Stormlight Archive Translation Guide

[Harakeke]

As Weiry pointed out in the AMA, Brandon's store refers to the "Windrunners glyph" as jeseh. So either there is a hiccup somewhere, or that's the word for Windrunner, or possibly Windrunners. Can someone check if this transliteration could match what we see in the glyph itself?

 

There are three (four) sets of glyphs that share the same basic structure, but with different embellishments:

• The ten fundamental glyphs seen on one of the shardblade illustrations
• The ten Knights Radiant glyphs on the WoK endpaper
• The embossed "swords" on the WoK and WoR covers
• (The "voidcaller" glyphs on the WoK endpaper appear to share a similar root, but with different warping/symmetry.)

 

This could be because they're slightly different words (e.g. jes, jeseh, Jezrien, Jezerezeh, etc.) or just because of artistic license.

Edited June 11, 2015 by Harakeke

[casannmar]

Hey - speechless at how talented you are. Storms, you could get paid for this sort of thing!

 

Just a thought - if glyphs can be modified to such an extent, with lines being added ad lib and whatnot, then I'm reminded of this gif of the Al Jazeera logo being made from the original script and the calligraphised (for lack of a better word) to the shape of a flame.

 

Is it possible that glyphs started out as some sort of unmodified original script, and were turned into what they are now? Presumably, then, there would be a way for you to go backwards from the glyphs and figure out the original. I'm not sure, and certainly what has been achieved thus far is unbelievable!

[Treamayne]

So, I just finished reading this whole thread (whew). I have been working on some ideas and may post some soon if I can flesh them out. First though; I just wanted to throw out one thing I noted, having lived in both Korea and Japan, in the last couple pages:

 

 

@ArgentSun @BrandSanderson @PeterAhlstrom Thaylen and Alethi are related kinda in the same way Korean {hangul} and Chinese chars are related.

 

Where Hangul was corrected by Peter

 

 

If there is such a relationship, then I would venture to say Thaylen is the Hangul (maybe BoPoMoFo is a more accurate analogy) and the Glyphs are Hanzi. It seems unlikely that an entire pictographic form was developed for glyphs, but sections could certainly undergo a similar simplification process (either in the form of Character to Radical simplification or Long to Short form simplification). This might account for the comment that Writers approach a glyph differently than a reader does.

 

In the attached example, Su is the character for Water and the Red portion of Ho is the Water radical (simplified Su for use in other characters). The other example is Guk (국) - Country in both the Long Form (used in Korea and other areas where Long form is common) and the Short Form (used in PRC and Japan).

 

Just an observation to prompt discussion and to give you all an idea of the angle I am going to approach from as I try to analyze some of the glyphs.

 

----

 

Another "food for thought" is that there has been discussions of Alethi vs Vorin vs Veden (etc) glyphs. I think it's possible that when Shallan mentions Major vs Minor vs Topical glyphs; if the Topical glyphs are those merchant glyphs stylized for illiterate customers, then it is possible that the Topical glyphs are universal where the Major and Minor glyphs may be where regional variance is encountered. I know there is no evidence of this, it is more a hypothesis based on extrapolation. If there were a set of glyphs that had become standardized (or were more resistant to regional changes) it would make sense that those glyphs were considered a "separate" glyph type - and Topical glyphs seem to fit that type.

Edited January 20, 2016 by Treamayne

[Treamayne]

So, it's been forever since I had time to review and work on my idea (been working midnights all summer, no internet at work). What I alluded to above was that I think I found two pairs of glyphs that are "related;" in that they seem to be mirrors of each other. The remaining six do not obviously follow the same pattern, but it makes me wonder of there are thre more pairs with a different or similar relationship. Anybody else see connections like this among the Glyphs?

[Harakeke]

Very interesting! Good catch. That connection will give the surgebinding chart folks something to chew on! By the Almighty -- symmetries that produce asymmetries!

So Friction and Adhesion might be pronounced something like "Betep" and "Peteb" (possibly with some "ve"s mixed in there somewhere, depending if the straight lines are letters or screw-you's!)

