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Warbreaker Leatherbound Translation


Pagerunner

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We just got some pictures of the Warbreaker leatherbound. There's a new script on the front cover. Let's try to figure out what it says.

Before we get started, all you weebs get the "uwu"s out of your system. Yes, we know that's what it looks like. No, we don't need to dwell on it.

Okay, down to business. There's a nine-word phrase that is essentially repeated on each side:

5df4324d9b606_WarbreakerLeatherboundtranslation.thumb.PNG.b39c6105671a83efd14437ec38f8e8e9.PNG

Along short sides, there's just the nine-word phrase. Along the long sides, there's a seventeen-word phrase; it's the same phrase, but the first word is excluded.

Thinking of what's significant: "hello would you like to destroy some evil today"

The second word was throwing me for a loop at first, since it's a pretty obvious double letter to begin, and only five letters. But the opening two U's are a literal W, and what I thought was the last single letter is actually two that kind of smush together. Going off the three most common vowels, everything falls right where I'd expect it to:

5df4377e15cda_warbreakerleatherboundtranslation2.thumb.PNG.4f972a6ba9d767f43a266490579cf929.PNG

I'll try and make a cleaned-up reference of what we have. We've only got half the alphabet (13 letters)... hopefully we'll get some more clues to flesh it out the rest of the way.

EDIT: nothing every works perfect the first time. The middle of "destroy" doesn't quite seem to work out, and I can't quite distinguish the difference between T and V. I think I'll need some better resolution pictures or actually have the book in my hand to say for sure. But the vast bulk of the phrase matches up very well. Here's my rough key, with dashed lines to indicate which letters rise above and which letters fall below. (Thrown together in powerpoint using letters and symbols stacked on top of each other; I'm no graphic designer, so don't be too harsh.)

 

5df447ff4c9c5_Warbreakerleatherboundtranslation3.png.490bbcd0f6152aea55143a24c661b3f7.png

Edited by Pagerunner
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Toyed with the image to make it a bit easier [for me] to read:

nalthian script.png

Here I've highlighted all the letters that appear more than once with a clear match and they are nearly dead on:

nalthian script knowns.jpg

There's a few letters that are weirdly similar to one another despite being very different sounds. (like V and T for example) But I guess it's not that weird. Happens with several Roman characters after all. (like O/Q)

The only thing bugging me is the STR in the middle... It looks like two characters at first glance, but as is the challenge with many of these I think some adjacent characters are just hard to separate in the photo. So the R must be that tiny little vertical character before the O...

The S and T don't match the other Ss and Ts, which is odd. I started to wonder if maybe it is 2 characters after all and ST or TR could be a single character. Also wondered if maybe these instances are slightly different sounds than their other instances... But I'm pretty sure what we're seeing here is just a case of letters written differently in the middle of a word versus the beginning. (something that happens in Arabic and probably several other languages)

Anyways, here's those three letters highlighted, plus other instances of the S and T:

nalthian script unknowns.jpg

Aaaaan, stealing Pagerunner's alphabet image...

Nalthian alphabet.jpg

As for Susebron's tablet from here...

Yeah, really doubt we can do much with this even had a higher quality image.

tablet.png

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I tried to clean up the image at the risk of over-simplification:

warbreaker-extracted.jpg.652276e87e59ff2a07410023108180eb.jpg

 

For the word "destroy", I believe it is being spelled D-E-ST-R-O-Y. It does mean that the characters for ST and I are very similar. However it seems like I has a point like a pencil while ST has a point like a razor, but again it's hard to tell on this image.

I don't believe any letters in this are capitalized, or they all are, if there even is such a thing in this language. That is because characters for U ("uuould" and "you") and E ("evil" and "like") stay the same.

 

After doing this I noticed a pattern in some of the letters, and I tried to extrapolate some possible other characters (in red):

5df8442f6e8e1_warbreakerchart.jpg.49af5b673d214814796478511dad09bf.jpg

It doesn't work as well for the second set, but I think I'm on the right track as this does give us 24 possible characters, close to our own 26. They don't have a W in their language but they do have an ST so they might be missing other characters, or this chart is incomplete and they have over 26 total. 

