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Be advised that trying to tease letters out of the stylized glyphs can really lead you deep down the pareidolia rabbit hole. Isaac (the artist who designed the glyphs) has basically said "Hah! Good luck with that." (Check out some of my early "decipherings" further up in this thread if you want a laugh!) I commend your efforts though. Other lines of  investigation have stagnated, so you may uncover some interesting things!

3 hours ago, Pagerunner said:

Hey, how fast and loose can we play with order? Been looking at the Highprince glyphs some more, and it looks like the swirly Kholin and the straight Kholin have the same letters, in different orders. (I'm trying to build my own glyph alphabet from scratch, rather than start with the Thaylen letters, so right now I've got some quite different than Harakeke. It's still in progress, so don't get distracted. Regardless of how the letters may have been enhanced or simplified from their 'true' forms, they are undoubtedly the same letters in both forms of the Kholin glyph.)

Kholin Glyphs.png

That's an interesting interpretation, but I'm more inclined to read into the negative space of the Kholin tanat tattoo. Tanat is tricky because we don't have a non-stylized example of the Alethi subglyph for T, but the Kholin half seems to plausibly match up with what I see in the regular version of the glyph -- taking into account that it's highly stylized to cover up Kaladin's preexisting brands (cf. the treatment of gesheh in the same tattoo though, which uses positive space).

tatoo.jpg

Note that the image in jofwu's glyph thread is the left half of the tattoo glyph, but you're matching it up with the right half of the warcamp glyph. Personally, I'd be reluctant to throw out the symmetry and positioning rules. They seem to be fairly consistent across all the decipherable glyphs, and without them "reading" the glyphs becomes completely impossible, because component graphemes could be literally anywhere. (That being said, I suspect Navani may have done something like that in her ketek, possibly for artistic effect.)

I'm rather confident the loop on the L in Kholin is just for decoration. You can trace how it develops from a curlicue on the warcamp illustration to a shorthand loop on the battle map. It's also absent in Aladar and Sebarial (though Sebarial's glyph is especially horrible when it comes to deciphering, which seems fitting). Likewise, reversing the symmetry of L is problematic for both Aladar/Sebarial and the underlying connection with Thaylen via proto-Vorin. Similarly, you can trace the evolution of N from the crisp versions in nahn to a lazy stylized swoosh in Kholin. It's more of a doctor's signature scrawl at that point, rather than a proper letter.

Edited by Harakeke
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8 hours ago, Harakeke said:

Note that the image in jofwu's glyph thread is the left half of the tattoo glyph, but you're matching it up with the right half of the warcamp glyph. Personally, I'd be reluctant to throw out the symmetry and positioning rules. They seem to be fairly consistent across all the decipherable glyphs, and without them "reading" the glyphs becomes completely impossible, because component graphemes could be literally anywhere. (That being said, I suspect Navani may have done something like that in her ketek, possibly for artistic effect.)

But doesn't that fit with what Isaac said, that glyphs aren't read, but memorized? In many cases, they're in order, but they don't have to be when they would ruin the aesthetics (like overwriting slave brands).

Also, are if there are no letters that are mirror images of one another, then there's no reason the 'right' side of one glyph couldn't be the 'left' of another. Another avenue I'm checking.

8 hours ago, Harakeke said:

I'm rather confident the loop on the L in Kholin is just for decoration. You can trace how it develops from a curlicue on the warcamp illustration to a shorthand loop on the battle map. It's also absent in Aladar and Sebarial (though Sebarial's glyph is especially horrible when it comes to deciphering, which seems fitting). Likewise, reversing the symmetry of L is problematic for both Aladar/Sebarial and the underlying connection with Thaylen via proto-Vorin. Similarly, you can trace the evolution of N from the crisp versions in nahn to a lazy stylized swoosh in Kholin. It's more of a doctor's signature scrawl at that point, rather than a proper letter.

It's there in Sebarial's glyph, and in the outermost letter of Jofwu's Unknown 2 (which I've tentatively ID'd as Thanadal, especially since it has a small curve that looks like the other highprince N's), and in the outermost letter of Vamah. My hypothesis is that nasal consonants (the third in each set of five you present in Women's Script) have a loop or at least a curved line that can be dramatized as a loop. (Incidentally, it looks like you've swapped the positions of L and R on your glyph letter guide.) Hard to verify without a Y (which really should sound like an NG, shouldn't it?)

EDIT: Some more thoughts on the drive in to work this morning. First, leftmost line in swirly Kholin is the 'centerline,' which I think signifies the glyph belongs to a person or family. Second, just a quick glimpse into my overall letter identification method. Assume order is irrelevant. Assume orientation is irrelevant. It's just that certain shapes must be present in the glyphs depending on the letters in the word. Assume there will be patterns in letter shapes, similar to the Women's Script patterns. That means I'm looking for specific identifiers, like both certainly-known glyph with a circle (Aladar, Gesheh) also have a voiced stop. Maybe the voiced stops all have curls at the bottom of the letters, so Unknown 1 has two big circles on each side because it's Bethab. Sadeas would have an 'upside-down'  And maybe the nasals all have clockwise curls at the top, and all curls at the bottom are counterclockwise. It's a very iterative process, so I'll avoid going too in-depth into the justification for my letters right now. (Also, I need to do some actual work today...) I was more concerned with the order question, with regards to the Kholin glyphs.