Transportation and Gravitation make more sense if they're upside-down. Something like "Kenese?ep" and "Pe?esenek" perhaps.

Perhaps there are other pairs that are near-palindromes when pronounced, but look different when written.

Edited September 16, 2016 by Harakeke

[Argent]

Fascinating! You say this doesn't apply to the others though?

[Harakeke]

I don't see any other pairs like this either, but it does hold true for the "voidbinding" chart as well.

It doesn't seem to relate to any of the surge connections/oppositions?, which leads me to think the relationship is due to something linguistic, rather than realmatic. It bugs me that I can only make sense of Transportation and Gravitation by flipping them. I thought maybe the orientation of glyphs around the chart was mirrored, but this suggests there's something off with the key...

[Argent]

9 minutes ago, Harakeke said:

I don't see any other pairs like this either, but it does hold true for the "voidbinding" chart as well.

Well, it would. The endsheet glyphs are simply the ones from the frontsheet, but their symmetry changed. 

Eyeballing, tension and progression look like you could get one from the other. 

[Harakeke]

7 minutes ago, Argent said:

Well, it would. The endsheet glyphs are simply the ones from the frontsheet, but their symmetry changed. 

Eyeballing, tension and progression look like you could get one from the other. 

Yeah.

I dunno' about tension and progression. You'd have to do some rotating/flipping, and even then it doesn't seem to work.

But -- the "compass rose" and map border glyphs have a similar sort of symmetry in how they repeat, come to think of it. Maybe they're each actually be a pair of two palindromic glyphs.

[Treamayne]

8 hours ago, Harakeke said:

It doesn't seem to relate to any of the surge connections/oppositions?, which leads me to think the relationship is due to something linguistic, rather than realmatic.

But, could the connections also be based on "type?" Gravitation and Transportation are both "movement" based surges. Friction and Adhesion are similar as well (maybe closer to opposites) and seem to manipulate the same "force" (one to prevent two surface from moving next to each other, one to ease the same movement).

 

If this is the case, I'd probably expect some kind of relationship between Growth and Division (not that we really know what Division does yet). If the remaining pairs are a "mirror plus" conversion, I can see a possible pattern in Cohesion/Illumination* where the top of cohsion is the bottom of illusion (gaining curves for elegance) , the bottom of cohsion is "mirrored" to the top of illusion (straightening curves, same reason maybe). Then illusion adds one element to each, the outside swirls on the bottom and the extra "L"s on top. That may be a stretch thouhg. As soon as I have time, I'll work up a step by step of the possible metamorphosis.

 

* possible relationship  in that Cohesion seems to change physical objects - like the hand print in a table example - where Illumination makes ephemeral "changes" via illusions.

[Rasarr]

Looking at what you people have been discussing, I started to wonder whether there is indeed anything between tension and progression, and I did find a fairly reasonable connection. Then again, I might be grasping at straws here, so there it is, for your review:

And in case you can't see the GIF file, here's the step-by-step:

 

 

I'm not sure if that makes any sense, and what it would mean in terms of actually deciphering the glyphs.

Edited September 17, 2016 by Rasarr

[Argent]

I come bearing news from the Thinker of Inks himself, Isaac Stewart!

I took @Treamayne's idea to Twitter, figured going to the source might get us some answers, and indeed it did. He didn't answer the question directly, but I believe we are overthinking things, as usually.

Quote

Argent: 17th Shard user Treamayne made an interesting observation re: Surge glyphs - https://goo.gl/5eVHPr
Can you comment? :3

Isaac: No comment yet on this specifically, tho I'll respond to something in that thread regarding names and "screw yous" within glyphs.

Isaac: Readers are trying to pronounce glyphs by reading them. Glyphs aren't read. They're memorized. Sounds might be found in glyphs.

Isaac: Glyphs have evolved from the early days. Just like the Chinese character for "tree" doesn't look like a tree anymore.

