Isu Language Hub Update

Written by Sary, May 14th, 2023

Shuàrh (SuàH): In Antoine's words, "This is a verb that means "wake up" when used transitively (i.e. with an object) and "awaken" when used intransitively (i.e. without an object).
It evolved into Proto-Indo-European *weǵ-, which then gave Proto-Germanic *wakāną, and ultimately English wake; but also Latin vegeō "I move, I excite" (transitive) or "I am lively" (intransitive), which later gave Italian vigore."

The verb appears in-game in its infinitive form so our interpretation is that it should have been conjugated in its second person singular, present tense to be used as an imperative as if Eivor was giving an order of "waking up" to the AI within the cave. The correct verb should have been "Shuàrhàsi" or "dű shuàrhàsi" with the attached subject.

Shuàgw (SuàG): First big surprise here. We have apparently already met this word. It was in the Canterbury File already but we mixed two letters in our original transcription:

What we transcripted as "luàgw" should have actually been "Shuàgw".

So now we have the meaning of the word which is "voice" but as an answer in the Tombs of the Fallen Part 2 conversation it wouldn't make much sense. Antoine told us though, that this word can also have the meaning of "to speak" and in that case, as it happened for "Shuàrh", we can consider it as the AI answering to Eivor's request. Again "Shuàgw", as it stands, represents the verb in its infinitive tense while in our interpretation, in order to appear as an imperative answer it should have been "Shuàgwàsi" or "dű shuàgwàsi" with the attached subject.

The complete translation should then be:



It would make sense, as the AI is asking Eivor the password to open the vault, even because Eivor answers to this by pronouncing the sentence she learnt in the various tombs while finding the artifacts.

As a side note, as we were having a conversation about the infinitive tense in the Isu Language, we learnt a new rule. In the text we were provided by Valhalla and its post launch content, we surmised that the infinitive form of a verb was created as follows:

Contrarily to that, Antoine stated that R or "ṛ is not a marker for infinitive in the citation form (like "to" is in English for example: to be, to have, etc.), but it is indeed used to postpose infinitive clauses - among other uses."

Dű (dù) : Subject of the sentence meaning YOU

Hàsṃ (hàsM) : This was our second surprise. We initially thought it was the verbal noun for the verb “To belong” (hàs) in its accusative declension (hàsm) with the meaning of "belongings". Antoine actually corrected our guess though, because this word is a definite article.
As far as we knew before this, the articles in the Isu Language were usually conjugated in the same grammatical case of the word they referred to. Here is an example from the Canterbury file:


The rules about definite articles though, were not really clear, especially how sometimes they appeared in a sentence and some other time they did not. With Antoine's help, we got to understand them a bit better now:
"When it comes to their use, it's harder to grasp also because it's not a grammatical requirement in most cases, but in some specific cases it is. But even when it's not a grammatical requirement, it can be used to emphasize the definiteness (i.e. the specificity or uniqueness) of the noun."
About the declension, in this very case the article is conjugated in its irregular form, as it often happens in real languages. So this word translates to: THE

Rhobtoràs (Hobtoràs). As we analized in our video, we can extract a lot of information from this word: it's in its genitive declension (às), plural (r) and with a past participle form (to). We are in front of an adjective derived from a verb, in the plural form, which indicates a group of people and with the genitive case. When we attempted our translation we had no way of knowing the meaning of the verb "Rhob" without Antoine's help but with his hints we got to understand this verb meant "To choose". With all the information at our disposal, we can now translate this word: OF THE CHOSEN ONES.

Oænosôd (oènosòd): The stem of this word we know pretty well, and it means "One". In this case, it is presented with a causal case, thus we can translate it as: FOR THE SAKE OF ONE.

Oærhàsi (oèrhàsi): The translation of this word delivered another big surprise: we thought it was the same word as the one pronounced by Sigurd in front of the elevator needed to reach the Yggdrasil machine at the end of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, but it turned out that these are two entirely different words.

We do know that the word we are trying to translate is a verb, in its present tense, second person singular, but after speaking to Antoine, it emerged that the meaning of the verb Oærh is actually the one we had assigned to Hoærh and so "to Activate". The correct translation of Oærhàsi should then be: (you) ACTIVATE.

Considering this update, it is not clear how to actually translate Hoærhàsi, as pronounced by Sigurd at the end of Assassin's Creed.

The complete translation of the sentence should then be:

Ṇṛchdrṃ (NRcdrM): We already know the first word, which means "tool to unlock", as we have already met it on the Collectors Edition Case of Valhalla. In Tombs of Fallen Rah Cel'Eze calls Eivor "Unlocker", which has pretty much the same meaning. We only had some doubt about the pronunciation of this word in-game and Antoine recorded a short audio to teach us how to correctly pronounce it.



Smṛmṇ (smRmN). We interpred this as follows: we know the verb "to remember" = "smṛ" from the text file featured in the Crossover with Assassin's Creed Odyssey. We know that adding "mṇ" to a verb makes a noun out of that verb (as we have seen in other texts already). This line of thought would consider this word a noun in the nominative case as we see no suffixes to indicate any other grammar case. Considering this the verbal noun of "to remember", we gave this word the meaning of MEMORY or something similar, which was then indeed confirmed by Antoine.

Zràw (zràw). "It is a verb that means "flow, stream, run", which evolved into Proto-Indo-European *srew- and later into Greek ρέω, Sanskrit स्रवति, etc. "flow" and English stream.".

Considering there is no declension on these last two words, we can only guess what the intent was in creating this sentence. Literally, it means "memory to stream" or in Italian "memoria fluire", but we came up with two options for what this could actually mean:

The first option is that the author meant to say "Memory Stream" or, gramatically speaking, "Stream/flow of memory" : if that was the case, the translation should have been "smṛmṇàs zràwæs". The first word, Memory, would be in its genitive declension and the second one would be the verbal noun derived by the verb "to Stream".

The second option is that the author meant to say "Memory streams", as in "Memory is being streamed". If this was the case, the sentence should have been "smṛmṇ zràwôdi". The first word would be memory in its nominative case and the second word would be the verb "to stream" conjugated in its present tense, third person singular.