illsmithyourbonds

That was a really good listen, thank you for doing that y'all. I just wanted to mention that shardblades change form, definitely while the spren is alive, and I'm not entirely certain, but I think they can after death, as they mould themselves around the gemstones placed in their hilts, so that's a possible explanation for Nightblood looking so different to shardblades generally. It would seem reasonable to expect that, as Nightblood is very openly seen as a dangerous and deathly weapon, strongly associated with death, which, especially if Nightblood's own consciousness has an effect on their appearance, would make them look dark and evil. Basically, Nightblood would be a goth shardblade.

Don't think I'll be able to come this time unfortunately, but I'm gonna still follow the thread in the hopes that there's another one soon. Hope you have fun!

that would probably be best in terms of returning trains and getting back home

1. Not sure if I'll be able to make 19th, but will try. 2. I don't really mind where we go, so long as it allows 16s and over, and we get a map. Is there going to be anyone else getting the train? 3. What kind of time of day? Are we going to have a meal as well? Are we going to do optional meal?

Yeah London is very easy to get to. I'd suggest (for ease of non-londoners) that we choose a pub near to one of the main stations, so there isn't a massive possibility of getting lost, or that if there is a large enough people getting a train that we all meet there and go to a pub from there.

@cromptj are you in year 11 or 1st year college/AS?

Okay so I tweeted Brandon Sanderson asking for a RT with a link to this, and well he RT'd and so did a few others and I'd suggest for all noon-members to bookmark this page and check every couple of weeks if you're interested. (Or make an account and follow the topic)

Yes that is reassuring thank you Branf Sabrina, did you message everyone who has a UK location or everyone who as an England location etc? Because I don't know that every cosmere/Brandon Sanderson fan is on here, and if it's looking like quite a small number then we could get the message out via tumblr/facbook/twitter?

I'd love to do a meetup, however I do have two issues: a) is that I am (I think?) a fairly young reader, being only 17 I worry that I'd be the only young person there. is that I have no monies but I will do in a few months so as long as it isn't for a few months then I should be good

This would readily explain how easy Ishi was for me to read in the glyphs, and Tanat. I think this makes a lot more sense. It may even be (abbreviated) Heralds' names - Jeseh is short for Jezerezeh, Tanat is short for Talenelat, and since h is what I am going to call a pseudo letter, being mostly shown by an extra screw you line or a little rotation or a diacritic (will find Shallan's quote eventually) and actually looks like any other apart from this, we may be able to work this notation out from the first glyph and it's common forms. Have we as translators of varying capabilities decided that the rotation of the letters is irrelevent, or are we going to say aS is Sa backwards? Can we find evidence of iSh being Shi backwards?

@askthepaperclip I think that men can still speak Alethi and can therefore read a glyph phonetically and understand what it means, but for the illiterate who can't even read that, then glyphs can be stylised to be more similar to what they represent. I think Shallan's confusion at reading Amaram's glyphs was more because he may have been writing glyphs that represent (to give anglicised examples): sand + her + son to represent Sanderson, and still be writing them like those words like sand shaped like sand etc or like man + key for monkey and still shaped like a person and a key? I'm not sure if that makes sense, but sometimes you can compose large words from smaller ones that sound similar. Or even like instead of mixing the Khokh and Linil glyphs to make Kholin, he might have been doing (Kho) on one side and (lin) on the other. There are plenty of ways of writing phonetic alphabets too phonetically. English is fairly phonetic, (on the same kind of level that glyphs could be) and yet if you don't know how to write things then you might just write sections that you do know that sound similar, such as (in)+(sin)+(dent) instead of incident. Also: in regards to Alethi glyphs, how do we know that vowels are represented at all? Could it be that they literally rotate and reflect lines however the storm they want, and the extra lines are just EVEN MORE screw you lines?

Okay so at school today I had a greater and more detailed look at the glyphs (I saved the images to my phone) and what's weird is that the 8th order (the last purple one) is quite conceivably Talenelat. Now it could still be Kelek/Kalak (I think they're using the Vorin names, as those are the symmetrical ones). And indeed, now I'm looking for it, on the simplified versions, it does appear to be Talenelat for the ninth one. I will do a match up and see if I can see all of the heralds and then if so compare the rotations etc with yours and see if they're similar, and propose new ones. Sidenote: I was drawing out more simplified, straigh-edged versions of them, and at one point the girl sitting next to me asked why I was drawing vaginas and insisted on referring to the glyphs as vagina-ish or vaginese. I found it a little humorous and it is believable that I was drawing vaginas if you saw how I simplified them. Edit: I did not have to get very far to see that these are not the Heralds. It is probably mere coincidence that the last ones seem similar. But I also don't think that they are the two surges. I think it will have to be the alethi words for Windrunner, Skybreaker... Bondsmith. Do we know any of the names of the surges? This lack of glyphs with transliterations is really quite annoying, especially as we have so little experience in reading these it makes it quite difficult to interpret them.