Isaac: Alethi glyphs are recognized by overall shape, not by the shapes/sounds that might be found within.

Isaac: For example, the Bridge 4 glyph is still recognizable even if the component shapes are changed.

 

[Argel]

So he's saying we should be looking at the outline/silhouette?

[Argent]

He is saying that:

• The "screw you" lines are not there to screw with us. They are there because the original shape of the glyphpairs has evolved past the one that "made sense" linguistically.
• Reading (these) glyphspairs is not necessarily a viable option. So, let's take the kholin glyphpair - usually drawn as khokh and linil, shaped like a tower and a crown (or crown & sword, in Elhokar's case, but we'll ignore this for now). What we have been trying to do is look at the crown-and-tower glyphpair and split it into a crown (khokh) and a tower (linil). So if we had the image of the crown-and-tower, but didn't know it was pronounced kholin (which is very similar to the scenario we find ourselves in with the glyphs or glyphpairs for the Surges and Orders), we would examine the glyphpair, deduce that it consists of stylized khokh and linil glyphs (and we would do that by looking at the lines in the crown-and-tower glyphpair and trying to isolate individual letters from them, and guessing what glyphs those letters might compose), and then guess that the unknown crown-and-tower glyph would be pronounced similarly to kholin (because we would take one half of each base glyph). Isaac is saying this is not necessarily correct. The kholin glyphpair could've started off as khokh & linil, but time could've changed the details of its shape so that it could still resemble a crown and a tower, but the lines would no longer be neatly separated into khokh and linil - because of the "screw you" lines added throughout the ages.
  Obviously, the kholin glyphpair hasn't had enough time to "evolve" like the glyphpairs for the Surges and Orders have, so its lines are still clearly splittable into its base glyphs. 
• Read over that previous point again, I know it might be a little... winded. I can elaborate if it doesn't make sense outside of my own head.

[Harakeke]

2 hours ago, Argent said:

He is saying that:

• The kholin glyphpair could've started off as khokh & linil, but time could've changed the details of its shape so that it could still resemble a crown and a tower, but the lines would no longer be neatly separated into khokh and linil - because of the "screw you" lines added throughout the ages.
  Obviously, the kholin glyphpair hasn't had enough time to "evolve" like the glyphpairs for the Surges and Orders have, so its lines are still clearly splittable into its base glyphs. 

Makes sense. Trying to "read" the root words in the stylized glyphs has always been a rather silly exercise, but I enjoy speculating! 

We touched on this topic a bit back on page 3-4. Not only is there a tower and crown glyphpair for kokh linil, but there's also a sword & crown version, a simple glyph for the "contraction" kholin, and a stylized contraction as part of the tattoo. There's lots of room for creativity when drawing a glyph, but going from the "traditional" to "stylized" form is a very noisy transformation in which details can be both added and removed. The process doesn't seem to follow any particular rules apart from the "rule of cool".

The takeaway here seems to be that traditional glyphs like sas nahn are easily decipherable, but that stylized glyphs like the highprince names and radiant orders are so noisy that it isn't possible to "reverse engineer" them. That isn't a big surprise. I'd been hoping we could somehow use stylized glyphs to fill in the speculative gaps in the basic key, but we've pretty clearly hit a wall.  Guess we'll have to wait and see what goodies are in the next book! :-)
 

Edited September 19, 2016 by Harakeke

[Argel]

4 hours ago, Argent said:

Read over that previous point again, I know it might be a little... winded. I can elaborate if it doesn't make sense outside of my own head.

Actually, it made a lot of sense. I see why you mentioned we are probably overthinking it and I think you are correct on that one.   Thanks for the great explanation!!

[Sarevok]

Sorry to necro a thread, but a question for @Harakeke. I'm looking at making a Thaylen script page on the Coppermind wiki. I'm assuming it's ok if I base it on your research? I might borrow some phrasing, too.

[Harakeke]

On 10/16/2016 at 5:27 AM, Sarevok said:

Sorry to necro a thread, but a question for @Harakeke. I'm looking at making a Thaylen script page on the Coppermind wiki. I'm assuming it's ok if I base it on your research? I might borrow some phrasing, too.