Edited by Pagerunner
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My own interpretation of the glyphs, paired with Isaac's comments, falls somewhere in between the two of you. I think the glyphs are more structured than you seem to be going for @Pagerunner, and I think @Harakeke's difficulty is a result of looking for connections where they don't exist.

I know very little about Chinese, but I imagine we can draw a lot of parallels with out that language developed. I put this together:
chinese.png

I've tried to make some connections between elements of these characters as we've done with the glyphs. I don't mean to make TOO close of a comparrison. There are some obvious differences. Notably would be the existence (presumably) of the graphemes used in glyphs (the "letters", which Harakeke has attempted to translate some some success) compared to the pictorial nature of Chinese (while the Chinese symbols can be broken down into lines, theose lines don't generally have any meaning of their own). But I think this helps to illustrate how symbols can change over time and in style.

For me the variations can appear to be wildly different. If I saw both the "seal script" and "regular script" for horse randomly scribbled around (amidst other characters), I wouldn't casually recognize that those two are the same thing. But it's not terribly hard to see how somebody can. The "cursive script" takes it even further. With the other two, if you threw these in a pile and asked me to pair them together, I could probably do it. But the cursive? Probably not. And yet there are people to whom this is not a problem.

In each case (Chinese or glyphs) we have to consider both changes over time AND changes in style (basic vs. caligriphic vs. quickly scribbled, etc.). I think it's interesting that we see glyphs popping up "naturally" around the Knights Radiant. (when Kaladin speaks an oath, on ancient Shardplate, etc.) I think we have to assume that those are the original script, which dates back to (or before) the creation of the Knights Radiant. I expect these glyphs were constructed of a set of graphemes representing consonants (and possible vowels as well, or syllables). They may or may not have been written symmetrically. It seems likely to me that the symmetry was a stylistic option. It's not hard to see how symmetry might be used for importance or formality or emphasis, and this was warped by time and Vorinism until it became the standard.

I think the emphasis shifted from the component graphemes to something more pictorial eventually. Screw-you lines were probably added first, in ways that didn't bother someone literate. Then the graphemes themselves began to (occasionally) see fundamental alterations. Parts of one might be removed, reshaped, or added to, and eventually they might be removed altogether. This was all possible because, by this point, people were looking at the general shape and flow of lines rather than all the components. And the result is modern Alethi/Vorin glyphs.

Can you still see the original graphemes? Sometimes yes... sometimes not. A glyph might have a few clear graphemes, right alongside those that were altered notably.

Kholin is a great example. The K stuck around with little alteration. The L got a lot more curvy with a loop at the top end. The N degraded to a sweeping hook. Nobody would look at the Kholin glyph and think, "Ah, K-L-N, it says Kholin." They would recognize the overall shape for one. They would recognize the center line and the strong mark (once "K") enveloping the rest of the glyph. They'd recognized the 3 shaped symbol beneath the "K", with some kind of embellishment on the top end. And they'd recognize the outward swoop on the edges. So when you look at the tattoo (more on that later), you're not looking for K-L-N. If you spot those in an unfamiliar glyph, that's certainly a helpful indicator. But what you're really looking for is what I've described above.
Someone who is literate in glyphs doesn't necessarily know all of the ancient graphemes. They might naturally have picked up on some of them... but they're not necessarily going to look at an unknown, complicated, new glyph and be able to figure out what it means by analyzing the components. If I'm wrong about this, let me know. My belief here is based on Shallan's explanation that she "knows the major, minor, and topical glyphs". This implies you have to learn them like the alphabet. But this is also where glyphpairs come in. I imagine that there's a large number of standard glyphs that you'd learn to be considered literate. And I get the sense these can be combined in creative ways to make other words. Imagine there is no glyph for "cloud", for example. Rather, it's created using the glyphs for "sky" and "smoke". So there IS an element of learning beyond knowing the right individual glyphs. Being literate isn't just about memorizing glyphs, but knowing how to combine them. There's also probably a component of understanding context. For example, Kaladin sees the glyph "morom" and believes it is probably refering to a location. I don't think he read, "MRM, oh that's some district I've heard about". Rather he recognizes "morom" and it's meaning, but understands that it's a highlord's district by nature of it being paired with "sas" and branded on someone's forehead.

In the end, I think trying to recognize the component graphemes IS useful. Because the present glyphs are rooted in ancient glyphs which were comprised of those graphemes. But we have to recognized that they may be warped significantly. I'm a bit more hesitant to say that they can be moved around for convenience like Pagerunner describes. That would imply those individual elements have distinct meaning, even if separated from the glyph. You can't swap positions of the symbols in a proper "Kholin" glyph and get something legible. But that's completely different from movement over time, which is arguably the case with "Roshar". The argument there isn't that someone just decided to move and/or change the "Sh" on a whim one day; the argument is that it slowly distorted/moved/got replaced over the course of many centuries.

