Destiny 2 Lore - The Euphony Raid Exotic and The Dread Language. A Rosetta's Stone or a Dead End? 

Quick note! Aegis Mind has also made some recordings on their channel of the Tormentors from way back when and of the Dread generally. Dropping them here in case people are using them to sample some of the dialogue. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nZn5SlW1_AU.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-iy3yiiaZ4sM.html

My mother is a linguist. She is in no way a gamer, but I'm trying to get her to help on this one.

I . . . am sweating. I put that video together for fun. I shocked from the community response. Thank you so much for the shout out!

Do note that the Witness speaks In the Dread Language in the Raid during the fight when performing attacks so that also may need deciphering

“I’m not a linguist” Yeah I’m pretty sure you trying to speak the all too (in)famous Valus Ta’aurc intro dialogue in German during your GCX TSLAYP Raid-a-Thon told us that. But, Sir Byf, the Community has spoken. Lore Daddy can never rest XD

That one video where Byf opens up in Dread....

This whole topic reminds me directly of the gradual efforts to translate the Phyrexian language from Magic The Gathering. It’s very complicated and doesn’t even use what we would consider an “alphabet”, but over time the community and linguists alike have been able to translate and understand it in a truly impressive way. My guess is this will be something similar with the Dread language, it’ll take a long time to figure out but it will be very satisfying as it’s pieced together. (If you aren’t familiar with the topic, I recommend watching the last section of Rhystic Studies’ video on Phyrexia, it’s a wonderfully interesting delve into linguistics!)

I swear I heard a Subjugator say, "Per Audacia Ad Astra" when I was farming for some class items the other day.

Somebody, get the people from the Magic:The Gathering fandom in here, they translated and figured out parts of the phyrexian language from looking at the cards, for Cayde's sake!

As someone whos helped decode THREE dialects of dead Scala (kingdom hearts) a key fundament isnt more the written word, although that WOULD help, but ironically, subtitles and if possible, file names. There being a lore tab from Eulogy with a reference to pyramdian should NOT be overlooked as a contextual refernece. A litteral translation it is not. Moreover, missing letters of less common characters is actually a good thing if its a 1:1, as written scala even now has us missing z, q, and one other letter that im forggeting off hand. The language is serviceable and we can facimilate those rare missing characters if need be due to having a treasure trove of data mined texture sheet characters. The consistency requires cross references and all of this requires DETAILED texture matching

The symbol that keeps popping up whenever the Witness or the Precursor civilization is visualized, the strange tree-like one that's subtely different everytime it pops up, there's something about it that makes me think that itself is a hieroglyph. I can't quite put my finger on what it is specifically, but i also can't shake the feeling that there's something to it. The closest example I can think of is Zonai script from the game Outer Wilds. Highly recommend it, by the way, but the language has an unconventional sentence structure on top of alien language, with spiraling and branching thoughts off of the central idea and main message.

Literally just got the exotic from the raid, I got off Destiny to see this video had been posted. What excellent timing

Euphony's barrel? if it could even be called that is literally just the witness's hands/fingers. I guess thats one way to turn a raid boss into a weapon.

If the dread language is meant to have a Rosetta Stone, maybe it’s written form is something akin to hieroglyphics? Kind of like the images associated with resonance *glyphs* from Vow and the campaign missions?

As a reminder to all, report the bot comments when you see them.

I actually took a language design class in college one year (not that this makes me an expert in any way. One of our "textbooks" was just the Klingon dictionary). One of the challenging things as a starting point is that the Dread language may not be constructed with an alphabet at all, so trying to pair up symbols (wherever they may be) to Roman lettering may not be possible. A symbol could be an entire word, or concept, as opposed to a letter. If you're looking at a symbol and can't determine if it's a word or a letter, you have no basis of understanding, and hearing the language phonetically doesn't contribute at all to understanding either written or spoken language, unless a native speaker is actually reading something aloud. It doesn't help that the lore tab on this Exotic does not provide an untranslated transcription of the text it's reciting. Now THAT would've been our Rosetta stone to at least understand the written portion. As to why it hasn't been found in the game yet, at this point, it wouldn't surprise me if Bungie would add this "recessed wall" either in a new strike within the Pale Heart, or if they shadow add it in somewhere. It doesn't physically exist now, but it could in the future if Bungie decides to sneak it in.

