Basic Information
There are not many occurrences of AL2 in the series so it is difficult to tell much about the users of the language. There is no punctuation, and one of the letters has yet to be discovered. The chart below contains the letters of the English alphabet, the numeric equivalents of those letter, and every known character from AL2. The letter which looks like a large number 1 in a circle is the missing character.
How is AL2 Encoded?
AL2 is based on a complex mathematical progression. As far as I can make out, it appears to be a Fibonacci sequence which stops and wraps around at 25. In order to encode any message in AL2, you must first conver the letters of your message to their numeric equivalents. I find it easiest to begin numbering from zero instead of one.
| Sample message to encode: | futurama |
| Numerical equivalents: | f = 5 u = 20 t = 19 u = 20 r = 17 a = 0 m = 12 a = 0 |
The progression always begins with zero. The first letter is the easiest. It will always be the corresponding character to the appropriate number on the chart.
f = 5 =
After this, it get's tricky.
For the next letter, the number of the new letter is added to the number of the last character used in the progression. If the sum is less than 25, then that sum is used. If it is greater than 25, then 26 must be subtracted from the total and the resulting number is the number of the new character. Confused? Take a look at the example below.
f = 5 u = 20 t = 19 u = 20 r = 17 a = 0 m = 12 a = 0
f = 5 =
u = 5 + 20 = 25 =
t = 25 + 19 - 26 = 18 =
u = 18 + 20 - 26 = 12 =
r = 12 + 17 - 26 = 3 =
a = 3 + 0 = 3 =
m = 3 + 12 = 15 =
a = 15 + 0 = 15 =
And the final result is:
futurama =
Problems - What Makes AL2 So Difficult?
There are several problems which plague the use of AL2 in Futurama. Most important is how to handle phrases with more than one word. Do we begin the progression from zero for each word or do we continue from the last letter of the last word? Unfortunately, the animators of Futurama were not always consistant with how they encoded the orthography. For example, on this door, the language reads "codebreakers chat room" and each word is a continuation of the sequence from the last. However on this sign, the message spelled out ("iron cook") begins a new sequence for each separate word.
The other major problem of this orthography is the overwhelming complexity of it. It is tricky to encode, and sometimes even the animators seem to have had problems choosing the correct characters to use. In this sign, the second to last letter is incorrect, which makes the following letter also incorrect. However, if the correct character is substituted for the second to last letter, the rest of the message is right. By making a mistake on a single character, the remainder of the message could be distorted beyond comprehension.
Follow this link to view a selection from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English and AL2. Since AL2 contains no punctuation or numerals, I simply deleted them from the translation. I also opted to only re-start the numerical sequence after semicolons and at the beginnings of sentences. This means that within a sentence, the sequence remains intact. Also, the 22nd character was missing from my font. It shows up in this document as a number 22 within a circle.
To see more screen captures from the series containing AL2, click on the "Screen Captures" button in the navigation pane on the right.
To decode or encode your own messages in AL2, click on the "Translator" button in the navigation pane on the right.
The fonts which I used for this project can be obtained from The Futurama Point.