 

Bonus:

We can spell things like

 Vasher* - Vasher.jpg.307423a4bffb1d17e60cf7e8cb111953.jpg 

Siri - Siri.jpg.c5a05db45ccd3a7132a00d510ef71f56.jpg

Vivenna - vivenna.jpg.2e571a8a4530919ff316315276a85e26.jpg 

 

*There could be a character for SH

**Had to guess on the N Character

Edited by SpikeMe
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There is a higher resolution file of the endpages.

Picture2.png.082e11a653d163bd956ea8dac89a4a34.png

I am certain some of the lines read:

---- --- B?Y?

DANDOS THE

OILSWORN

--- ----- -

Which gives us some new letters to play with (R,N). I suspect the organization of symbols has to deal with dots/short slashes that are being lost in the calligraphic style of the book cover. 

I attempted to organize the characters by the number of dot/slashes they have, in a similar manner to SpikeMe's post. I think logically it could be a 4x6 table, but there is not enough to say for certain of course. I also added B and a different looking Y because I do not know what other two letter word can precede a name using letters not already assigned. Maybe those two slashes on Y are simplified into a vertical? Maybe a dash on top is sometimes turned horizontal giving us the railroad spike looking letters? I could be totally wrong. I'm afraid the simplification of characters went too far here.

Alphabet.thumb.PNG.f46d9653002665c9c66ffc670eef1333.PNG

 

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31 minutes ago, Moonrise said:

I am certain some of the lines read:

---- --- B?Y?

DANDOS THE

OILSWORN

--- ----- -

The word you are missing is "created", if I recall correctly my conversation with Dan from earlier this year. Created by Dandos the Oilsworn. Don't read too much into it, Dandos is not a worldhopper or anything, it's just an Easter egg.

ST as a single letter feels really weird to me. At a quick glance everything checks out, so I don't think there could be an alternative translation - not after this one fits so well... So I don't know. I might dig more into this at another time.

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22 hours ago, Moonrise said:

I suspect the organization of symbols has to deal with dots/short slashes that are being lost in the calligraphic style of the book cover. 

 

I think that Moonrise is on the right track, I went ahead and combined our ideas a little and got this:

 

Nalthis-Alphabet.png.bec2e334841cd0c1d5bda6f53c17c07b.png

We are probably missing a few rows, I'm guessing maybe the C character could be used as a base to create another two rows of characters.

 

Edited by SpikeMe
Spelling & Grammer
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Additionally, I'd guess that the characters are grouped above based on sound. Which means:

  • G and J are in the row with H and K
  • P is in the row with B, M, and V
    • V and F are the same character
  • Q and Z are in the row with D and T

That would cover all the 26 letters (Except X, but it might share a character with C) in the English alphabet, but it still doesn't explain the ST character we see in DESTROY spelling we see on the cover.

 

 

Edited by SpikeMe
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On 12/18/2019 at 0:49 PM, SpikeMe said:

I think that Moonrise is on the right track, I went ahead and combined our ideas a little and got this:

 

Nalthis-Alphabet.png.bec2e334841cd0c1d5bda6f53c17c07b.png

We are probably missing a few rows, I'm guessing maybe the C character could be used as a base to create another two rows of characters.

 

I got my grubby paws on my copy today, so I can get a bit of a better look. It is really difficult to make out the purple text on the black cover, even with the book in hand, and I'm not having much success taking any better pictures. But some observations:

  • Every letter with a dot above actually has two dots, very closely placed side-by-side. Which is why they look like a single large dot on the original pictures. I believe U will match this pattern; they just get spaced a little more widely, since that's more natural for the shape of the letter.
  • The Y has two dots to the side, one atop the other. It is in the correct row; it shares the "A" structure.
  • R is odd, based on the chalkboard example. The "R" in "created" appears to share the "A" structure, but in "oilsworn" it appears to follow the "L" structure. It's subtle, but quite distinctive, especially since the next two letters provide immediate contrast.