I don’t know if this is related, but there is one moment regarding the Witness in the cutscenes where it confronts Zavala. After it shows Zavala how the creation process took place, you can see subtitles that say [Witness chants]. It sounds like the Witness says something like “sing to loss.” I’m positive it doesn’t actually say that specifically, but that’s how I heard it. You can also hear the Precursor’s chanting in the background during the cutscene, but I don’t think their chanting is intelligible at all. But clearly Bungie meant it to mean something, for the Witness to chant this one unknown phrase. They wouldn’t make a subtitle for it if it wasn’t important, let alone have the Witness say such an enigmatic thing in the first place. There’s more to this.

YEEEEES IVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS VID!! Euphony is literally my fav gun at the moment!! Ive only had it a week and already got 2400 kills on it lol. Also, the fact that i outdamage still hunt hunters is CRAZY 😂

I agree that it is unlikely that there is a slab of stone somewhere we haven't found. Especially given how on the nose the Euphony lore tab is in terms of suggesting it. As far as translating goes.... The thing that makes it the most difficult is that we only hear them in combat saying combat things. We don't get to see them outside of that. We don't get to listen to them speak around a dinner table or hear a pair of Dread speak about mundane day to day stuff. Because despite the differences in our languages and cultures, language exists to facilitate social interactions between two or more beings that speak the same language. Combat is not exactly a "social" thing because it often results in one party being killed. So there isn't much there, and it's mostly just screams or single word statements. But in conversation you can hear how diferent sounds play out. You could listen for repeated patterns. For example, if you heard the English word "Fighting" over and over again it isn't very useful. But if you heard the words fighting, running, healing, jumping, sleeping, combing, listening, hearing, and blinking.... you might start to notice a pattern of the "ing" suffix being present in all of them. You don't know what it means, or what those words mean, but you could reasonably deduce that the sound of "ing" is a suffix and not part of the base word or root word. That kind of deduction will be extremely difficult given how little Dread language we can hear, and how limited the contexts we do hear it are.

In the cutscene where Zavala sees the ritual that created the witness and where targe dies, the witness actually chants in another language. This is after the dissenter whispers into Zavala’s ear. Pretty interesting and I think it’s the dread language or the normal language of the precursors? Perhaps that’s what the dread language is anyway, just precursor original language.

Something to note for people searching for the wall in the strike, you don't need to go into the strike to look at the area, if you launch the Dissent mission you can turn around and walk throught the entire thing

Byf, sounding better put together than I have ever been in my entire personal and professional life: "I'm off script for a moment here, bear with me."

I didn't realize how badly I wanted a poster translating different random phrases/words across the various Destiny languages til now

theory. the dread language is written in pictures (think the pictures that you have to select to access cave and solve the puzzles in the pale heart) ref 17:40. remember a good story rhymes with real life.

I saw the pi naar vid, I felt chills and hoped this was coming soon

Theres a RU-vidr by the name "Aegis Mind" that has uploaded the sfx for all of the Dread & the Witness, & based off that im unsure if the Dread share the same language as the Witness when It speaks in alt language or the whispers It does when heard from various instances/objects

Wait.....The brackets IMMEDIATELY made me think of "Tesselation" the pre-order exotic. It's Description - "This [weapon|instrument|topology] adapts its damage type to match your equipped grenade. Final blows grant grenade energy." and "Consume your grenade to load a large [projectile|shape|language] that generates an elemental explosion on impact." Could there be symbols or clues on the weapon?? Oh no I see a rabbit hole.

It feels like the weapons from Salvations Edge and Root of Nightmares were switched. Conditional Finality has its spirit in transcendence and Eupony is a strand weapon. If you swapped the lore tabs the weapons would make more sense

Maybe the text wall can only be read "In Darkness"....

