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Harakeke

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Everything posted by Harakeke

  1. Seems like a recurring linguistic theme, sule. The Duladen language on Sel also uses auxilary words, kolo?
  2. Nice catch! I just assumed Raboniel was adding some wry laughter from her internal monologue, but this makes much more sense. The interrogative auxiliary word also shows up in the Ship Designs notebook page from Oathbringer: "Too fanciful, ha?" I think the ? symbol is one of Nazh's annotations. The "handwriting" style matches his other notes.
  3. Neat! Have you considered putting the same inscription on the other side in Thaylen? I bet it would go well with the vertical layout. If you want to tweak the spacing of the letters in inkscape, you can convert them back to vector art by clicking on the text, and then selecting Path> Object to Path in the top menu. Then right click> Ungroup and you can move the individual pieces around.
  4. I'd suggest writing the individual letters over and over, like in grade school. These practice sheets might help. "The spear that would not break" should look something like...
  5. Oh, great point! I forget we're coming up on the ten year anniversary of WoK...
  6. I suspect the cymatic patterns of were created using an ancient fabriel that replicated the "voidbinding" applications of Tension and Illumination. Take for example Kholinar and Sesemalex Dar. Tension could soften the stone into a malleable form, and Cohesion could alter its shape into the protective windblades and canyons. This initially points to the Stonewards -- but the vast scale seems beyond the limits of the glimpses of what we've seen Stonewards accomplish, and the alignment with auditory resonance frequencies suggest Listener, rather than human application of Investiture. Specifically, Illumination. While human surgebinders use Illumination for Lightweaving, its application can also include "various waveforms", according to the Ars Arcanum. So... perhaps this is related to the the mostly as-yet-unrevealed "voidbinding" powers? That in turn points to the Dawnsingers, except we know that they weren't responsible for big undertakings, such as the excavation of the Palanaeum. Furthermore, the cymatic patterns seem restricted to the earliest portions of the Dawncities, and the means by which they were created was lost over time. Newer cities such as Yeddaw had to be deliberately excavated using shardblades. Much as an Oathgate accesses the surge of Transportation and amplifies it toward a singular purpose, a Tesnsion-Illumination fabrial might allow a single individual to liquefy the stone and vibrate it at the right frequencies to produce troughs and ridges. In some places (such as Kholinar and Sesemalex Dar) the original formations remain, but in most other cities they have been so eroded by Highstorms that the only indication of their existence is the overall layout of streets and buildings. So, tying this all together, here's my theory: Sometime shortly before or after the start of the First Desolation, we had a human going around with a fabrial whose design was inspired by how Listeners were using the surges of Tension and Illumination. This human, with the assistance of a willing (but not Bonded) spren used the fabrials to create sheltering outposts that allowed humanity to expand their territorial presence outside of Shinovar.
  7. Seems likely, although I didn't spot any that matched in this research paper. Based on Nazh's map, it looks like the shattered plains have either 4-fold or 8-fold symmetry.
  8. This may already be known, but as I was casually skimming through Sheldrake, Merlin & Sheldrake, Rupert. (2017). Determinants of Faraday Wave-Patterns in Water Samples Oscillated Vertically at a Range of Frequencies from 50-200 Hz. Water (as one does, once they've exhausted weightier tomes such as the Stormlight Archive), I noticed that some of the resonance patterns seemed familiar. Specifically, they resemble the street layouts of certain Silver Kingdoms cities, as recorded by Ardent Kabsal. Could these mathematical images be the inspiration for the cities' cymatic patterns, much like the Julia set rendering inspired the map of Roshar?
  9. D&D is great, but at its mechanical core it's fundamentally a combat simulator with strictly-defined powers, and Surgebinding doesn't align particularly well with D&D's Vancian model of magic. For a setting as narratively-driven as the Stormlight Archive, I think a PBTA rpg would be more fitting. I'd take a look at Masks as a starting point. Masks is a game about teenage superheroes struggling to balance the mundane and super-powered sides of their lives. One of the game's taglines is: "When the villain hits you, it’ll hurt, yeah—but the real danger is how they make you feel, and what you’ll do to vent those feelings!" That strikes me as very similar to the introspective perspective on Shardbearers we see in the books. It probably wouldn't take much to adapt the Masks playbooks to a Rosharan setting.
  10. There's a new glyph in the WOK leatherbound edition preview art: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/030/073/235/62b46d71ba1e312115ef1519ed48657f_original.jpg?ixlib=rb-2.1.0&w=700&fit=max&v=1596579829&auto=format&frame=1&q=92&s=e2bf2507466055c71ed83129d08b3d8e Can't quite make out the accompanying text in the Women's Scrpt, but the glpyh looks like it says "BEN(A)" -- I'm guessing illustrator Ben McSweeny has gotten the Isasik Shulin treatment.