Lastly, I think we have to be extra careful with the Bridge Four tattoo... I'm not convinced that just anybody would understand it. It's heavily artistic. The point isn't to be a clear record of the slave's freedom. It's a tattoo on somebody's forehead covering up a brand. It's there to deter people from questioning your freedom, not to serve as an official record. It's not there so that the questioner can read it.

Does that all make sense? That's my understanding. Sorry this is so long.

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43 minutes ago, jofwu said:

Lastly, I think we have to be extra careful with the Bridge Four tattoo... I'm not convinced that just anybody would understand it. It's heavily artistic. The point isn't to be a clear record of the slave's freedom. It's a tattoo on somebody's forehead covering up a brand. It's there to deter people from questioning your freedom, not to serve as an official record. It's not there so that the questioner can read it.

Kaladin actually makes the argument that it's both. 

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I hunted down something over my lunch break that had been tickling the back of my mind:

Quote
Q: Alethi has Hebrew roots? Man, I'm Israeli and I didn't notice.
 
A: They're buried, but in there. The Kh that you see in a lot of Alethi (like Kholin) are a gutteral, kind of like Chet.

The prominent first letter in Kholin might not be the Alethi unvoiced velar stop {K}, but the unvoiced velar fricative, {CH}. (Which is not pronounced like chapel, but is a sound I don't think we have anywhere in English. It's basically saying a "Y" without vibrating your vocal chords.) (Also, I had previously identified this consonant family as uvular. I've revised that opinion, I had them too far down in the throat.)

This gets a little more into the phoenetics of Alethi. I've wondered how the Alethi Y works when the Alethi J fills in for the English Y, like in Jasnah. It's possible that the Alethi Y corresponds to the English NG, the velar nasal, which doesn't have its own symbol but actually appears quite frequently in the English language. (Side note, if you say "uh oh", there's a consonant called a 'glottal stop' that you say twice, but isn't written at all. I'm not saying the Alethi have a glottal stop, it's just one of the easiest ways to illustrate how a consonant that doesn't have a letter looks.) If the velar nasal were actually the last letter of Roion, Kholin, etc, then it could explain the difference in N's between nahn and kholin - they're actually different letters! A more strict transliteration of Dalinar's surname might be Choling, but that would actually be farther away from the actual name when pronounced in English. So, we see it written as Kholin.

It would mean we have three different ways of seeing the Alethi language in the text:

  • Navani's notebook, English -> Alethi Transliteration
  • Names in text, Alethi -> English Transliteration
  • Glyphs, Alethi -> Alethi Alphabet

We can learn about the Alethi language from transliterations to and from English, but there might be letters that are dealt with differently in each method, like CH or NG.

Again, typical work-in-progress disclaimer. There are some very clear patterns in the Women's Script letters that get thrown for some very unusual loops that I'm trying to address with this glyph investigation, as well. (I can accept that we've rolled labial and labio-dental into the same family, but why on earth isn't N with the T/D family! All three have the same tongue placement!)

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8 minutes ago, Argent said:

Kaladin actually makes the argument that it's both. 

Touche! That's right. To speak more on the tattoo...

I'm much more comfortable with @Pagerunner's interpretation of the Kholin symbols. Not fond of the white-space theory. I see the overarching "K", the twirly "L", and the swooshy "N". I don't have a problem with the "N" being 'outside' of the "K" because of the way it's off to the side.

I'm uncomfortable with the fact that it feels backwards, and I'm uncomfortable with the idea that it might be only half of the glyph. But... perhaps that's what the 'apostrophe'-like line in the top left is supposed to indicate? I'm more inclined to imagine that Nazh is mistaken; that Kholin and tanat form one glyph, that's essentially got them superimposed on top of one another with subtle asymmetry to suggest both. Kind of like Tolkien's symbol. However, I'm not seeing how it works with that interpretation.

I think it's worth remembering that "tanat" is the number 9. It's possible that we're not looking for a unique glyph for "tanat" (e.g. the T-N-T symbols) but rather the symbol for 9 (an inverted V).

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So, I've been working on translating the few unknown highprince glyphs, and I think I may have figured out Hatham's.

The blue line mostly fits with what we think could be the H, the red line fits what might be a Th, and the green could be an M. Not much to go on, but none of the other unknown highprince glyphs match the H at the beginning. 

Apologies if this has been posted before, been a while since I sifted through all the pages.

Hatham.2.png

Hatham.3.png

Edited by Khyrindor
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On 2/15/2017 at 11:57 AM, jofwu said:

My own interpretation of the glyphs, paired with Isaac's comments, falls somewhere in between the two of you. I think the glyphs are more structured than you seem to be going for @Pagerunner, and I think @Harakeke's difficulty is a result of looking for connections where they don't exist.