The Doylist Explanation: I hate to be a spoilsport, but it’s entirely possible that this “Dread Language” is an old Bungie joke from the Halo Era they are maintaining. …as by pure coincidence, I’m sure, Halo Bungie also said Covenant Languages can be translated into English. Can they be? Not really, no. Some phrases could be found by reversing lines, but it was just used for the audio. There wasn’t a fully understandable language to be found. It’s entirely possible that this is another iteration of this troll. And if you think Bungie would never send us on a wild goose chase: Remember the D1 Kings Fall Basketball Court? Or “Complete Shattered Throne Solo on 999 Light”? Or the Original 15th Wish? Or Caydes Ramen Coupon? Or the Telesto Strange Changes? The community tried to discover a secret Bungie implied existed, but it never did. On the more optimistic side, me and my friend swore we heard a Dread say *”Your Flesh is Weak.”* So the Dread are Cyborgs?

Deciphering their language would be a great opportunity for you to make a discord. Add stuff similar to other creators discords, but also and places for lore discussion and maybe space for those working on the language. It would also be a cool place to poll or get ideas from your community to see what people want to see you cover.

I feel like this “wall” is going to be the next “15th wish” all over again I’m not the only one am I ?

The wall might be in the dual destiny mission. Could explain the 600 second timer you get after completing the mission.

I misread the title as “…or a Dread end” and I chuckled because it was clever than realized I was just being dyslexic

So I get the vibe Euphony was meant to be our signature Disciple weapon had we joined The Witness akin to Lubrae's Ruin being Rhulk's signature weapon.

Given how little we hear the Dread actually speak (probably less than a hundred distinct audio lines) and the absolute lack of similarities due to it being an alien language, I'd guess the best bet is to crack it like how the German Enigma code was cracked in WWII, which was cracked because of an extremely common repeating phrase in a majority of intercepted transmissions (can't repeat it because RU-vid). For the Dread, I'd be interested in seeing if text lines from the various Disciples (especially Rhulk and Nezarec) could be repeated given the right context, especially if they relate to words or phrases like "Witness" or "Final Shape" or anything related to combat. In keeping with the Sword Logic, I'd imagine it's like a battle language from Dune, since the Dread were only made to fight for the Witness; the heavy syllables remind me of Denis Villeneuve's interpretation of Harknonnen, which was as brutally efficient as it was harsh on the ears. It's interesting how many times language has connected to larger plot beats in Destiny in the past, namely with Oryx almost cutting his daughters' tongues out for not speaking the Imperial Tongue at one point in the Books of Sorrow regarding throne worlds, and also when first the Cabal and then the Shadow Legion reduced their language just to make tactical communications more efficient at the cost of soul, poetry, and nuance. Maybe since the Dread are mostly just twisted forms of existing enemies (rip Grim), bits of Hive or Psion language might help if they've been even partially cracked?

Has anyone looked for spectrograms in either Euphony's sound effects or any of the music tracks? The lore tab spends a lot of time talking about wavelengths.

This would make figuring out the eliksni language sound simple back in D1, i once knew a friend who did a good impression on a fallen and it spooked me

I think the Euphony lore is itself a clue for how the language is made. It could be telling us about how features like pitch accent or stress or vowel/consonant length is designed in the language. Considering the devs in Destiny are generally English-speaking, I doubt they went with something fully tonal like Mandarin.

Listen I’m no one special when it comes to finding stuff but the two things that comes to mind is 1. Where we got ergo sum (as in the mission we load into to get it and not the witness battle field) 2. The darkness wall that Zavala goes into

I think you need a special weapon scope to see the writing on the walls. I mean, wasent it a mechanic in a past event/senario? It wouldn't surprise me if that was added here as well.