  11. So, I think I see where some of the typos are coming from. Early on someone made a .ttf file from the translation key, but it had several inaccuracies -- ranging from little things like line heights/angles to larger things like transposed letters. It also coded [sh], [th], and [ch] as capital S, T, and C. It seems like the artist got got ahold of that font file and used it to lay out the text. It's particularly obvious in the artwork for Stick, which has larger, more legible text.
  12. Our worldhopping buddy Nazh recently infiltrated the Calligrapher's Guild -- check out the official interior art from Oathbringer...
  13. That's some pretty Awesome work! I'd love to mess around with the shapefiles if you get a chance. I've always wanted to take a crack at georectifying the various map images, but wasn't sure what projection to set the data frame in. Any thoughts as to the blue and red markings on the Frostlands map? Do they match up with any interesting lines of lat/long?
  14. Hmm. Yeah. "Too fanciful, ha?" perhaps? Based on the context, it seems like they are.
  15. ::thumbs-up:: I think somewhere in the other thread I posted some side-by-side images of the various versions of those glyphs, which could be helpful.
  16. Well, we didn't quite forget them -- we were just going about it wrong. Someone did properly identify the phoneme for "A" -- we just assumed that it stood for "initial vowel" rather than one specific vowel, since those A's happened to be at the start of the word. Based on Nazh's notes (and way too much time spent squinting at their various forms), I suspect the Radiant glyphs aren't meant to be readable. Also, many of the same glyphs existed in the early draft of WOK in which the orders/surges had different names than in the final draft.I suspect the glyph phonemes hadn't been completely pinned down at that point, and the Order glpyhs were designed to look cool, and then the art team worked backwards to build "readable" glpyhs.
  17. Yeah, Nazh needs to get back in there and find page 2! I'm curious if we'll be able to work out the Scroll Stance glyphs now. They're nice and clean.
  18. Okay, I closed my eyes and ventured into the spoiler board! Here's a thread for further discussion of glyphs based on what we've learned from Nazh: Please don't post plot spoilers though.
  19. This is a continuation of the glyph discussion from the Stormlight Archive Translation Guide. Please do not post plot-related spoilers in this thread. Nazh has infiltrated the Calligrapher's Guild and provided us with a very thorough analysis of Alethi glyphs, including a table of the component phonemes glyphmakers use as a starting point for Standard glyphs: I'm actually surprised how close we we got with deciphering some of them independently, given that we now know that the phonemes can be rotated, flipped, and distorted, mixed with Calligraphic phonemes, screw-you lines, and indecipherable symbols from the Dawnchant or something. There are also some nice tidbits in the other illustrations, including the Kholin "Sword & Crown" glyphpair. The "compass rose" only shows up once that I was able to spot. It's featured prominently in the Kholinar map. There are some sketch captions in the women's script which I assume someone has translated by now and some very pretty Thaylen writing around image borders. I especially like how the letters almost interweave like Celtic knotwork. The writing around the map says "Thaylenah". I took a quick skim over the Taker of Secrets text, but nothing jumped out at me. I'll take a closer look at it once I get there in the book. There's also a map that looks like the one that Shallan found in Amaram's study in WoR.
  20. No plot spoilers, but the Oathbringer art gallery has some very useful information courtesy of our friend Nazh: Edit: Question for the mods -- how does the spoiler policy affect this thread? Should we make a separate post in the spoiler board, or can we keep talking about glyphs here as long as we don't spoil the actual book?
  21. Okay, that makes sense, and it jives with our various attempts at deciphering where we'd be able to pick out a plausible letter or two, but the rest was a muddle. It sounds like glyphs are incredibly "lossy": while there may be a letter that inspires their overall layout, most of the design consists of screw-you lines. So for example, the spoken words "Khokh Linil" would be written something like "K~{..+ L/*!,,= " With that in mind, I don't think we'll ever have a key like we do for Thaylen or the Women's Script. I don't think trying to decipher glyphs is entirely fruitless though, because some of the simpler glyphs (like sas) are definitely "readable" from their component parts. Likewise, Navani's giant ketek has to have some sort of underlying linguistic structure, otherwise it's just arbitrary lines. I think we've exhausted just about all the material we have to work with for now, but I think that eventually we'll be able to reverse-engineer the calligrapher's guild rules. We're only on Book 2 of the series, after all -- and I for one am enjoying the mystery!
  22. Kinda swamped IRL, but I hope to have it up before Oathbringer hits.
  23. Yeah, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this new way of approaching glyphs. My gut tells me it's on the right track, but that key is nowhere near complete -- it doesn't even cover everything I worked out in my handwritten notes. (Sidenote: I'm starting to sympathize with Taravangian. Is that good or bad?) I expect we'll get a wealth of new information to work with once Oathbringer comes out, so I'm hesitant to spend too much more time squinting at Highprince glyphs. I'm even tempted to take the glyph key off the first post, because I very much suspect now that it is wildly inaccurate.
  24. Keteks are hard, but these are looking great! And because I couldn't help myself... It really is a beautiful ketek though!
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