Great analysis. I agree that native Rosharans would find what we're doing here quite silly! They'd certainly comprehend glyphpairs as cohesive entities, just like English readers parse entire sentence chunks at once. We only sound out words letter-by-letter when we're learning to read, which is what we're doing here with the glyphs.  We've exhausted the easy answers, but I think we may still be able to tease a few secrets out of the more obscure glyphs

 

1 hour ago, Khyrindor said:

So, I've been working on translating the few unknown highprince glyphs, and I think I may have figured out Hatham's.

Nice catch -- seems plausible to me!

On 2/15/2017 at 0:42 PM, Pagerunner said:

It would mean we have three different ways of seeing the Alethi language in the text:

  • Navani's notebook, English -> Alethi Transliteration
  • Names in text, Alethi -> English Transliteration
  • Glyphs, Alethi -> Alethi Alphabet


There is also an English -> Alethi phonetic transliteration of Jasnah's journal hidden in Shallan's recycled sketchbook pages, which you may find useful.

 

 

 

Edited by Harakeke
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Continuing on with my Highprince translation attempts, I've found two possibilities for this glyph:

Ruthar.1.png

My interpretations on this glyph are spoilered below for length.

*Apologies for the crappy mouse-writing*

 

The first possibility takes into account the very obvious R in the middle of the glyph, leading me to believe that it is Ruthar's glyph. Other evidence suggests that this is matched by another R on the outside (if we discard part of the line as a screw-you line). The orange line denotes a possible Th (though it's backwards). This interpretation also leaves behind quite a few screw-you lines.

Ruthar.2.png

The other possibility I thought of takes the whole line on the outside (which I realized just after finishing) and makes it an L, which I think fits it a little better. If we ignore the line on top of what looks a lot like an R, it could be a Th, and the line which I previously thought might be a Th looks a lot more like a D. Down at the bottom, the line could be a very stylized N, leaving the glyph to be Thanadal's.

Thanadal.1.png

Original glyph:

Ruthar.1.png

What do you think? Does the glyph work better as Ruthar or Thanadal? Did I miss anything?

Just for fun, I'll attempt to narrow this one down by using the last "Unknown highprince glyph":
 

Next, I went to a new glyph to interpret, and came upon this one:

Battab.1.png

Interpretations below.

 

I saw this and immediately saw the obvious B in the middle. Then what looked like an N on the outside. If we split the outside line in two, we get a T and half of a B. Not sure if it's enough, but it's the only one that starts with a B (If you ignore the V as a screw-you line. Vamah's already solved and it doesn't have a B in it!) This, of course, convinces me that it's Bettab's glyph.

Battab.2.png

Original glyph:

Battab.1.png

Just for fun, I'm attempting the translation of the last "Unknown" Highprince glyph, in order to narrow down the Thanadal/Ruthar above.

Thanadal-Ruthar.2.png

Here's what I have so far:

Towards the bottom, there are a lot of lines that can be interpreted many ways. The one in the middle bottom could be an L, an Sh, a D, a Th... I am reasonably sure that the one in light blue is an N because the angles match except for the curve. If the outside parts of it are decoration, then it could be a D.

The curves in the middle that take up much of the glyph are either huge screw-yous, or a big Th or T. The thing in the middle could be an M (it half-matches the one in Vamah and the glyph I think is Hatham) however, no Highprince's names start with an M. It could be an upside down R, which, if the curvy lines are a Th, would plausibly make it Ruthar's glyph.

Really not sure on this one. It doesn't look like either of them.

Screw-you.1.png

Original glyph:

Thanadal-Ruthar.2.png

Edited by Khyrindor
Edited to add spoiler
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I've been looking at the phoenetics of Alethi, to try to remove English influences from our Glyph translation attempts. I've got 145 words, mostly names, a few cities, some Alethi words and glyphs. Not audiobooks, stuff I pulled from the Coppermind, so there are some places I wasn't sure on pronunciation.

I pulled out just the consonants (I don't feel confident in being able to accurately ID vowels, even if I did have audio, and they're also not relevant to our current understanding of Glyphs), to see how often each consonant occurred.

Notable: Alethi doesn't appear to have a "Z." Less notable, there are no words that start with an "O" or a "U." These might be due to the vocabulary I used, so I'd like to do a readthrough and get a more comprehensive list.

More in-depth:

  • There are some extremely common letters, that appear in about 50 words apiece (1/3 of our entire vocabulary). These are R, L, and N.
  • There are many relatively common letters, that appear in between 20 and 30 words (10%-20%). M, V, T, D, S, Sh, K, H, J. I also put Glottal Stops into this category, but Alethi might be like English and not give them a letter. (But if they do, that could be represented by the circle that's on words that start with a vowel.)
  • There are many letters that appear in very few words. There are many names of bridgemen, lots of Darkeyes, that have some of these unusual letters; and if they're from Kaladin's history, then there may be foreign influence in the names (since most of the Sadeas and Aladar princedoms weren't part of Alethela, but actually Rishir in the Silver Kingdoms era.) These letters are P, F, Th, G, Ng, Kh, W, X, and Y. (Although, X is an affricative, a combination of K and S. It doesn't really need its own letter.)
  • There are a couple of Engish letters that I don't think are in Alethi at all. Z is the obvious one, that appears in no Alethi words. There's no soft Th like in the word "there" (Which I'll call Thh, and silently cringe at this terrible convention I'm creating), at least none that feel natural to me. (Which is really odd, since that means that V is the only confirmed voiced fricative in Alethi.) There may be one instance of a normal English J (remember, the Alethi J is pronounced more like an English Y), in the name of Agil, but that might also be a hard G. There's only one Ch, from Chanarach, so I think that might actually be a Kh in Alethi, and the Herald herself has a 'foreign' name. (Same way Jacques Cousteau begins with a letter we don't usually have in English. But we don't revere him anywhere near as much as the Alethi do the Heralds, probably. Not judging, whatever floats your boat.) Incidentally, I don't think that letter, which I'll call Zh, appears in Alethi either. Also, Ch and J are also affricatives, combinations of other letters (T-Sh and D-Zh, respectively).