Love the video, hopefully some folks crack the code so we can get even more lore from the expansion. Also, unrelated, I faced you in trials a few weeks ago and tried to show my excitement with emotes. Thought it might come off as rude once the match was done and wanted to let you know if some Warlock was trying to give your Ghost a hug, it was out of love! 😅

Didn't the developers once say there were still secrets in Vault of Glass/Black Garden that players still hadn't found? I remember it being iconic D1 location, with the comment made during D2.

It'd be kinda scary if the written language of the Dread was the tree looking glyphs we see at time. Like the Stigma of the Witness

The bits about the golden harp and references to music makes me wonder if there is any connection between the feed and the choral vex. The choral vex are all about music and these references have to mean something

I'm actually hesitant about it, but can it be that this text is the tree-like ornament on the map of the pale heart(the one near the raid and 12-men mission)? It seems to be too small and stylistically different from other pyramid-style ornaments, and missing many of the recurrent patterns of those. But weirder thing irl are actually readable words while looking like some pretty patterns(like kufic square script or ogham for example)

Go look at the Fate's Intertwined Emblem, those symbols might be Dread text. I think there are more of those symbols across the game too. Also, what if the wall in Euphony is the Red Border wall in Salvation's Edge? Probably not, but it's worth a think I guess. There's also another wall sandwiched between the Red Border symbols that looks like red brick. Maybe that's important? Again, probably not. But it is worth a look, isn't it?

I swear to the Light and Dark, Bungie specifically mentioned that the Dread Language is translatable for the sole purpose of giving the Lore Community a reason to not only keep playing every single day, but to have them run around the Pale Heart like headless chickens like we did in Taken King looking for Sleeper Simulant.

[softer] ~ gentler. [beingness] ~ existence. [golden harp] ~ lyre. [?UNKOWN?] ~ final shape/perfection. [buttresses] ~ pillars. [tuned] ~ harmonized. [balance of distress] ~ equilibrium. [rupture] ~ tear. [vibration reverberates] ~ it echoes. [atmosphere] ~ space. [they crest then fade] ~ then subsides. [plucked] ~ struck. [sweet music] ~ Euphony. [we are the hand that plucks] ~ the composers. Also, isn’t this lore tab describing what happened to The Witness or just them.

It'll take a couple of years to get some basics in translation and some kind of alphabet. It took a few years to translate the Na'vi language and also to figure out the Na'vi alphabet.

the dialect sounded familiar to me then i realized that it sounds EXTREMELY close to navi' from james camerons avatar. some sounds use the exact enunciation. i also remember a wall i saw in a part early in the beginning that had writing on the back of it ill look back to see if it is what i think it was now.

One of the subjugator lines continually sounds to me like, “your flesh is weak”.

Look up Sarsion in the Cryptarchy also others in Venextron Discord were able to understand what languages were being used, but there was another realization thanks to Sarsion that it’s a mix indo-European and Latin. Which gave him a thought about it being close to or slightly similar to the Eliksni language.

My bet is on the blooming wall/door which leads to Zavala home that we opened in the campaign. there was a big glyph on it with many details

This is making me wonder, if Euphony is updated to have a Catalyst, maybe we'll find that wall in the raid somewhere? Could be a Basketball Court of Oryx scenario but with more moving parts on how to find it, but that requires Euphony getting a Catalyst first, and a majority of our raid Exotics still have yet to get any

The opening mentioning 'marathon' multiple times has me wanting more info on Marathon. C'mon Bungo

Idea. In the future we might have acess to some way to write the dread language in a dread activity and we could use our rough translations to find other info to perfect it

there is also some languages both in real life and fiction that are more conceptual languages the either have each word representing certain ideas or heavily dependent on context to get the proper meaning of any given text

Could it be the rest of the stone wall at the beginning of the raid for the red border chest, since we only use the third column for the actual puzzles?

I wonder if the translation accuracy percentages are marked differently in other languages?

Oh this has a LOT of Potential. I think for sure though, this "Golden Harp" could be represented in-game by either Euphony itself, or perhaps Wish-Ender.

