A Mysterious Sign (Rebuild World Manga Ch. 2)

Hey fellow manga lovers! So as you may know by now, I’m not only the editor for the Rebuild World light novel but also the Rebuild World manga currently being released by J-Novel Club.

It’s an exciting series, and editing it provides some exciting moments! For instance, in chapter 2 of the manga, our hero Akira visits the Hunter Office for the first time. Outside the Office is an intriguing sign:

The symbol in the center is simply the kanji for “buy”: nothing to write home about here. But what’s up with those symbols around the outside? Those aren’t Japanese, nor are they English letters.

The translator simply sent me a note saying he couldn’t make sense of it. And this from a guy who knows just about everything when it comes to translating these kinds of stories!

So, not content to leave it, I decided to take a crack at it. Zooming it for a closer look, I suddenly recognized the letters.

They’re Greek.

All at once, the adrenaline began coursing through my body. Was this the moment that those years of Greek in college would finally pay off?!

The letters are kind of smushed together, so I tried to isolate intelligible strings of letters and came up with the following:

ANXIENT ΩOPΛΔ APTIΦAXTΣ

Sadly (to the hellenophile inside me, at least), those aren’t Greek words. They’re English. The letters A, N, I, E, T, and O are close enough to their English equivalents to make the text more or less readable. That leaves X and P, which look like English letters but have different sounds in Greek, and the purely Greek Ω, Λ, Δ, Φ, and Σ.

X is the letter chi and is pronounced (classically) as a rough “H.” Here it’s used for the letter “c” in “ancient.” An interesting choice, probably made because Greek doesn’t have a “sh” sound or a “c” letter.

P is the letter rho, and is basically “r”, which is how it’s used on the sign. That’s what you’d expect, and so too with four of the remaining five letters: Λ for “L”, Δ for “d”, Φ for “f”, and Σ for “s”.

And lastly we come to Ω, omega. In ancient Greek it had a long “o” sound. Here it’s used for “w” in “world.” Another intriguing decision, given that the letter Y, upsilon, was right there and comes pretty close in sound to a “w”.

Or, they could have gone with the digamma, which resembles a capital “F” with the vertical bar slanted a bit to the right. The digamma actually represented the “w” sound—but the Greeks dropped it before the Classical period, so it doesn’t show up on your average list of Greek letters.

But at the end of the day, you can’t deny that omega just looks cooler. So that was probably the right choice!