I'm not feeling too confident about my proposition that the Kholin "N" wasn't actually an "N" but an "Ng." There is one in Alethi, but only one that I found, in Inkima. And that might be pronounced differenty. I won't throw my idea out yet, but I'll be looking for it in Oathbringer.

The only confirmed "W" is in Wistiow, and there's a Hallaw who I think ends in a vowel, not a consonant. But, like the Ng, it's in a Lighteyes name.

I'm really confused about how the Alethi J and Y work. There are quite a few Alethi J's, which we know are pronounced like an English Y. But there's also an Alethi Y, from former highprince Yenev. And then there are some other places I might expect to hear an English Y sound that don't have a consonant written (like Ialai), that might have a separate consonant. If I personally were designing the language, knowing that Kh is a letter, I'd use a voiced version and call it a Gh, which is what Jasnah would start with. Ialai would have a Y, and Yenev would have an Ng (which would let me finagle that Ng into the Alethi alphabet a little more).

Wow. This is actually really difficult to discuss, I'm having a hard time talking about Alethi consonants, English consonants, and IPA consonants. I'll try to put together a phoenetic reference table at some point, confirmed and suspected. Would anyone understand if I started throwing around IPA symbols and terms?

EDIT: So, I kinda forgot to conclude anything. The numbers are nice, but why should we care, and why is this relevant to Glyphs? The English alphabet has 21 consonants, while the English language has 26 consonants, with the remaining five (Th, Th, Sh, Ch, Ng) represented by letter combinations. The Alethi alphabet appears to have 20 consonants. I can clearly identify 12 consonants that frequently appear in the Alethi language, and if I exclude X and W (which don't correspond to Alethi letters on Harakeke's transliteration guide), then there are 7 more that appear less frequently. If we assume that Z is actually an Alethi consonant, then identifying the phoenetics of the Alethi letters might give insight into patterns for glyph letter development. (I'd expect K, T, and P to all share some characteristics as unvoiced stops, as well as K, G, Kh, and J as velar consonants.)

Edited by Pagerunner
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22 minutes ago, Pagerunner said:

I'm really confused about how the Alethi J and Y work. There are quite a few Alethi J's, which we know are pronounced like an English Y. But there's also an Alethi Y, from former highprince Yenev. And then there are some other places I might expect to hear an English Y sound that don't have a consonant written (like Ialai), that might have a separate consonant. If I personally were designing the language, knowing that Kh is a letter, I'd use a voiced version and call it a Gh, which is what Jasnah would start with. Ialai would have a Y, and Yenev would have an Ng (which would let me finagle that Ng into the Alethi alphabet a little more).

I recall a WoB about the J pronounced as Y being a more modern lighteyes phenomenon. So Jasnah and Jezerezeh would have the Y sound while Jezrien and any darkeyes would have the J sound. I saw this a while ago though, so I might be misremembering some parts. If anyone knows what I'm talking about they can post it, or I can search for it later. 

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21 minutes ago, thegatorgirl00 said:

I recall a WoB about the J pronounced as Y being a more modern lighteyes phenomenon. So Jasnah and Jezerezeh would have the Y sound while Jezrien and any darkeyes would have the J sound. I saw this a while ago though, so I might be misremembering some parts. If anyone knows what I'm talking about they can post it, or I can search for it later. 

Great point. I tracked it down, it's not a WoB, it's from Peter.

Quote

Question: The Rosharans seem to pronounce J as Y? Or is it only limited to Vorin nations?

Peter’s answer: So, this is a modern Vorin upper-class thing. But it might appear in some other countries as well…hard to say. Lower-class names like Jost and Jest would still be [dʒ]. Jezrien’s name in the Prelude would be pronounced with [dʒ], but by the modern day Jezerezeh is pronounced with y and Jezrien is also usually pronounced with y.

That's gonna throw off my work, since I had assumed all Alethi Js were English Ys, and I'd only identified one potential English J.

