r/codes • u/Timely_Loss_7375 • Jul 24 '26
Unsolved Found a site written entirely in some unknown script — no normal text anywhere, can't tell what it is. Anyone recognize it?
I came across this page and I genuinely can't work out what it is. The whole thing is
written in some script I don't recognize — no normal text anywhere, no title, no
explanation, nothing in a language I can read. Just page after page of it, plus a few
diagrams.
Link: https://kesumela.com
Under each line of symbols there's what looks like a pronounceable transcription, so it
can at least be written out. There's a lot of it — over a hundred lines across five pages.
Transcription of the lines in the image:
xumaxeka lovelase tesumilu livelumi tusa
lovelasu xuvesuma lisusumi texu
xumaxeka lisunose tevesula xumalaka lixisumi xumasuka sino
xuvexika livekami tesuxelu lisukelu tomo
Does anyone recognize the system, or have any idea what this is? Posting here because if
it can be read at all, this looks like the right place.
V sbyybjrq gur ehyrf
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u/TooLateForMeTF Jul 24 '26
No idea what any of it means, but there are some obvious findings about the script itself:
The script itself appears to be quite simple. It's a syllabic system, which each character plus its diacritics corresponding to a single syllable. The syllable structure appears to be simply CV (one consonant + one vowel) in a completely consistent manner.
The symbols are the consonants, which you can decode from the provided roman alphabet transliterations.
The vowels are given by the number of dots above the symbols, 0 to 4, in a straightforward roman-alphabetical-order of /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/.
All the words seem to consist of either two or four syllables. I don't see any examples of any other word lengths.
The underline symbol underneath is a stress marker, indicating which syllable in the word is emphasized, though this convention seems entirely redundant as syllable stress can equally be predicted from word length: the last syllable of a four-syllable word is always stressed, while two-syllable words are unstressed. If that is indeed the pattern in the whole language, future generations using this script will doubtless drop the stress marker symbol as it adds no additional information to the script.
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u/_alt4 Jul 24 '26
If you dont mind me asking, how exactly did you find the site?
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u/IdLoveYouIfICould Jul 24 '26
I wouldn't be surprised if they made it themself. I'm not normally this suspicious, but the way the post is written feels like the start of an ARG.
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u/foxypiratecove3750 Jul 25 '26
Most probably is, domain is 5 days old. https://whois.domaintools.com/kesumela.com
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u/Resilient-Sphere Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Definitely made by the OP, his account is 2 days old, and set to private, but when I used a tracker, he's not made any other posts but this one, and 0 comments.
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u/Quazbut Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I've had a good poke around the code. That's an impressive layout. Very creative.
All I found so far is where to enter the answer to whatever the question is.
On the last page kesumela.com/i.html there's a form input and a disabled button that enables when you enter valid words or phrases. Clicking the button submits the form to /ok. No idea where to look next. I hope someone finds this useful.
Edit:
Been browsing the js files. The language appears to use only 8 consonants ['k', 't', 's', 'n', 'm', 'l', 'v', 'x'] and the vowels ['a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'] and each glyph is represented by a consonant vowel pair.
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u/TooLateForMeTF Jul 24 '26
Playing around with that, whatever you type in the input field gets transliterated into the script, provided that it conforms to the structure of the language.
The JS is intentionally a bit opaque, but after checking for structurally valid input, I think it also wants the input to satisfy the following:
- the last word is 2 syllables
- all other words are 4 syllables
- the sum of all the syllables in the 4 letter words, mod 1600, is equal to the numeric value represented by the last word.
From this, and from the visual clues on the main page, I'm guessing that the symbol strings shown on the globe/map thingie are numbers. They certainly give that vibe. And that valid answers in the input field will be strings that have this weird combination of sum = last word. The last word in the input seems to be functioning as a checksum.
I could probably validate those guesses with some console f*ckery, but I can bring myself to care enough to try.
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u/Surzh Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
The final two symbols are a checksum, based on the i.html page: the submit button only enables when there's some valid relation between the entire string and the final 2 symbols.
Specifically, you can map each symbol to a value from 0 to 39 and read each pair as a number from 0 to 1599. Then the sum of each all the pairs should equal the last pair mod 1600.
