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English in, hmm out
Villager
How it works
Three rules, and one of them is only there to keep it pronounceable
A word becomes an h followed by one m per remaining letter, so length survives the translation even though the letters do not. “Emerald” has seven letters, so it comes out as seven characters.
Case survives too. An all-caps word stays a single long shout — HELLO becomes HMMMM — while a capital that follows lowercase starts a fresh syllable, so CamelCase reads as HmmHmm rather than sliding into one word.
The third rule exists purely so nothing ends on a lone h: a one-letter word, or a word cut short by punctuation, gets an m added. Otherwise “I said hi!” would end on a dangling h and stop looking like villager at all.
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Frequently asked questions
The rules, the sounds and why it only goes one way
How does the translation work? +
Every word starts with an h and every letter after it becomes an m, so a five-letter word is “hmmmm”. Capitals are carried across — an all-caps word comes out as “HMMMM”, and a capital in the middle of a word starts a new “Hmm” so CamelCase still reads as two syllables. Punctuation, numbers and spaces pass through untouched.
Can I translate villager speak back into English? +
No, and neither can anything else. The transformation throws away which letter each m used to be; all that survives is the length of each word and its capitalisation. Two different sentences of the same shape produce exactly the same hmms.
What sound do villagers actually make? +
A short nasal hum, pitched differently per villager and shifted up for babies. The game has separate sounds for idle, trading, agreeing to a trade and refusing one — the “hurr” when a trade is locked is a distinct sound, not the idle one. Wandering traders reuse the villager sounds at a lower pitch.
Do villagers understand each other? +
They gossip, which is the closest thing the game has to villager conversation: reputation about a player spreads between villagers who meet, and it is what makes prices rise after you hit one and fall after you cure a zombie villager. None of that is carried in the sound — the hum is decoration on top of the gossip system.