[Semi-Spoiler] Trunic Rune System - Reference for reading the ingame text

Guide / reference sheet for reading the writing system used in Tunic🦊

Includes:

• Explanation of the writing system syntax
  
• Full symbol list
  
• Phonemes and examples
  
• Great for either reference in replay visits or useful for newer players who just want to translate the text!
  
• No story or game spoilers present in guide, but proceed with caution as it will allow you to read information earlier than the game might expect you to!

My take on making a reference sheet for the writing system of Tunic 🦊

Made it for personal use while learning with some friends, but wanted to share the wisdom. Hope it can be of some help to others! 💖

Huge thanks to Farris and KayosLance for helping with this guide and just being wonderful people. 💗
Additional thanks to The Sojourner for spotting some details that needed correction!

Hi! I hope others can make use of this as a guide for reference after learning Trunic script, or if you're here early on and don't mind "spoiling" the learning experience, I hope it helps you read through the ingame text!

As a side note, I am not a native speaker of English, but consider myself fluent (given I've now lived for over half a decade in a country that speaks it lol) and have been speaking English for over 15 years now.

As a result though, some of my notation symbols for the phonemes might be odd choices and are not compliant with the English International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) standard. However I do believe there is a method to the madness in the whole thing and hope it can still be helpful to others.

I've always struggled with teaching to other non-native speakers such as my family, but Tunic's deconstruction of the language makes for a clever compartmentalization of every (or almost every) possible sound used in English. In turn this has made it a little easier for me to explain certain pronunciations and quirks of the language after the brain-teaser exercise that picking up Trunic was.

Happy rune reading!

[Ori]

[@bnnuy]: I think Steam's lost the image somehow as it's missing from even the guide files, so I've put it up again. Must have happened recently as I had someone look at the guide no less than a week ago. Sorry about the trouble, and hope it stays up now!

[bnuuy]

i... dont see an image here... is part of this text supposed to be a link somewhere? is steam just not showing me an embedded image??

[Ori]

[@The Sojourner]: Thank you for the constructive criticism, admittedly I tried to play a bit fast and loose originally to mostly get a "serviceable" reference for reading. Considering I managed to get the ending where sharing the wisdom is required, I just thought I'd call it "good enough" and didn't think much about it hahah. 🙃

I've amended the image for the guide and added your cited contribution! Also a few other touch ups, hope it's a tid bit more cleaned up now.

[The Sojourner]

Your chart is actually a little incorrect: the 3rd and 5th runes in the top row are actually the "ih" (as in KIT, SICK, BIG, etc.) and "ooh" (as in LOOK, FOOT, etc.) respectively. Also the "fs" sound you list is the voiceless "th" sound, and the other one is the voiced "th" sounds — you could probably use "dh" for that if you don't want to use any diacritics.

Actually, Trunic is interesting in how it handles unstressed syllables: it will either use the "uh" sound, the "ih" sound, or "oohl" (as in "little" or "simple"), despite that in practice, the actual sounds are slightly different. Meanwhile though in many English dictionaries, the common practice is to use a breve over a short/lax vowel (e.g. "ŏ" for "cot"), but a macron/overline for a long/tense vowel (e.g. "ō" for "go").

Interesting though to think that Trunic is a useful English language learning tool.