While no where near as complicated this reminds me of wen I was little trying to decode the unknown language in pokemon heart gold. Got a paper and pencil and started writing down all the letters to translate lol

You’re a good man Byf.

15:09 i don’t know what it is about it but i find it somewhat scary that a being with the goal to basically end the universe as we know it has its own language and there is a word that even with the translation we are so unfamiliar with its concept we still don’t know what it means even after being translated, same goes for the phrases that have a >10% confidence accuracy to them.

I did the same thing! I read the euophony lore tab and immediately went out to go find this wall and only found the exact same writing on those piller things! But to no avail :/ I hope it’s an actual physical wall with a way to decipher the language. If not I heard someone on Reddit say if you go back to the strikes or story mission of light fall where we first hear nezerac you can try and listen to his voices lines before and after putting on relic of nezerac to try and decipher the language that way

Love you content byf ❤

We don't have dread writing (or not much?). Is it possible we should be *listening* for a Rosetta "sound"? Somewhere the language is speaking the euphony lore tab or something else identifiable?

Since that vidoc and the revelation we'd return to the Dreadnaught in Heresy, I've been wondering if the Dread language (written) isn't connected to the writing on the shrine in the Cathedral of Dusk. Those glyphs are even resonance colored

Spent hours hunting for that wall as Soon as you mentioned it

The thing about Euphony I'm interested is the interpretation that it may be talking about Resonant/Resonance, the unexplained Darkness element of the Witness and its Pyramid Ships. Which would make it one of the few pieces of law that might give insight into what the hell it *is.*

In enigma protocol could the room with all the random human objects encased in bubbles be a sign they’ve started to worship us after the witness’s death?

What if some of the dread lines are speaking phrases from that stone wall, if some of their lines line up with the phrases at the end in the lore tab then we might be able to start there.

Getting real evergaol and scadu energy from this

I don‘t think we‘ll find a wall with actual words, rather there could be a wall with pictures that show the words we know and what those words are like in the Dread-language; imagine seeing a Blade on the left side (where the true meaning is) and then a chicken on the right side (because the Dread word for „Blade“ sounds like „Chiken“); and then we have to match our knowledge from the wall with the ingame dialogue..

Just a random thought, but what if the written language of the dread are symbols and not letters.

the biggest hole I have is the dread language is most likely a brutalistic one. meant to be dense in information so as to be spoken quickly on the battlefeild. that would also mean, assuming the dread language is not an older repurposed language, it would not likely have the ability for the rather flowery prose shown in the text in Euphony's loretab due to not natively having the words for it. The Witness made this language for the dread, and the dread are a means to an end, they don't need flowery words or words for things like "Harp" or "Beautiful." why would a faction that was built scantly a year ago, that doesn't have a point to exist after the witness achieve its goal, have a need for prose and poetry?

I don't know if this has been proposed yet (and if it has, sorry for wasting time), but we may need to, perhaps, use a weapon's sights to look at every single wall within the pale heart, maybe it could give us some sort of vision we normally wouldn't have. Or maybe we need something like Taken vision (like that one mission we can see platforms and stuff)

Duc and Jay solved the Dread’s language eons ago

The lore of Euphony, specifically the “Confidence Percentage” terms, begin to make more sense when read through the lens of Spacetime. It's possible that the [UNKNOWN] term is connected to [SINGULARITY], or [Black Hole]. This conclusion is based on the fact that a Black Hole can be defined as having 'Graceful Curves and Infinite Potential'. There's a chance that the [GOLDEN HARP] is a remark on [GRAVITATIONAL WAVES] describing the behavior of ripples in the fabric of spacetime. The term, or phrase, consisting of [BUTTRESSES] may be associated with the Event Horizons of a Binary Black Hole System, or in this case, perhaps the Traveler and Veil in Sol.

is there not a way to look through game files to isolate really clean recordings of the dread language?

Do we think we need a specific armor peice in order to hear it? Like with nezerac's sin on neomuna.