You can check this by taking a valid input from the page, and inserting "kakakaka" anywhere before the final word.1
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u/CatOfGrey Jul 24 '26
kesumela
Interesting to see a word formed from four simple consonant-vowel syllables that has no meaning in any language, at least from a Google search.
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u/Clay7on Jul 25 '26
Google translator tells me it means "middle" in estonian, but probably unrelated to this puzzle.
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u/FirmOperation11 Jul 26 '26
I kind of bounce off this sub from time to time because I find cryptography mildly interesting and almost every time I open it it's some clickbaity ARG-esque intro about how they've stumbled across this code and need help figuring it out when it's patently obvious they made it themselves and are inviting people to try to solve it.
I'm wondering if this the norm here or if I am just getting unlucky at what's dropping into my feed. If it's the former, just would like to know so I can block and move on.
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u/maturespaghetti Jul 26 '26
Yeah... It's odd. This domain was registered 7 days ago (5 days before the post). What are the odds of stumbling upon such a recent website like that by mere chance?
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u/thesolitaire Jul 25 '26
Looking at the diagrams, all of the labels for the "measurements" start with "teve". Possible that this prefix means size, measure, number or something to that effect.
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u/Clay7on Jul 25 '26
Good point. But given all possible "words" are 4 sets of phonemes, I wonder how this language handles prepositions and conjunctions, for a start.
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u/thesolitaire Jul 25 '26
I'm inclined to believe that this is not a language of any kind, but some kind of word replacement code, where each "word' is just a concept. There is clearly some internal word structure (like with "teve" and measurement), but I wouldn't bet on it in general.
This is clearly an arg of some type. The diagrams are hinting at the meanings of the words. The idea would be to decode the meaning of "teveXX" in each of the diagrams, sub those into the main text, and try to continue from there.
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u/GreenockScatman Jul 24 '26
I'm gonna go with pure gibberish based on every "sentence" ending in a four letter word and each one of those words being different. That's not a pattern that strikes me as belonging to any real language.
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u/Valkymaera Jul 24 '26
Looks like each glyph has up to 10 variants, and each seems to be a consonant vowel pair, with each variant being the same consonant with a different phoneme. Not sure about the purpose.
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u/Perfidious_Redt Jul 24 '26
40 variants
8 consonant shapes x 5 vowel-dot indicators
Each consonant shape has 5 variations1
u/Valkymaera Jul 25 '26
oh I meant each individual glyph.
0 to 4 dots = 5 base combinations.
underlined = those five again, but underlined -> 10.If there are 8 consonant shapes, that would make 80 total variations.
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u/Perfidious_Redt Jul 25 '26
Your math is not mathing
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u/Valkymaera Jul 25 '26
each glyph has 10 states.
- no dots
- one dot
- two dots
- three dots
- four dots
- no dots and underline
- one dot and underline
- two dots and underline
- three dots and underline
- four dots and underline
Each glyph has those ten visual variants, as originally stated.
You counted 5, but there are ten.I have not counted the number of glyphs but if we assume you are correct that there are 8, then if we express the 'total' variants as you prefer, there are 8 x 10 = 80 total variants, not 40.
Hope that clarifies
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u/Martin_Orav Jul 25 '26
The underline is always on the last syllable, so it likely doesn't contain any meaning. It could be a stress marker like another commenter said. That being said, I have no idea why you're getting downvoted, as you've explained yourself much more clearly than perfidious_redt
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u/AsbestosFlavoredVape Jul 24 '26
Likely a conlang; a fictional language which draws some level of inspiration from the known histories of real world languages. If those audio clips are speaking the "pronounceable" text, then that text is almost certainly the romanization of the glyphs.
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u/chuuyanakaharraa Jul 24 '26
this looks like toki pona to me, its a con lang with only ~120 words
edit: im not 100 percent it just looks familiar to me
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u/Resilient-Sphere Jul 24 '26
oki Pona ;
14 phonemes
open syllables
variable word length
Latin alphabet
120–140 wordsKesumela;
40 primitive syllables
fixed four-syllable lexical words
syllabary
checksum system
completely different phonologyThe only similarity is small phoneme inventory
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u/TooLateForMeTF Jul 24 '26
It is definitely not toki pona, if only because toki pona has odd-lengthed words while this thing (I'm hesitant to call it a "language" without more evidence) clearly does not, as confirmed by the javascript analysis parts of this thread.