Please do! I love the great work you folks do with the wiki!

[Pattern]

Somewhere in this thread I read about the analogy between Glyphs/Thaylen and Chinese/Korean. On some Youtube-Video I saw Brandon mentioning the invention of Korean script and its advantages of being much easier than Chinese. The essence of it is, that Chinese has a symbol for a syllable/word and cannot be read phonetically, while the Korean script is phonetically and can be learned quickly. I don't remember if that video was of a book signing or one of Brandons BYU lectures and I only have the rough ideas in mind. The "easy" Thaylen script is deciphered, whereas Glyphs might have different symbols for words, which are not phonetical. So the shape of the "bridge" glyph wouldn't give us a hint of the Alethi pronounciation of the Alethi word for "bridge".

[Treamayne]

16 hours ago, Pattern said:

Somewhere in this thread I read about the analogy between Glyphs/Thaylen and Chinese/Korean. On some Youtube-Video I saw Brandon mentioning the invention of Korean script and its advantages of being much easier than Chinese. The essence of it is, that Chinese has a symbol for a syllable/word and cannot be read phonetically, while the Korean script is phonetically and can be learned quickly. I don't remember if that video was of a book signing or one of Brandons BYU lectures and I only have the rough ideas in mind. The "easy" Thaylen script is deciphered, whereas Glyphs might have different symbols for words, which are not phonetic. So the shape of the "bridge" glyph wouldn't give us a hint of the Alethi pronunciation of the Alethi word for "bridge".

It really depends on how much was borrowed from both real languages. So far, it seems that at one point Alethi glyphs did grow from an alphabet of some kind, where Chinese never had an alphabet at all.

In the attached examples, you can see how the grassroot character for "Day" started as a graphical representation of the Sun (circle with a dot)  and evolved over time to the modern version. In the second example, I show how the character for "Fire" is also a radical (principal component of a character, many Chinese/Hanja/Kanji dictionaries use Radicals for how you look up characters and words) and that radical is used in building related words. So, in Chinese, if you know the radicals you can sometimes guess, if not the meaning, then at least a relation to a word bearing that radical (though some relationships are quite disparate, such as "Troublesome" uses the fire radical).

 

 

If the same has been applied to Alethi, then the glyph derivation could be based on meaning. However, if Alethi is a progression from a root alphabet, then it is more likely pronunciation/phonetics derived. Either way, the average Alethi (non-historian) just has to memorize the characters and meanings, much like learning modern Chinese (and anybody that knows some Chinese that tries to read Calligraphy understands how difficult it can be to discern stylized characters).

With Korean, King Sejong commissioned the Korean alphabet to be developed based on science (consonants were developed based on the mouth and tongue positions used to say that letter) in order to increase literacy for the masses. Korean has a mix of native words and Chinese-derived (called Sino-Korean), but if you know the Sino pronunciation of a Chinese character or can read some characters, you can usually pick it out of Korean language text solo or in compound words/characters (Examples: day = il (일) and tomorrow = nayil (내일) -  or - day/일 =  日 and tree/목 = 木 then East/동 = 東 = Sun rising behind a tree )

 

I would like to think that Alethi is alphabet derived, and the pronunciation can be guessed it. It would make sense with why glyphs like "Book" are stylized to look like a book if the original was never originally based on the a stylized meaning (like how some Chinese is).

I apologize if any of that only makes sense in my own mind.

 

Edited December 30, 2016 by Treamayne
Typos/formatting

[Pattern]

It doesn't only make sense in your mind. Nice explanation! Perhaps we can get the sound of some Alethi after all. If it developed phonetically, what similarities to the Thaylen script with a common origin hint to, someone way more able at linguistics than me could crack it.

Harakeke, I have trust in you !

[Yezrien]

Hi guys, hope I'm not too late to the game with this. 

The compass rose almost definitely says "Urithiru" multiple times.