When I first saw the live stream going over the language I went straight to work trying to find out what he says and the closest thing I could find was Latin granted it was finicky trying to find the right combo to get a phrase but what I eventually got was “I was born with a vow to live.”

the missing letters are not an issue - in Polish, we usually use di-consonants to describe sounds that are usually using letters not present in Polish alfabet. "Q" is written "KW" or "KŁ" like in Latin "Quo vadis?" -> Polish "Kwo Wadis?" Latin has also a situation with several consonats, like "C", which can be read as "K" in "Currum" or "Ch" in "Censor" or "C" in "Cerebellum" The spoken language seems a bit constructed using Latin and some sort of Far Eastern language (I want to say Japanese/Korean) but I'm not a linguist either XD

I do think that the lore tab is relevant, because its so obviously connected to this puzzle... But perhaps we're looking at it the wrong way. I don't think the percentages at the end are random; perhaps there is a pattern in them that could be deciphered, and in turn lead to a key. In other words, I wonder if this lore tab is the Rosetta Stone we've been looking for.

Anyone who wants to know the dread language, just remember simplicity is key. Get hooked on phonix

We don't need a Rosetta Stone like artifact to translate the Dread language. For example from real life Cuneiform was translated through educated guess work. There was an artifact that had a repeating seven character phrase that was guessed to mean "king" so that the text read "King X, son of King Y, son of King Z, son of W."

What is that arc auto rifle you’re using? Looks cool as hell

The idea seems solid. Players from other nationalities should check their descriptions as well and than we could do a cross refference to see if there really are different kinds of meanings behind the words.

Could it maybe have something to do with wearing the helm of nezarec again? Along with euphony in order to see this supposed wall, he is the blueprint for the dread or at least the tormentors after all

Maybe its on the lore tabs. We see parentheses and brackets used in them often enough, so check those maybe?

“Perhaps the final shape is not silence, it is a symphony” is just a fancier way of saying “maybe the final shape were the friends we made along the way”

Plot twist: the stone is hidden somewhere on the actual witness

"Latin's a dead language, as dead as dead can be It killed off all the Romans - and now it's killing me" Switch out Lain for Dread Language. It's kind of like that one deleted scene from the Prometheus movie where they spoke with an engineer. Apparently it's part of the lore that the engineers no longer use conventional language to communicate with one another, and any time that they do {especially in the atmosphere of a derelict planet) they shave entire centuries off their life. Just from uttering a single sentence. The dread language works in much the same way. It fills you with a sense of existential dread when you speak it out loud. And that's all I can say. For now...

It would be wild if the Dread language is the Percursor's original language.

On the note of "it has to translate to every language that Destiny is available in" bit. No, it doesn't. It has to translate into whatever common cypher we use to communicate with Cabal and Eliksni and everyone else. They don't speak english, yet we have some universal translator that let's us speak with them. A "language of light" or whatever might be appropriate for what is likely Traveler tech. So the Dread Rosetta stone would only need to translate to that language. The actual rosetta stone only covers three languages, so it is likely this one only covers two or three as well. The more languages are on the Dread Stone, the better, but all we need would be Dread to universal (likely english). Further, do we have any other languages known in the universe of Destiny? Do we know actual Eliksni words? How about Cabal words? Hive has runes all over the place, do we have a key for them? Hell, a Krill/Dread/Light rosetta stone would make a lot of sense. They were to be the first inheritors of the light after the precursor as far as we know timeline wise, were stolen from the light by the Worms and Witness... I'd look that way first, though that might be my own love for hive/krill lore talking. Any underwater sections of the Pale Heart we can explore/see?

When do you plan on uploading the live raid lore run? I watched a good chunk live but needed to leave and have been wondering.

You can glitch in this area(strike area), I'll end up going in tonight and look around.

Just realized that euphony looks like the witnesses fingers.

If you take all the numbers from the lore tab you will have two sets of coordinates, they're random but that's anyways another angle to look at

16:21 Maybe the different translations of Euphony are the key to understand it?! We could search for resemblances between the translations and find the real translation of the loretab? Did anyone try that?