inverse-for-> <sun> <alive> <thin>.

“Of course,” Twilight thought with frustration, “I have an old tome written in a dead language. Even with a dictionary there was never a chance that it could be easy...”

Uncertain Twilight boarded the train to Ponyville. On her, she had Blue’s book and some other works that she thought could potentially prove useful. The riddle could not wait, of course — Twilight started solving it right away, giving it her absolute best.

The old tome was not ready to reveal its secrets. From the abyss of time, an Ever-falling Unicorn was raising their hoof, holding a shard of knowledge, hoping that somepony would catch it and save it from drifting into the darkness. But Twilight could not grab it, as if held back by a barrier that she could not break even with all her strength.

No matter the angle, from which she looked, she could only see portions of the puzzle, never realizing what the entire picture was. Her mind, losing the concept of time, was split between the two books. Weird scribbles, like snakes, left their imprints on her eyes. Getting absorbed into the dry, sand-colored pages, she entered a hypnotic-like state. Her body was calm, but her mind — a brave nomad, who’s traversed numerous universes by paths both well-lit and hidden in the darkness — her mind was furiously fighting an uphill battle for the meaning.

The nomad was losing, lost, in a desert, with nothing familiar around. Flickering glyphs, long flying transparent eels, dead bushes, growing sideways from the thin air, rotating triangles and teapots. Her confidence and her limbs succumbed under the pressure from this alien, barren world. She was all alone… A sudden gust of wind swept sharp, bruising, blinding sand grains across the boundary of her essence. The air vibrated, resonating a chord outside of any musical scale. Deafening, volume-shifting, tone-morphing. Yet something within it almost resembled… Speech.

“You are not alone!”

The nomad looked around. Amidst the infinite valleys fully lit with the oppressive sun, a dark goddess far away graciously cast her shadow. Her forms unclear and mane entangled from an uneasy journey; she spread her wings across the horizon, devouring all the light…

Twilight’s focus returned to the Equestrian world, looking at the paper and ink before her. “Thank Luna,” gasped she with relief. Twilight breathed for some time. Recollecting her thoughts, she remembered where her real strength lies. “My friends… No need to panic, for I am not alone. With my friends’ help and Blue Monocle’s assistance I can solve any challenge. We definitely will solve the riddle of the book.”