[djammmer]

20 minutes ago, Belzedar said:

Hi guys, hope I'm not too late to the game with this. 

The compass rose almost definitely says "Urithiru" multiple times.

Whoa! The glyphs being palindromes is an amazing observation.

[Harakeke]

12 hours ago, Pattern said:

It doesn't only make sense in your mind. Nice explanation! Perhaps we can get the sound of some Alethi after all. If it developed phonetically, what similarities to the Thaylen script with a common origin hint to, someone way more able at linguistics than me could crack it.

Harakeke, I have trust in you !

There are a couple examples of spoken Alethi, and we also know that J is pronounced like Y.

sas nahn  = without honor

shash = dangerous

gesheh =  bridge

jes, nan, etc. (all the Vorin numerals)

There's also the scene where Shallan? is trying to decipher the Ghostbloods' funky phonetic glyph sentences, and I believe she reads it aloud.

The phrase "sas merom" also comes to mind, but I forget where I may have seen it.

You can also pick up some linguistic differences in the variations different nations have for the Heralds' names.

WOB:

Quote

I often look for a "feel" for a language. Alethi, for example, is a semitic language mashup with some Mediterranean influence.

Brandon Sanderson ‏@BrandSanderson  21 Oct 2014

@ArgentSun @PeterAhlstrom @IzykStewart The glyphpairs are more Chinese influenced. But Isaac will have to answer on Thaylen.

 

 

Isaac Stewart ‏@IzykStewart  2 Dec 2014

@ArgentSun @BrandSanderson @PeterAhlstrom Thaylen and Alethi are related kinda in the same way Korean [hangul] and Chinese chars are related.

 

3 hours ago, Belzedar said:

Hi guys, hope I'm not too late to the game with this. 

The compass rose almost definitely says "Urithiru" multiple times.

I agree!

[Yezrien]

20 hours ago, Harakeke said:

 

WOB:

Brandon Sanderson ‏@BrandSanderson  21 Oct 2014

@ArgentSun @PeterAhlstrom @IzykStewart The glyphpairs are more Chinese influenced. But Isaac will have to answer on Thaylen.

Isaac Stewart ‏@IzykStewart  2 Dec 2014

@ArgentSun @BrandSanderson @PeterAhlstrom Thaylen and Alethi are related kinda in the same way Korean [hangul] and Chinese chars are related.

 

At least in terms of the writing system, I think Thaylen is extremely semitic. Like Hebrew and Arabic (and other semitic languages), the Thaylen alphabet is an abjad -- all consonants, no vowels. The shapes of the letters, with all their hard angles and thick brushstrokes, have a similar aesthetic to Hebrew calligraphy. In fact.... 

When Isaac says Thaylen and Alethi are related like hangul and hanxi (Chinese chas.), he's obviouslly referring to Alethi glyphpairs, not the women's script. Moreover, I think the relationship he's referring to is actually the reverse of the hangul-hanxi relationship.

Hanxi came first. They're Chinese logograms or symbols -- abstract pictures with no phonetic information. Hangul is a phonetic script (like our alphabet), whose letters are derived from pieces of the Hanxi. 

Alethi glyphs are logograms, like Hanxi, which is why Brandon sometimes compares Alethi to Chinese. But since the Alethi glyphs are phonetically readable, and seem to contain Thaylen letters, it's likely that Thaylen came first, and that Thaylen letters were eventually stylized into Alethi glyphs. (I'm not the first to compare the glyphs with Arabic calligraphy.)

I would theorize that the Thaylen alphabet is the original writing system of eastern Roshar. It was probably used by Alethela, Natanatan, Thalath, and others. It probably came from the Heralds, or the Dawnsingers. After the rise of Vorinism, Alethkar (and perhaps other peoples) abandoned the Thaylen script because it wasn't symmetrical, and created the new Vorin alphabet (women's script) to replace it. But Thaylen-based calligraphy continued to be used in heraldry and signage. It incorporated symmetry for aesthetic reasons, and gradually evolved into modern glyphs.