I finally had a breakthrough with understanding how Hermes in the Lotm donghua works! (ฅ>ω<*ฅ)
Or at least I've discovered a pattern to it. Visual explanation time!
In the beginning, Hermes didn't make any sense because as you can see, directly translated hermes doesn't give you words like Ancient Hermes and Loenese does. With the exception of the mid episode info slides, every other time hermes appeared it looked like gibberish. (-_-;)
But earlier this week I suddenly had a breakthrough! ＼(^o^)／
I was trying to see if there was any connection between the Chinese characters and the hermes. I discovered that when the characters were spelled out in the latin alphabet, the first letter of each character matched the hermes letters and always ended on the same last letter.
As you can see in the picture, this pattern fits almost every time we see Hermes, to the point where it's hard to call it a coincidence.
Btw, I literally know next to no Chinese at all and only discovered this through guessing my way through google translate.
(●—●)
So that's the usual Hermes pattern, which means that it usually doesn't give you any new info.
That changed with the intro of the slumber charm.
Suddenly I had to try figure out the characters based on only the Hermes letters. Which is kinda hard when you don't know the language at all. (；´∀｀)
Alone, I could only guess that the CMN could be "Chén MiáN" (沉眠) which can be translated to 'Deep sleep/slumber'. Which could fit. But the rest? I couldn't solve alone. (-_-;)
Thankfully I got some help from zeeshiry on Reddit! (๑•̀ㅁ•́๑)✧
Who knows some Chinese and with her help we were able to come up with some theories about the writing on the charm!
Our current theory is that 'HYECMN' is split into two, 'HYE' and 'CMN'.
Because 'HYE' could mean "Hēi yè" (黑夜) which can mean 'Black night' and is also the characters used for 'Evernight'.
Basically, this means that 'HYECMN' can stand for "Hēiyè Chénmián" (黑夜沉眠). Meaning "Black night deep sleep/slumber" or "Evernight deep sleep/slumber". Both of which feel like they'd fit the slumber charm.
As for the rest of the text on the charm...
It's harder to tell because we don't know how it's supposed to be read. Additionally, 'NNS' is almost impossible with the current pattern because practically no Chinese characters ends with S.
So one theory for NNS that Zeeshiry came with was that it could be rearranged into NSN, which could be "Nü shén" (女神) meaning 'Goddess'.
If this is the case, then a possible translation of the other hermes text on the charm could be:
H -> "Hēi" (黑) [Black]
YE -> "YÈ" (夜) [Night]
CMN -> "Chén MiáN" (沉眠) [Deep sleep]
HYE -> "HēiYÈ" (黑夜) [Evernight]
NNS (NSN) -> "Nü ShéN" (女神) [Goddess]
That is currently our best guess and theory, even if it doesn't match perfectly with the previous pattern. It's the best we could come up with until we learn more about charms.
If you have any better suggestions, then please share.
Even though there's still a lot unsolved about Hermes, I'm honestly just really proud I discovered anything at all. It really confused me in the beginning and it's so satisfying to have been able to find a possible key to decoding hermes.
This might not seem like a big deal to casual veiws, but to us who've hit a wall of confusion whenever we tried translating Hermes, this is a significant discovery.