Yeah but glyphs aren't really designed for readability - they're supposed to look pretty which is precisely why there are screw you lines and symmetry, and these would make interpreting the glyphs easier, if we knew alethi or how glyphs were supposed to be written or literally anything about glyphs. (exaggeration, but you get my point) Now the next stop in checking heraldishness would be seeing if the ninth one can be seen as Tanat or Talenelat. Can anyone see that? Edit: Are they even in the correct order?

I can see the last one being Ishi, which is that symmetrical nickname for Ishar, Herald of Luck. If I could use image editing software with any degree of decency, I would highlight the parts of it that look like the Sh, but I can't. Instead I'm gonna say that there is a Sh with a line in the middle, that looks like either an oSh or a Sho (depending on how you read the chart) or a Sh* with * being a vowel that I think is i (and this is if you think there are 11 forms of a consonant - one with each vowel before, one with each vowel after, and one with neither). I think this means that they are names of the Heralds, but I may just be a terrible glyph reader.

The red lines give us three pairs of orders and one quarter. Not sure what that would signify, but I think it will have something to do with the type of spren rather than the orders themselves. Maybe the types of spren of red-connected orders are similar, or even the same?

Okay so I'm gonna get all mathsy, and I'm gonna use stuff we know from words of radiance (no actual spoilers about what happens, just small things that have been said about T's intelligence - read at your peril) So Taravangian (hereby referred to as T) has an intelligence on a particular day that is rated from 1-100. Now I think it's wrong to say his average is low, I think it is probably somewhere around 60-70. Let's say 65. Since is extremely extremely clever days are much more rare than his moderately clever days, then we can say that it is close to being normally distributed. If he can get to 100, then his standard deviation will be 10. So we have I ~ N(65, 10) where I is intelligence. What this means is that if his intelligence needs to be above 65 for him to be able to rule effectively, then he can do that exactly 50% of the time. But if he only needs to be above 50, then he can rule *gets out graphics calculator* 93% of the time. If however he needs to be above 70, (running a kingdom is not easy), then he can do so only 31% of the time. Now, that model is flawed, that merely describes how he is and how he can be - it doesn't give you a method that will calculate his intelligence if you want it on a particular day for, say, fanfiction. In order to do that, you'll need either 6 d10, 3 d20, 10 d6 or n d(90/n) OR a calculator with the Rand button and a dice with an even number of sides If you just have dice, then you d0 35 + the sum of all of your dice rolled together. If you have a calc (the better method as it well it just is) then you do 65 + ((-1)^dice x Rand^2 x 31) and then round. Yeah that's how I'm gonna mathematically model it, but that's just my opinion.

Okay so hello! This is my third post on 17th Shard because I mostly got it to contribute to two other threads I'd seen, but I thought I'd introduce myself. So I have read (in order of recency of most recent re-read) Words of Radiance, The Way of Kings, Warbreaker, Elantris, The Alloy of Law, and the Mistborn Trilogy. I love Sanderson's work, and in particular, the Stormlight Archive, because it is exactly what I love to read - fantastical creatures and people in different universes with crazy (weird, not crazy spaceship good) technology that relies not on what we think technology should rely, but on weird mystical things. I love the idea of Cosmere because it means I can read all the ones I like and they're all linked but in order to understand them, I don't have to read the ones that I don't like so much. My favourite character is currently Dalinar, (hence (tiny wor spoiler in the next sentence I don't know how to put it in it's box thingy ) my username) because he is genuinely just such a great guy and he is like a tyrant, yeah sure, but he does good things, and Roshar will, eventually, be better for it.

Uhh okay so I think Ym and Renarin are of the same order, and that when Ym died, the spren that was beginning to bond/had bonded with him had/wanted to find someone else in Roshar to bond with and chose Renarin OR more than one spren of the type that bonded with Renarin and Ym was sent to Roshar. I don't think that actually has anything to do with seeing the future. I think that it is about growing plants and regrowing skin and flesh from wounds. It kinda says in the ars arcanum what all of the stuff do, and whilst some, like Division, Cohesion and Tension, are a little open to interpretation, and will presumably be further explained later, others, like Progression, Gravitation and Transformation, aren't really. The ars arcanum says exactly what it does.

My (uneducated) opinion on glyphs in general is that they must all be symmetrical. I say this mostly for composing glyphs, and I think this because there is a quote (from Shallan I think) that I don't have on me about how Nohadon's name was changed to Nohadon to make it more symmetrical and how in Vorinism symmetrical-ness is considered holy and awesome and since glyphs I think are supposed to be pretty and awesome I think they are symmetrical. My other opinion is that if there is a word with just an 'h' sound then look out for a diacritic, because Shallan says that Nohadon's name is symmetrical, because the 'h' is represented by a d with a diacritic or something like that. I am truly in awe of your decrypting and translating capabilities by the way.