You know, David X. Cohen doesn't seem to realize that the reason AL2 took us a few months is that it took us a few months to see enough of it.... We needed the Yummy/Tummy pillars as well as the chat room door before it was really crackable. Then we got it in a few days. So it's really his fault (or Fox's) that it took so long.
And I think we're in the same situation right now. Whether Leela's bracelet or Zoidberg's new eye chart is AL3, or even if they both are (I don't remember what the new eye chart looks like), that's not enough to crack it. We either have a handful of letters, some partially-obscured, or just three letters.
Also, keep in mind that there have already been a bunch of symbols in Futurama that are neither AL1 nor AL2 (nor English nor Hebrew nor Chinese). Take a look at the extra signs in My Three Sons; they're apparently just random doodling designed to look like an alien language, and they're every bit as detailed as Leela's bracelet. The same is true of everything that appeared to be AL3 pre-4acv, probably.
Also, from what Cohen said, we can make two inferences:
1. The new language is going to be computationally more difficult--not linguistically.
2. Someone read all of the ideas that we came up with in solving AL2. Which could mean they're not going to do something we've already considered, or it could mean something we considered inspired them....
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that AL3 is a complex cipher for normal English in the usual Roman alphabet. In particular, I don't think it will be a syllabary (like Japanese kana), or ideograms or pictograms (like hieroglyphics or Chinese), or even a different alphabet (like IPA).
My guess is that AL3 will be more contextual--that is, each plaintext letter's information is spread over the whole ciphertext string (or over a block of eight characters). That's the traditional next step in making a more difficult cipher.
By the way, I suspect that Leela's bracelet is not AL3 for her initials, but some made-up language that was never designed. And it could just as easily be a syllabic spelling of her first name ("T<schwa>" "r<ah>n" "g<ah>" ) as her initials.
The eye chart could be the first clue, but remember that our first glimpse of AL2 was a complete phrase, relatively easy to read from a frame grab (the "codebreakers chat room" )--almost, but not quite, enough to break it easily.
So, it seems a bit odd they wouldn't do that again with AL3--they obviously want use to spend frustrating months trying to crack it, rather than just sit around waiting for the clues to come in.
Oh, and for anyone who's reading that old thread, the different dialects of Chinese all use the same characters for the same meanings, but pronounce them differently. Japanese also uses a couple thousand of those characters as "kanji," with almost the same meanings but different pronunciations (in addition to the two kana syllabaries, and "Romanji," the Western alphabet).
By the way, I am 95% sure that the AL3 idea was mentioned in an interview before the DVDs came out, but I'd still guess that AL3 will only appear in 4acv (if at all).
Finally, going through all the "other language" citings on the Bender Bending Rodriguez site, here's some comments:
First, I used to know Japanese reasonably well (although I haven't used it in about a decade), so I may be able to tackle some of the Chinese and Japanese signs.
The Chinese characters in the pilot across from the Akbar sign are "fire" and "woman." In Japanese, this wouldn't mean anything, but I suspect that in Chinese the sign says "hot women hot women hot women," which makes obvious sense.
During the New Years' countdown, I don't think that's Japanese. The second character appears to be a kanji made up of the "stride" and "cloth" radicals, and there is no such kanji, as far as I know. Either I'm wrong, or it's a Chinese character that the Japanese never borrowed.
The writing in Kyoto in 3acv22, by contrast, is definitely Japanese, as it contains hiragana as well as kanji. If someone has a better scan, I could translate them.
I haven't looked at hieroglyphics since college, but I do know that the writing on the coffins in 1acv03 are nothing like actual hieroglyphs. They're probably just random doodles designed to look vaguely Egyptian and vaguely alien/futuristic at the same time.
However, the algebra in 1acv06, the sign in 1acv07, and the various signs in 3acv17 all have at least some real hieroglyphs. I suspect that they're all random hodgepodges of hieroglyphs from different eras and squiggles that look sort of hieroglyphic and don't mean anything, but I could be wrong.
I think everything in the 2acv09 field of billboards is in English. The email message may actually have meaningful AL2 in it; has anyone tried to translate it?
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