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Okay, I think I have another angle on the highprince names. The key is the layout of the painting of the Shattered Plains in Way of Kings. In the inset, the artist Vandonas helpfully describes the order in which the warcamps are situated, from north (right) to south (left): Roion, Sadeas, Aladar, Dalinar (Kholin), Vamah, Ruthar, Thanadal, Hatham, Bethab, and Sebarial. There is also a sidebar to the right with a series of eleven glyphs. Note that the top five glyphs are upside-down; the sequence is mirrored around the "compass rose" glyph. Five of these glyphs can be positively identified from the battlemaps, which have both English and Alethi notations: Roion, Sadeas, Aladar, Kholin, and Sebarial. That leaves Vamah, Ruthar, Thanadal, Hatham, and Bethab as the unknowns, plus the "compass rose".

The order of glyphs in the upper half of the sequence (starting at the compass rose and moving out)  corresponds with the order of the warcamps. Roion is first, followed by Sadeas, and so forth. This is further confirmed by the presence of Dalinar's tower and crown glyphpair at the appropriate camp.

The bottom sequence of glyphs is... kind of a mess (see the orange lines in the image below).  Sebarial's camp is farthest south, but it is second to last in the lower sequence. I suspect this may have been an error on the part of Vandonas, who after all is a painter, not a scribe. He couldn't even be bothered to learn the name of the river -- he just went ahead and named it after himself! To address this issue, let's assume that that Sebarial's glyph got swapped with Bethab's. Likewise, I suspect that Hatham and Thanadal have been similarly reversed.

Highprince-Map.jpg

If these pairings are correct, it also sheds some light on the method of construction for "cursive" glyphs. In each of these glyphs, the initial letter is clearly visible in the upper center. Thanadal's initial Th is somewhat distorted, but it's done in a manner that is consistent with the "inflated" surgebinding glyphs. The other letters, such as the N in Kholin and Roion, are much more heavily stylized. This makes sense. An illiterate spearman wouldn't able to "read" all the component elements, but he'd be able to recognize, "Hey, that glyph has a big K and looks like a tower. Must be Kholin. That one has a big S with squiggles like skyeels. Must be Sebarial." Conversely, a moderately educated person -- say someone in the Ghostbloods -- could mash together glyphs phonetically to crudely spell out words.

The positioning connection makes me pretty confident in the identification of Highprince - Vamah - C.png as Vamah, which in turn calls for an update to the translation key. It's easy to see the initial V, so the other squiggle must be "inspired by" M. However, it doesn't really resemble the speculative M in the key, which I was never particularly happy with anyway. The current guess is just a placeholder copy of N, since we don't have a concrete example of the Alethi M, and in Thaylen M and N are written the same. So I think the subglyph for M needs to get reversed. It makes the contortion in Vamah a little less painful, and there's an element like that in one of the Stance Scroll glyphs that has always bugged me:

Quote

M.jpg

Here's an updated key with revised speculation for M, the initial vowel marker, and some gut-feeling guesses for Z and Ch.

Key2.jpg

 

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9 hours ago, Harakeke said:

 

If these pairings are correct, it also sheds some light on the method of construction for "cursive" glyphs. In each of these glyphs, the initial letter is clearly visible in the upper center. Thanadal's initial Th is somewhat distorted, but it's done in a manner that is consistent with the "inflated" surgebinding glyphs. The other letters, such as the N in Kholin and Roion, are much more heavily stylized. This makes sense. An illiterate spearman wouldn't able to "read" all the component elements, but he'd be able to recognize, "Hey, that glyph has a big K and looks like a tower. Must be Kholin. That one has a big S with squiggles like skyeels. Must be Sebarial." Conversely, a moderately educated person -- say someone in the Ghostbloods -- could mash together glyphs phonetically to crudely spell out words.

The positioning connection makes me pretty confident in the identification of Highprince - Vamah - C.png as Vamah, which in turn calls for an update to the translation key. It's easy to see the initial V, so the other squiggle must be "inspired by" M. However, it doesn't really resemble the speculative M in the key, which I was never particularly happy with anyway. The current guess is just a placeholder copy of N, since we don't have a concrete example of the Alethi M, and in Thaylen M and N are written the same. So I think the subglyph for M needs to get reversed. It makes the contortion in Vamah a little less painful, and there's an element like that in one of the Stance Scroll glyphs that has always bugged me:

Here's an updated key with revised speculation for M, the initial vowel marker, and some gut-feeling guesses for Z and Ch.

Key2.jpg

 

On the M translations, I'm not sure if it's just a literal reflection of the N. Both glyphs for Vamah and Hatham have the same shape, just rotated differently. There hasn't been an extra line hanging down like the N. I know the outside glyphs are a little more stylized, but they still follow a pattern. This also fits with the weird shape in the Ironstance scroll that you mentioned. Same shape as in the pictures below.

 

Vamah.2.png

Hatham-M.4.png

Edited by Khyrindor
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So weird that there's no discernible order to the glyphs on the warcamp drawing.

Anyways, I just wanted to highlight in this thread that the "Voidbinding Chart" was confirmed to indeed be a Voidbinding Chart. Thus the theory that those symbols are connected with Silver Kingdoms or anything like that seems highly unlikely. :)

So now I'm really wondering what that one glyph is doing on the Kharbranth picture of all places!

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I transcribed the new Oathbringer interlude, relevant portion in spoiler tag below. Got a few spots I'm not sure about, the worst of which are marked with [?].