And the million dollar question... the mysterious "ST" letter is, in fact, an "I." I've gone cross-eyed trying to see a difference, and I can't find one; it is the exact same "L" structure with two dots above. If the letter after it is, indeed, an "R" (and it does match the "oilsworn" style "R"), then we are asking to "deiroy" some evil. Which, according to spellcheck, is not a word.

I'll keep poking around through the interior illustrations to see if there are any other examples of in-world text. I flipped to the Ars Arcanum and didn't see a key (which isn't terribly surprising).

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Double-posting because I played around with lighting and got some good pictures of the cover, and a clearer version of the blackboard, as well. There certainly appear to be errors (DEIROY, CYEATED) in each of the selections.

HELLO

HELLO.thumb.jpg.084c103beed29c3d38555ab972ae45bd.jpg

WOULD

WOULD.thumb.jpg.d8a24e302b274a92fc44a757bda325b0.jpg

YOU

YOU.thumb.jpg.957f0324a34047a6e725d1b49deeb58e.jpg

LIKE

LIKE.thumb.jpg.e91142604f761b147823ba9c5c994ef5.jpg

TO

TO.thumb.jpg.4961f36623a4ae5e34aafe66c087c2aa.jpg

DEIROY

DESTROY.thumb.jpg.895e994e9fc90bd8944e1203e955b288.jpg

SOME

SOME.thumb.jpg.210225a23a8e9afff0fd62d83e543b2d.jpg

EVIL

EVIL.thumb.jpg.d4fc711c802d384bc6ce6d45d311766c.jpg

TODAY

TODAY.thumb.jpg.95b5dc196c126ddf0100d87e92796044.jpg

 

CYEATED BY  

DANDOS THE

OILSWORN

AND ISAAC S

chalkboard.thumb.jpg.1103e602da4e18f3c295d3e6ec9bcc67.jpg

 

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3 minutes ago, SpikeMe said:

Now that we get a closer look, I think that final character is punctuation. Perhaps:

CREATED BY  

DANDOS THE

OILSWORN

AND ISAAC !

It's definitely an "S." The tail isn't as thickly drawn as the other characters, which is why it's getting blurred out in my pic, but it's the same character. Considering we didn't get a question mark at the end of the phrase on the cover, I don't think there are any punctuation symbols at all.

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20 hours ago, Ookla the Prolific said:

Claps.  Only this fandom could decipher this information before I knew that the information was even released.:D

Mood. I noticed the writing while looking at a reddit post and came here to see if anyone else had picked up on it. Silly me, I should have known we'd already have a translation, another piece of text, and nearly the entire alphabet deciphered.

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I digitized some letters, for fun. In summary there are 19/26 letters identified. The missing ones are FGJPQXZ, if they even exist. In any case I do not feel comfortable guessing their shapes since the patterns are not always consistent. 

Thank you Pagerunner for the close up photos. It feels great to not squint at blurry squiggles! 

Alphabet_v2.thumb.PNG.2b01cb4adbf3ccdc81c57028df1bc1e6.PNG

Edited by Moonrise
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  • 1 year later...

Apologies for the necro - this thread was just so interesting I had to make a font for this script: WarbreakerFont.otf

I had a great time working through the IPA categorizations to take my best guess at the missing letters! Here's the theory table I made:

WarbreakerScript_IPA_Analysis.thumb.png.dbb02ae475c0a0520d7dd3ac0efd6d6a.png

What I see is that within each column, there are often two closely related pairs of sounds. 

G/Q seemed to fit well in the H/K column, since all those sounds are from the back of the throat.

Either F or P seemed like it would fit equally well in the B/V/M column - I ended up putting P with O/U since those both involve similar lip shapes.

If X exists anywhere, maybe it's in the C column?

Z seemed like a great fit in the S/N column, rounded out with J.

Single letters for SH, CH, and TH appear in other Cosmere scripts, and none of those letter combinations exist in the available text, so who knows if they exist in this alphabet? If they do, the D/T column is a natural fit for TH (both voiced and unvoiced), while SH and CH could conceivably round out the C/X column.

I really have no idea what might fit in the A/Y and O/U/W categories - I'm likely waaay off! But I had fun :)

If you want some more details about the font, I posted some in my gallery here.

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