#even gaming sites list the wiki as the source so we're stuck

[icology]

Not so much trivia this time as it is an open question about Yorda's language. If you go to the Team Ico Wiki and look to the Runic Language page, you'll see both the chart displaying each hieroglyph from A-Z and a table giving you a word association that helps show how the letter and image are related. The A-Z chart is easily verified by early pages of the Japanese ICO Guidebook. On page 2 you can see all 26 letters placed in an order, which is a very simple, effective way of informing us that each letter on the wiki's chart is correct. But now here's the thing that bugs me. The table. The symbol-to-English-word correspondence. It is very obvious what some of these symbols indicate. A = Ant is a great example of the plainly obvious. But as it goes on, I begin to wonder where these interpretations are sourced from. How did someone figure out the shape of the Runic F represents 'Fall' or H = Hide? Like, yeah, now that it's been said, I can squint at it and see what was meant, but... Who determined this? Is it from a fan or an official source? Doesn't say. But that table has been on the page since it was created in 2009. So I went down a rabbit hole. And for about 9 hours I have been google searching with both English and Japanese terms, trying my best to track down where this info may have originated. I used the Wayback Machine, I used Google Lens to help translate images, and most searches didn't touch a year above 2009. But the worst part is that I came back empty handed. The only thing I determined is that the user who published the wiki page has vanished off the face of the web, and that modern Japanese ICO fans also inquire about the word associatio. But when they do they either try to figure it out from scratch or turn to the Team Ico Wiki for their info. So if the info did come from a Japanese source, it's possible their side of the fandom lost sight of it too. This is something I feel is going to bug me for a while.

I've wondered about this before too!

For those who don't know, here's a video showcasing the Runic alphabet, as well as the word that corresponds to each symbol:

Like you said, every single article that you can possibly find on the language lists the Team Ico Wiki as their primary source for the information, but the symbol to word association is never explained in detail.

So, it was either explained to someone by Kei Kuwabara (the Team Ico member who created the language) or a fan out there had to struggle to come up with feasible words for those symbols that are harder to make out. In hindsight, it wouldn't surprise me because even the colossi names that most of us use (Valus, Quadratus, Gaius...) are actually not canon. They were created by an obscure user and spread like wildfire to the point of people not even knowing that the team had totally different names for them while in development. But we have proof of that, even if it's buried deeeeeep in old forums, so if that's the case we should be able to find who did it too, but we can't. Plus, and even though they're listed on the wiki, the fan given names for the colossi are clearly stated as such.

One thing that surprises me is the extensive use of mainly english words for each symbol, with the exception of J, X and Y, whose corresponding words are japanese (jiisan and yoke) and greek (xoanon. how would one even know this?). Although Team Ico uses english names and words here and there (heck, they named one of their protagonists Wander), I have the feeling that they rely on japanese terms more often. So to me, this had to come from someone who is either japanese or fluent in the language, because judging from the symbols, many fans could guess jiisan for J, but not everyone would guess yoke for Y.

Canon or not, each symbol is clearly meant to have a corresponding word, but there's zero sources for that one piece of information, plus the Team Ico Wiki doesn't list any source of its own for this so we're left in the dark. I doubt it came from the game files or something because people have investigated them in the past and no one mentioned this. For a fanbase that's an expert in finding things, it's surprising that seemingly no one can provide a source for this.

So as usual, I'm kindly summoning the help of each and every single of you out there who might know something about it!