Spoiler

“Uh…” He looked down at her satchel. “You were the last one to check out the transcriptions from Bedthel[?]’s collection on the Dawnchant? The old version? I just wanted to check your progress.”

Dawnchant, right. They’d been working on that before the storm came and everyone got distracted. Old Navani Kholin in Alethkar had somehow come up with a key for translations. Her story about visions was nonsense most likely—the Kholin family was known for opaque politics. But the key was authentic, letting them slowly work through what the old text had once said.

She started digging through her satchel. She came up with three musty codices and a sheaf of paper, the latter being the work she’d done so far. Annoyingly, he settled down on the ground beside her stump, taking the papers as she offered them. He laid his satchel across his lap and began reading.

“Incredible!” he said a few moments later. “You’ve made way more progress than I have.”

“Everyone else is too busy worrying about that storm.”

“Well, it is threatening to wipe out civilization as we know it.”

“An overreaction. Everyone always overreacts to every little gust of wind.”

“That’s easy for us to say, tucked away in the mountains like this.” He flipped through her pages. “What’s this section? Why take so much care about the origins of the pieces found? Fokuson[?] concluded that these books had all spread from a central location, and so there’s nothing to learn by where they ended up.”

“Fokuson was a bootlicker, not a scholar,” Alista said. “Look, there’s easy proof that the same writing system was once used all across Roshar. I have references to Makabakam, Sela Tales, Alethela. Not just the diaspora of text, but real evidence they wrote naturally in the Dawnchant.”

“Do you suppose they all spoke the same language?”

“Hardly. But Jasnah Kholin’s Relics[?] doesn’t claim that everyone spoke the same language. Only that they wrote it. It’s foolish to assume that everyone used the same language across hundreds of years and dozens of nations. It makes more sense that there was a codified written language, a language of early scholarship just like you’d find in many underscripts written in Alethi now even if the scribe was originally Veden.”

“Ah!” he said, “And then a Desolation hits...”

Alista nodded, showing him a page later in her sheaf of notes. “This in-between weird language is where people started using the Dawnchant script to phonetically transcribe their language. It didn’t work so well.” She flipped two more pages. “After the next Desolation we have the proto-Vorin alphabet emerging and Thaylen a century later. We’ve always wondered what happened to the Dawnchant. Well it seems clear now they lost the knowledge of writing in the Dawnchant because by the days of the Recreance it had already become a dead language for millennia. It was easy to forget because they weren’t speaking it, as they hadn’t been in generations.”

“Brilliant!” Gurv said. He wasn’t so bad, actually, for a Siln. “All of this,” he said, “because of a madman’s ravings.” He pulled a sheaf of his own paper out from his satchel. “We’ve been translating what we can. We’re getting close to really cracking this thing, I think. If what you’ve been doing here is correct, that’s because Khovat[?] isn’t true Dawnchant but a phonetic transcription from another ancient language.”

Edit: some updates to most of the missing/questionable bits

Edited by jofwu
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  • 1 month later...

Not sure if somebody else has pointed this out but the speculative Veden numbers are definitely wrong. We know from Shallan's flashbacks in WoR that at first Heleran is referred to as Nan Helaran (WoR Pg 269, ln 3) and Balat is referred to as Tet Balat (WoR pg 269, ln 5). Before Helaran is presumed dead, Jushu is called Van Jushu, and she says he's her fourth brother, the youngest (WoR pg 336, ln 20). 'Four years ago', Balat has become Nan Balat 'as if he were the oldest', as Helaran is presumed dead (WoR pg 451, ln 29). We know that Wikim is older than Jushu (WoR pg 454, ln 36), and after Balat becomes Nan Balat we know Jushu becomes Asha Jushu and Wikim becomes Tet Wikim (WoK pg 174, ln 33). All of this means the oldest son is Nan ___ , then Tet, then Asha, then Van. Assuming OP is correct and Nan lines up with Nan, the number 2 in Alethi, Tet would be 3 and Asha 4, not the other way around. 

TLDR: In your numerals translation in Veden the number 3 should be Tet, not Asha, and 4 should be Asha, not Tet. 

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22 hours ago, mapledonut said:

Not sure if somebody else has pointed this out but the speculative Veden numbers are definitely wrong. We know from Shallan's flashbacks in WoR that at first Heleran is referred to as Nan Helaran (WoR Pg 269, ln 3) and Balat is referred to as Tet Balat (WoR pg 269, ln 5). Before Helaran is presumed dead, Jushu is called Van Jushu, and she says he's her fourth brother, the youngest (WoR pg 336, ln 20). 'Four years ago', Balat has become Nan Balat 'as if he were the oldest', as Helaran is presumed dead (WoR pg 451, ln 29). We know that Wikim is older than Jushu (WoR pg 454, ln 36), and after Balat becomes Nan Balat we know Jushu becomes Asha Jushu and Wikim becomes Tet Wikim (WoK pg 174, ln 33). All of this means the oldest son is Nan ___ , then Tet, then Asha, then Van. Assuming OP is correct and Nan lines up with Nan, the number 2 in Alethi, Tet would be 3 and Asha 4, not the other way around. 

