The way this works is that you can ask me to translate a specific word of your choosing, one at a time, and then you’ll just guess the song whenever you feel ready. At the bottom of this post you’ll find some hints, including info about the song, the frequency of the words which appear multiple times, and the lengths of the words which appear only once each. These hints should help you choose which words you want to translate.

The catch is that with the exception of lines consisting of only one word, I cannot reveal the meanings of every single word in a line. This rule means that, for instance, if I tell you the meaning of nng, then I couldn’t tell you the meaning of yasureyniya, and if I tell you the meaning of yasureyniya, then I couldn’t tell you the meaning of nng: is it then better to reveal yasureyniya because it’s a longer word that therefore is likely much more specific to this song, or is it better to reveal nng because it’s short and appears multiple times in different lines, and is therefore likely a function word? These are the types of questions you should ask yourself.

And so you should strategize which words you should ask to reveal, versus which words you think you can infer, and how much you think you can glean from repeated phrases, the structure of the text, the apparent number of syllables, and things like that.

But without further ado, here is the text in question…

S’ tangyu kay
Ziidecck, yeynyufi
Ow, nne iri, svit, u az
Yasureyniya nng
“Heeltrcjiif” hh
Nnesoentte ku’e yaabaz

Sj’ nay ya, sj’ nay ya
Ya n’y dru radu affasck, nay
Sj’ nay ya, sj’ nay ya
Vya n’y kyu puunu puunsck, nay

S’ tangyu kay
Ogemoj n’ yaykk
Ay, nne nay pedejjesk k’y
No ye3zo
Kotte yenood hh
Ay yoeyn nng kajjedong h’y

Sj’ nay ya, sj’ nay ya
Ya n’y dru dalayu orra
Sj’ nay ya, sj’ nay ya
Vya n’y kyu puunu puunsck, ya

[instrumental]

(Heeeee!!!)
S’ tangyu kay
Sinyu ngenzassk
Ay, nne nng e : kocckh do
Esulette,
“Kay v’ yaxayt : vur’k?” hh
Yemrezunne nng “Mo, mo, mo!”, yo

Sj’ nay ya, sj’ nay ya
Ya n’y dru doeeyniya, ya
Sj’ nay ya, sj’ nay ya
Vya n’y kyu puunu puunsck, na
Sj’ nay ya, sj’ nay ya
Vya n’y kyu puunu puunsck, nee nee nee
Sj’ nay ya, sj’ nay ya
Vya n’y kyu puunu puunsck, nee nee nee

Hints: About the song

Country: United States

Genre: Hard rock, roots rock, rock and roll

Time period: late 1960s

Popularity: 100M~150M views on YouTube

Hints: Words which appear multiple times by frequency

Ya appears 21 times.

Nay appears 19 times.

Sj’ appears 16 times.

N’y appears 8 times.

Nee appears 6 times.

Words which appear 5 times include puunsck, puunu, kyu, and vya.

Words which appear 4 times include kay and nng.

Words which appear 3 times include tangyu, dru, nne, hh, ay, s’, and mo.

: appears twice.

Hints: Words which appear once each by length

Yasureyniya, Heeltrcjiif, nnesoentte, yemrezunne, pedejjesk, kajjedong, ngenzassk, doeeyniya, ziidecck, yeynyufi, esulette, affasck, yaabaz, ogemoj, yenood, dalayu, heeeee, kocckh, yaxayt, yaykk, ye3zo, kotte, yoeyn, sinyu, vur’k, svit, radu, orra, ku’e, iri, k’y, h’y, ow, az, no, do, yo, na, n’, v’, u, e

If somebody ends up correctly guessing the song without me needing to reveal a single word, I’ll be both a little impressed and a little disappointed… But I feel like half of every Hexbear is going to be chronically sleep deprived and/or drunk or high at any given moment, so I frankly doubt that this will happen.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago
      Nerd infodumping and also spoilers for those who haven't guessed the song yet and also spoilers for the next guess the song post I guess

      I was originally writing this for a specific person who is pretty lousy with these types of puzzles, so I was even considering spelling “Heeltrcjiif” as just “Hail To The Chief”, and “dalayu orra” as “$-yu 1,000,000” just to make it more obvious.

      “Mo, mo, mo!” is a phono-semantic matching, mo literally means something along the lines of “ten billion” (the number system’s kinda fucky though), but if you know the Niconico meme song “Omoide wa Okusenman”, then mo can be used similarly to that word okusenman to just mean “a nonspecific very large number”, and when repeated as in “mo, mo, mo”, the meaning is basically “a nonspecific very large and (constantly and rapidly) growing quantity”. The word mo was itself out-of-universe inspired by the English word more/mo’ as well as the Japanese words mo and mou so it isn’t actually that coincidental, though.

      “Kay v’ yaxayt vur’k?” literally means “How much for the country [is/was/will be] good?” and in context means “How much done for the country will be enough?” — where using the word for “good” (vur) to mean “sufficient/enough” was also inspired by Japanese, where the word ii is used similarly. The little -'k at the end of vur’k is a highly colloquial, highly reduced clitic form of kay in its usage as a sentence-final question marker; this clitic is pronounced as /k̚/. A similar thing happened to bre (an emphatic particle), which eventually got the colloquial reduced clitic form -'b /b̚/.

      A side note about the word vur (“good”) is that in-universe this word actually comes from the old genitive form of the word for “penis” or “phallus” due to some old patriarchal weirdness… Out-of-universe, though, the word vur comes from my first ever conlang, where the word for “good” was literally just a random syllable that I thought sounded like it would probably mean something like “good”.

      …“Literally completely arbitrary” is a lot less fun, though, so I definitely appreciate the fact that I can canonize my own folk etymologies.