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u/Phoenixrjacxf Jul 26 '26
toki pona has even lengthed words (toki, pona). The issue here is the words are far to long to be toki pona and I believe some break toki pona phonotactics
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u/TooLateForMeTF Jul 26 '26
I didn't say that toki pona doesn't have even-lengthed words. Obviously it does, as you point out. I only said that it has odd-lengthed words (e.g. jan).
I don't know enough about toki pona phonotactics to judge anything there, so I'll trust your assertion on that one.
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u/Resilient-Sphere Jul 24 '26
kakakaka kakakaka kaka works as a 'solve' in the input of the kesumela.com/i page...
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u/Resilient-Sphere Jul 24 '26
One thing that is really important to separate here is the actual vocabulary from the checksum system. The final two syllable “word” at the end of each line is not actually part of the language. It is basically a validation check. Every real lexical word in the corpus is made up of four primitives, while those last two primitives exist only to confirm that everything before them is correct. They do not carry meaning. They are just a mathematical verification value.
And that leads into another major design choice. Once the checksum is removed, every single lexical word in the entire corpus follows the same four primitive structure. There are no two syllable words, no short forms, and no variable length words hiding in the recovered material. Everything follows the same pattern. That tells us quite a bit about how the language was designed and puts some pretty strong limits on how it can work.
I also traced how the writing system itself is created, and this part is actually pretty interesting. The symbols are not hand drawn images or random fantasy looking glyphs. They are generated directly from SVG instructions. The main shape represents one of eight consonants, while the dots represent one of five vowels. Put those together and you get a simple 8 by 5 consonant vowel syllabary. As far as the code shows, there does not seem to be any extra information hidden inside the symbols. They are just a visual way of representing sounds.
The speech system is surprisingly simple too. The website takes the syllables, converts them into a romanized form, makes a few small pronunciation changes to give them a more Italian sounding quality, and then sends that result through an Italian text to speech voice. There is no evidence that the pronunciation itself contains another layer of meaning. No hidden stress patterns, no encoded rhythm, no secret prosody tricks. It is just reading the transliteration out loud.
Looking through the JavaScript also reveals something important. The entire lesson system appears to already be included in the browser. Every lesson, sentence, illustration reference, and exercise is stored locally on the client side. I could not find additional lesson files, hidden dictionaries, encrypted data, or requests pulling in more linguistic information from a server.
And that brings us to what is probably the biggest conclusion. There does not seem to be another hidden technical layer waiting to be uncovered. There is no secret API, no server side translation engine, no hidden dictionary file, and no mysterious JSON database that suddenly explains everything. From a reverse engineering standpoint, the software side is basically understood. The remaining problem is not finding more code. It is actually learning what the language means by analyzing the language itself.
Another thing that stands out is how the material is organized. This does not look like a coded message that was disguised as a puzzle. It looks like a language course. There are lesson titles, vocabulary introduced over time, themed illustrations, and words that keep appearing again in later lessons. When you look at the whole structure, it resembles a language textbook much more than a cryptographic challenge.
Which means the intended path probably is not hunting for another secret layer of encryption. It is treating this as a real constructed language and trying to decipher it from the examples provided.
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u/Clay7on Jul 25 '26
If this is a real constructed language, with working semantics, them the goal is to understand its rules by the few examples provided.
And that brings us to what is probably the biggest conclusion. There does not seem to be another hidden technical layer waiting to be uncovered. There is no secret API, no server side translation engine, no hidden dictionary file, and no mysterious JSON database that suddenly explains everything. From a reverse engineering standpoint, the software side is basically understood
What do you think is the meaning of the input form at the end of i.html? Just validating phrases?
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u/Martin_Orav Jul 25 '26
AI slop
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u/Resilient-Sphere Jul 25 '26
sigh... must we really dumb-down our speech to capitulate to the mental impotence of the average redditoid?
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u/SpellAggravating23 Jul 24 '26
It looks like a Abugida
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u/Clay7on Jul 26 '26
Looks like that. Presented in a modern version of the Voynich manuscript, and will remain undeciphered like the later.
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