TLDR: In your numerals translation in Veden the number 3 should be Tet, not Asha, and 4 should be Asha, not Tet. 

Good catch! Those Veden numbers had never quite felt right. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/20/2014 at 8:10 PM, Mysty said:

You mean this quote?

I have been thinking about this line. H isn't the only letter in the woman's script that has diacritical marks. Does that mean other letters can be considered symetrical for each other? R and L? D and TH? G and CH?

Resurrecting this quote because I'm unsure if it was ever resolved (the OP's chart still has a distinct letter for 'h') and Brandon's recent Reddit comment brought it to mind again.

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2 hours ago, Kurkistan said:

Resurrecting this quote because I'm unsure if it was ever resolved (the OP's chart still has a distinct letter for 'h') and Brandon's recent Reddit comment brought it to mind again.

I think this is a repost of that incorrect font that's been floating around. L and R are swapped, and a lot of the double-diacritic letters are the wrong size. There's a proper font that I made somewhere in the middle of this thread. Maybe I should dig it up and put a link on the first post... 
Is there a way to post .ttf files to the 17th Shard media directory or something? If not, shoot me a message if you want a copy of the font and I can send it to you via email. It's a little finicky to format, but I believe all the letters are correct. 

The diacritic transformations in Women's Script generally tend to indicate fricatives in a roughly similar place of articulation: A>U, O>I, D>Th, L>R, Z>Sh, N>H, B>F, M>V, K>Ch, Y>J

When I first broke the code for the Women's Script way back when, I actually did use all sorts of crazy diacritics. I think you can find the original handwritten key archived somewhere at the beginning of the thread, along with some comments from Peter/Isaac.  It was a mess though, so I simplified the chart to make the correspondence with English more intuitive. 

When it comes to glyphs, the subglyphs in grey are purely speculative, based on portions of untranslated glyphs and wild guesses at proto-Vorin roots via Thaylen. I  suspect that there has to be some sort of glyphic notation for H, otherwise it would very hard to write "Hatham".
 

Edited by Harakeke
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2 hours ago, Kurkistan said:

Resurrecting this quote because I'm unsure if it was ever resolved (the OP's chart still has a distinct letter for 'h') and Brandon's recent Reddit comment brought it to mind again.

So, when used as a cipher for English, there's definitely an H, because we need an H. But here's how I interpreted Brandon's latest comment: we're not writing in the actual Alethi alphabet (which has at least one letter that doesn't exist in English, the KH from Kholin). It's like taking a Greek keyboard and writing English words using what would be the keystrokes on an English keyboard, like this (λικε τηισ). That's nowhere near correct in any sense, but it's not writing Greek, it's not even transliterating English into Greek symbols, it's just being used as a cipher to write English.

That being said, I'm pretty sure the 'H' in Women's Script will correspond to a different letter in Alethi. (Like the greek Eta, whose symbol is a capital H, but it's a vowel, a long E), maybe one that is attributed elsewhere in the English cipher.

Maybe Alethi has even more consonants than English. Maybe there actually is a large consonant with three short lines following it, but we don't use it for transliteration because we don't have that many letters in English. (Or maybe not; if Alethi doesn't have separate Js and Ys, or if the Ch is actually pronounced like Kh, I think we've got room to get some extra consonants.)

Side note, I don't know if this has been brought up in this thread, but the double-k is a guttural stop, I believe. Another non-English letter, one I don't think we've seen in the east of Roshar, only the west. Alethi might not have a consonant for it, even though I really hope they have a glyph component for a glottal stop.

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@Pagerunner, nobody's claiming that Alethi speak English. I'm pretty sure Peter has confirmed earlier in the thread that the women's script decryption is correct. Your Greek alphabet comparison is a good one. But I do think you underestimate how much we do know about the script. We have a good list of Alethi words and names on hand, which tells a lot about what phonemes are used and how commonly they occur. And we've got some commentary from Brandon on how they pronounce different things.

@Harakeke, is it possible that there are any letter's missing Or has Peter confirmed that we have the full "alphabet" figured out?

The "kk" gutteral stop is a feature of eastern (Azish) languages. There's no evidence I can think of that the sound exists in Vorin languages. They would render it awkwardly in women's script (like we do with English) and probably pronounce it wrong.

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20 minutes ago, jofwu said:

@Pagerunner, nobody's claiming that Alethi speak English. I'm pretty sure Peter has confirmed earlier in the thread that the women's script decryption is correct. Your Greek alphabet comparison is a good one. But I do think you underestimate how much we do know about the script. We have a good list of Alethi words and names on hand, which tells a lot about what phonemes are used and how commonly they occur. And we've got some commentary from Brandon on how they pronounce different things. 

I don't think we're in disagreement. The inference I took from Kurk's post was that he thought the key in this thread was inaccurate because it had H as its own symbol. Which, for the sake of the English cipher (which is what the women's script is thus far), one of their letters does indeed match the English H. Even if it's not actually an H in Alethi.

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